The Havasupai's Eighty-Year Land Fight

The Havasupai, whose name means people of the blue-green water, have lived in Havasu Canyon and on the South Rim plateau for at least eight hundred years. The turquoise falls that draw permit-holders today are the center of a much older world. Havasupai families farmed the canyon floor in summer and moved to the plateau above in winter to hunt and graze livestock. The canyon and the plateau above it were not two places. They were one territory with two seasons.

When Grand Canyon National Park was established in nineteen nineteen, federal authorities drew a boundary that confined the Havasupai to a reservation of roughly five hundred eighteen acres at the canyon's bottom, the smallest reservation in the lower forty-eight states at the time. The plateau lands where the tribe had farmed and grazed for generations were absorbed into the national park and the adjacent Kaibab National Forest. Tribal members who wanted to visit their own ancestral lands above the rim needed to obtain federal permits. The park, in the way that parks sometimes do, had taken a living landscape and turned it into a scenic backdrop for visitors who knew nothing of the people it had displaced.

For fifty-six years, the Havasupai fought in congressional hearings, in federal courts, and in public testimony to recover what had been taken. Tribal members traveled to Washington repeatedly. Supporters including environmental advocates who had initially been skeptical about land restoration, came to understand that the tribe's claims were both legally sound and historically documented. The opposition argued that returning plateau land would compromise the park's integrity. The Havasupai argued that the park had already compromised theirs.

In nineteen seventy-five, Congress passed the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act. It transferred one hundred eighty-five thousand acres of park and national forest land back to the Havasupai Tribe, the largest Indigenous land return in the lower forty-eight states at that time. The tribe also received use rights to an additional ninety-five thousand acres for traditional purposes.

The blue-green water still flows. The plateau above is Havasupai land again.