WE HAVE COME FAR -- WE ARE ON THE WAY

 

THE GREATER GRAND CANYON’S POLITICAL HISTORY:

A PERSONAL REPRISE

With the proclamation by President Biden of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument on August 8, 2023, our recognition of the Grand Canyon has widened once again, this time the resulting physical and human dimensons justify a new label: Greater Grand Canyon.

Greater in part because of its further reaching out to cover its watershed; greater because in the Monument name and its Associated Tribes, it recognizes its original and continuing peoples, its future in their, and our, hands.

This essay (in 4 more parts; this is the preface) is offered as a very personal, even idiosyncratic, historical guide to our efforts at an ever widening and deepening conceptual reach that seeks to comprehend the Grand Canyon as a place, a home for its peoples, and the knowledge and experience represented and embodied in its synthesis of topography, residents, and advocates.  

Our goal is shown in two maps (they appear in the fourth part) that embrace the designations and regard we all hold the Greater Grand Canyon in; how it encompasses its place and people.

FIRST PART: START-UPS AND MISFIRES

HERE COME NEW NEIGHBORS; SO GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

In American political terms, the Greater Grand Canyon started in the early 1880’s, in 1881/3, when the Hualapai Reservation was created. Simultaneously, the strange creation known as the Havasupai Reservation was declared, beginning a 90-some-year drama of broken promises, inflicted difficulties, Havasupai perseverance, and political conflict.

Almost immediately, this birthing time also produced the 1884 introduction in the U. S. Senate of John Wesley Powell’s idea for a Grand Canyon National Park, which though large in excess plateau acreage actually encompassed but a fraction of the Canyon’s 277-mile length, ignoring the wonders of its beginning and central and western regions. The Powell version of the Park settled into another 90-year mis-recognition — facetiously put, he and most visitors epitomized the Grand Canyon, the one they saw, as The Big Gully. This is was to be a site of much future conflict.

SECOND PART: 1966: THE HINGE OF ALL HINGE YEARS

OUT OF A NIGHTMARE, NEW GROWTH

Fortunately for the Grand Canyon — the Greater Grand Canyon— fortunately I insist, the Hualapai’s next big effort, allied with Hayden (and a bunch of Western politicos) their next effort did not bring victory. This effort, did, however, act as a huge hinge in history: of the Canyon, its overall region, the American west, and society at large. That hinge was, of course, the monumental struggle over whether to authorize and build two hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, a move that would have continued, ratified, indeed intensified, 20th-century over-development of the West, and turned the Greater Grand Canyon into the Grand Canyon National Industrial Park.

This is not the place to re-narrate that struggle; the dreamers of dams were defeated; the dams were not authorized. America chose instead to “Save Grand Canyon” and possibly itself as marked by the consequent burgeoning of our environmental consciousness. The outcome of this larger effort, comprehending and dealing with the consequences (e.g., negative climate alteration and weather unpredictability) of this Anthropocene age of ours, is yet to be known. The story of the Greater Grand Canyon is only one, if a singularly significant one, strand of the many that humans are weaving to make our future, for better and worse.

THIRD PART: AND NOW TO WORK: BUILD A PARK — AND A HAVASUPAI RESERVATION

 MAKING SAUSAGE IN CONGRESS' FACTORY

So in the 1966-72 period, we had struggled to trim and revise our Park conception to represent “complete” and not transgress against important interests. 

At this same time, there were a variety of other proposals, and after the 1968 elections, when Barry Goldwater (another Republican fond of the Grand Canyon) replaced the retired Hayden, he vowed to move legislation forward that would expand the Park, in part to protect it against dams. His leadership would be seconded, then almost taken over by Morris Udall, who became our chief ally. Ironically, as a southern Arizonan and would-be dam-builder in the ’60’s, he had been, like Goldwater, our opponent . 

FOURTH PART: THE 21ST CENTURY CREATES A NEW, GREATER CONCEPTION

NEW LEADERS, NEW INITIATIVES, A NEW MONUMENT

For the 21st Century, southern Arizona has produced another Grand Canyon champion In the environmental tradition of Morris Udall: Raul Grijalva. (One who was never a dreamer of dams.) He appeared on the Grand Canyon scene in 2009 as he chaired a Flagstaff hearing about the dangers from quickening uranium-mining activity in the area. There was mutual support with the residents, the Havasupai, Navajo, Hualapai, Hopi, Kaibab band of the Southern Paiute — indeed with the several peoples who make up the Grand Canyon’s Associated Tribes. Their concern arose from the many destructive human and natural impacts shown by earlier uranium exploitation, especially what uranium might do to the water supply. This concern, widened to protection of the WATERSHED, not just the drainage, shaped the concern of this alliance. 

Over the past 15 years, the advantage in this struggle has gone back and forth with national partisan changes in Washington. Monuments and moratoriums have been pursued and blocked. Lets skip, then, to August 8, 2023, and what is clearly a new, bright, moment; a re-setting of the Grand Canyon’s political framework, the Antiquities Act proclamation (Grand Canyon’s fifth) of new protection, bringing the public national recognition of the Greater Grand Canyon. 

President Biden, with Congressman Grijalva and the Associated Tribes in attendance and support, brought 150 years of history to a culmination point that is in truth another hinge to open a new door. The proclamation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument selects and designates three pieces of federal land, as outlined in red:

Even more, clear on the map below, this Greater Grand Canyon completes an embrace of the topographic Canyon using the Associated Tribes' hands from time immemorial to wrap about, raising a physical, topographic wonder into a global entity celebrating and defending the peoples and the place of the Greater Grand Canyon. 

Here is another view of the Associated Tribes of the Greater Grand Canyon that constitute a cloud of knowingness, experience, and concern encompassing the physical feature now enlarged not just beyond the Powell concept and a "complete" Park, but outward toward this world treasure's natural boundaries.

 

Some —the Hualapai, the Havasupai, the Navajo, the Southern Paiute, the Hopi — are physical protectors and even residents. What brings the Greater Grand Canyon into being, however, is the synergy and cooperation generated by the topographic Grand Canyon nestling within the protections offered by the American polity and the knowledge of the Associated Tribes: their long extension — their footprints — into the past; their possession in many forms of these lands they have roamed now and into the future.

For above all, the coming into existence of the Greater Grand Canyon, is the promise of bringing that future cooperatively into being, based on the past of the many peoples who revere the Canyon as the global environmental icon it is, the reminder and provoker for us to redouble, and again, our efforts to shape our future actions so as to protect our world, our environment, our earth, and our coming generations’ future.

Greater Grand Canyon:A Convergence

The Grand Canyon's pieces embraced.

Written out of the land and its peoples onto a map,

A map of human designations and times:

Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni

where indigenous, the first, peoples roam;

their ancestral footprints:

Out of the past, gathering all the world's;

Into the Greater Grand Canyon,

So into the future.