The Havasupai and the Plateau Above the Canyon

The plateau country around Williams was not empty land when the railroad arrived. The Havasupai people, whose name means people of the blue-green water, have lived in and around Havasu Canyon and the surrounding plateau for more than eight hundred years. Their homeland encompassed the canyon floor where they farmed in summer and the plateau above, including areas near what is now Williams, where they hunted and gathered seasonally.

The federal government took systematic action to compress their world in the late nineteenth century. In eighteen eighty-two, an executive order confined the Havasupai to a reservation of approximately five hundred eighteen acres on the floor of Havasu Canyon, a fraction of their original territory. The establishment of the Grand Canyon National Monument in nineteen zero eight and the Grand Canyon National Park in nineteen nineteen stripped the plateau access that the Havasupai had maintained even after the reservation was drawn.

For decades, the people of the blue-green water were effectively locked into a canyon that flooded seasonally and offered limited resources, while the plateau they had ranged for centuries was absorbed into the national park and national forest systems. The situation began to change in nineteen seventy-five, when Congress passed the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act and returned approximately one hundred eighty-five thousand acres of plateau land to the Havasupai. It was one of the largest land restorations to a Native nation in United States history up to that point.

The reservation today encompasses roughly one hundred eighty-eight thousand acres, a territory the Havasupai had never stopped considering their own.