IS THE SKY CRACKING OPEN?

ARE THE GRAND CANYON’S TWO WORLDS JOINING?

WILL THE CANYON’S OWNERS DO A GROUP HUG?

Hopi, Havasupai, Hualapai, Navajo, Kaibab & San Juan bands of the Southern Paiute, and Colorado River Tribes leaders spoke at a joint press conference April 11 2023 supporting the Presidential proclamation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument (bahj nuwavah Etahku’uvaini dulcemente).

U S Rep Raul Grijalva placed this revised proposal on the Washington agenda as the latest of his, the tribes’, and their allies, long-continuing effort to protect the Grand Canyon watershed and to ban and exclude any chance for more harm to the Canyon’s peoples from uranium and efforts to exploit it. Certainly, at a subsequent July 2023 hearing open to all comers, the overwhelming preponderance of people’s hopes and opinions supported Monument creation.

The Monument would be on lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service (USFS). On a map (below), such a Monument (red outlining), along with the uniquely related Kaibab Plateau (USFS-administered) and the nations of the Navajo, Havasupai & Hualapai, hug as in a protective embrace the eastern half of the Grand Canyon (and its) National Park.

Fifty years ago, the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act gave this charge to the Secretary of the Interior:

“Sec. 5. The Secretary is authorized and encouraged to enter into cooperative agreements … with interested Indian tribes providing for the protection and interpretation of the Grand Canyon in its entirety.”

The Secretary was authorized to work with the tribes toward the goal of a unified interpretation of the Grand Canyon, a sensible and necessary step given that the Navajo, Havasupai, and Hualapai, with the Park, are the land-owners of the Canyon’s east and south sides. 

 

If that were all the recent story about the Grand Canyon, much cooperation and joint projects might have constituted the story’s content. History is dicier.

Although direction of the Monument will depend on the text of the proclamation, it is refreshing to think of the future of the Canyon’s  administration as one of cooperation, joint and reciprocal benefit, comprehensive explication and presentation of the Canyon and all its facets including the multitude of opportunities to physically enjoy and explore it.

There is so much history to subsume if the Monument is to be more than a barrier to resource exploitation. The absence of Park Service officials was obvious. For all the Canyon’s over-seers, the challenge to work for beneficial cooperation means great change.

For those of us who think of the Grand Canyon as an iconic gesture of the natural world, as a universal and continuing reminder of that world as necessary for human existence and thriving, we will wish for and work at of the possibility that the cartographic mutual embrace might be expressed in the Monument’s realization as the frame for users and owners (as we think of ourselves too often) to reciprocally work for unifying, even friend-making, gestures and actions.