PL93-620 R5. Jan-May 1974: Lobbying The Sierra Club: After A Little Tempest, The Teapot Goes Cold

Back to the events of early 1974:

In a January visit to Washington, McComb talked with Udall about flying over the area, and re-stated how adamant the Club was on keeping the Havasupai status quo. He had to repeat this to involved Committee staffers, too, who were "surprised" at what they had heard about the pro-Havasupai Chapter members. 

In Tucson, as I "offered information" to some of the uncommitted Chapter officers, others were trying to find a middle ground, i.e., using Canyon de Chelly National Monument as a model for mixed administration. However, McComb told Garcia that he did not want to be involved in the McIver-called meeting: "I am opposed to any Havasupai change." There was talk about a second Club-Havasupai get-together in Tucson. Another chapter member had visited Supai and came back bearing dire news about Havasupai conditions, which he would carry to the special meeting, where he hoped to bury any idea of buying private land and get the Executive Committee to support Havasupai land transfer. McComb argued with him, and as well tried to convince the two main Havasupai backers. Garcia worried to me about the extent of McComb's lobbying.

PL93-620 R4. Jan 1974: Ingram-- What He Was Thinking; How The Havasupai Saw Him

1. Before dealing with the climax of the Havasupai lobbying attempt on the Arizona Sierra Club, I want to provide a look at my own attempts to deal conceptually with their effort, at least as I wrote them down in several private documents. Not all can be exactly dated, but summarizing a few may give a sense of how we cast around over the many months of trying to shape worthwhile legislation to present and protect the Grand Canyon, while also trying to deflect the transfer of Park land to Havasupai ownership. Nothing made any difference; the Havasupai were no longer to be put off with part-way measures; sovereignty was their goal. And nothing could have led me to accept that goal given what I knew about the history, particularly recent events that accentuated the possibility of damage being done to the Canyon by development.

PL93-620 R3. Dec 1973 - Jan 1974: The Havasupai Lobby the Chapter; It Debates

A very large "Special Meeting Havasupai Tribal Council" took place on 2 Dec 1973 in Flagstaff at the Museum of Northern Arizona between 18 Havasupai plus 10 allies and 10 Club chapter members and McComb (for the complete roster, see below**.) Hirst wrote out very detailed minutes, while McComb's summary to me was much terser: "an unpleasant three hours";  the Havasupai were angrier; Hirst and Babbitt quieter. The anger focussed on McComb, whom they saw as the obstacle to getting the Sierra Club on their side: Why, they asked, can you not help us?

PL93-620 R2. Jun-Nov 1973: The Havasupai are ANGRY!

The Senate hearing in June gathered and concentrated everyone's attention. Meanwhile in Arizona, there was a series of meetings which, ignoring the land question, concentrated on infra-structure and development support. In early May, at Supai, the BIA and the Supai covered finishing the road from US 66, bringing transmission lines to Long Mesa and down to Supai, trail maintenance, a new school building, a revised liquor ordinance, upgraded irrigation, power at the Hilltop trailhead, beginning a study for a tramway, and starting a long-range-planning process to cover camping facilities, tourist lodge construction & the school. 

  CBS asked to meet with the Council in June about a tv documentary.

A mid-June meeting in Phoenix included officials from BIA, the Park and Forest Services, and a state planning agency; no Havasupai. They reviewed the road and power tranmission and then discussed multi-agency projects: a village and campground sewage system, trail improvement, camping limits, and a trail ride business. 

Whitefolk: Havasupai Tormentors or Saviors?

Time out from history for a bit of speculation.

Friends of the Havasupai have often castigated whitefolk,-- their actions, aggression, and agencies-- for first banishing them to a small plot in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, and then thwarting them for almost a century in regaining possession of only a small fraction of the land they used to occupy that runs from the Hualapai lands past Moenkopi and over toward the Hopi villages, as well as from the Canyon down south to the great east-west corridor that famed US 66 ran through.

In prospect, however, if not in fact, the Havasupai story, left to itself without whitefolk intervention and "protection", might well have been an even sadder episode of the XXth century. Consider:

Near-contemporaneously with the arrival and explorations of the Spaniards from the south, and their establishment along the Rio Grande, the Dine' -- the name "Navajo", "Navaho" is in much wider use-- were moving into the American southwest -- northern New Mexico, eastern Arizona, and lands bordering these areas. Early adopters of the ungulates, the Navajo were mobile and aggressive, riding their horses and bringing their sheep from the 1500's on such that by the 1700's, they were well-established near and surrounding the Hopi villages, coming up against the "Grand Canyon front". 

PL93-620 R1. March 1973: The Havasupai Flank Attack Begins: Introduction and Scene 1

To ease into the turbulence of this dispute, here is some background.

First, photos taken at the time that I found in my files. Martin Litton flew over and provided two views of the village of Supai, here showing its setting along the bottom of Havasu Canyon, cut into the Esplanade, itself one of the sweeping features of this part of the Grand Canyon; the upper rim is off toward the clouds.

Next, a view directly down over houses and fields:

PL93-620 R: The Havasupai Reservation Enlargement Act of 1975: Setting The Scene

Telling the story of Public Law 93-620 so far, through 1973 to the start of 1974, has been seemingly spinning out a single more-or-less coherent narrative thread. And truly, it would be possible to maintain this thread all the way through the final act of Presidential approval in January 1975. The legislation was conceived of and pushed as creating a Park more descriptive of the extent of the Canyon itself, although the range of opinion on the most accurate description was not just wide, but had been evolving over several years; well, over the decades, in truth. 

  This Park-centered narrative did continue through 1974, brought to a mangled conclusion in the final events. That narrative, responding throughout to our determination to "complete" the Park --and the push back by those who disagreed with us--, does have, as I say, its own coherence; it is a stand-alone story.

But that story is not the story of Public Law 93-620.

It is an ironic, to-be-remarked-upon, coincidence, though coincidence it is, that the history of the Canyon's Park began in the early 1880's, at the same historical moment that that other whitefolk creation, an Indian Reservation for the Havasupai, was brought into being and American history. Others, and I, have related the history of the increasing entanglement  of that Reservation and that Park, a history that makes clear why, on the one hand, legislation to enlarge a Park was necessarily also legislation to enlarge an Indian Reservation, and on the other, why the fight over the latter was so full of anger and seemingly irreconcilable positions. 

Which, I have to remark, is only to be expected in our advocacy-organized, invective-inviting, political system.