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The Blue-Green Water People: The Havasupai of the Grand Canyon
| Article
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17846 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
4,510 Words |
| Author
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
They call themselves Havsuw' Baaja, the Blue-Green Water people. Most members of the five-hundred-strong Havasupai tribe live at Supai village in northern Arizona. Supai, one of the most isolated settlements in the United States, lies nearly half a mile below the Coconino Plateau in remote Cataract Canyon, through which Havasu Creek seeks confluence with the turbulent Colorado in the vast netherworld of the Grand Canyon.
For a century, Havasupais have experienced tragedy assuaged by the promise of triumph and triumph tempered with impending tragedy because of threats posed by the Hay gu, the whites. Today, many Blue-Green Water people believe the time may soon come when they will simply cease to exist in a world that until recently consigned them to exile on a territorial dot less than a mile square.
The Grand Canyon system - including Cataract Canyon - is a labyrinth of towering escarpments, sweeping plateaus, and widely eroded side canyons nearly three hundred miles long, ten miles or more across, a mile deep, and over ten million years in the making. Down in Cataract Canyon - between layers of rocky strata tracing hundreds of millions of years of geological history - is Supai, nine miles by foot or horse from Hualapai Hilltop, which itself is reached only after driving seventy miles through the wilderness along a road cutting north from old Route 66.
At Supai, the Havasupais' tribal headquarters, one finds a lodge, café, general store, post office, school, clinic, and homes. The hamlet rambles across a more or less level, mile-long, half-mile-wide universe marked with stands of cottonwood, mesquite, and willow nourished by the waters of Havasu Creek. Almost fifty years ago, a visitor likened the oasis around Supai to "a tiny swatch of green land, a thin strip of fertility tortured in to a shape such as Dali might use to paint an emerald," - a description as true today as it was then.
Except during times of flooding, limestone deposits bestow a striking turquoise color upon Havasu Creek’s water’s hence the Havasupais' designation for themselves as Blue-Green water people. Downstream from Supai four waterfalls - Navajo, Havasu, Mooney, and Beaver - mark the creek's steep step like descent as it flows toward the Colorado.
When anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing visited the Havasupais in 1881, he was profoundly moved by the sight of the falls, "three hundred feet of crystal glory" with their "crown of perennial verdure" and “footstools
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