Customer Reviews

I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People

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The Havasupai people are a tribe of Native Americans who by oral tradition trace their origins back thousands of years. In some stories back to before the time that present day theory has the original people coming over the ice bridge from Asia. At any case, they have lived in the Grand Canyon area for a very long time. Their early habits were to live at the bottom of the canyon during the spring and summer, and to move to the plateau behind the South Rim during the fall and winter.

This book tells their story but concentrates on the last few hundred years. During this time first the Spanish and then the Americans came to disrupt their lives. As is often the case, the Americans wanted the Havasupai on reservations and eventually a very small (less than one square mile) reservation at the bottom of the canyon was 'given' to them. This robbed them from the use of their ancestral lands.

A major part of the book is on the struggle to retain some rights to the use of the upper lands. It was a fight against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Sierra Club (all of whom had different agendas), and more.

Eventually the Havasupai won over all this opposition, and their reservation was expanded by some 185,000 acres. This book shows that a small group can win, eventually, some of the time.

You may also want to view the Havasupai Tribe web site, do a Google search.

This book made me cheer for the underdogs--the whole Havasupai Nation!
They seemed to be a survivor nation--strong, resourceful and determined to live as their ancestors did. I used this book as a resource for my own fictional novel about the Grand Canyon. As I read it I learned about their history and their culture. I became absorbed in their struggle to survive many years of the prejudices of the American Government. The Havasupai Nation saved the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon but needed help preserving their way of life. Their struggle to save what was taken was documented effectively in this book.

Everyone should read how this nation survived for centuries in a hostile environment and fought to preserve their way of life in these modern times.

The Havasupai in Grand Canyon languished in a tiny reservation for almost a century, and this book tells their incredible story of their fight to have some of their ancestral lands returned to them, ultimately resulting in the return of almost 200,000 acres of land to the tribe, land transferred from the then-Grand Canyon National Monument, Grand Canyon National Park, and the Kaibab National Forest. This is simply a fantastic read that chronicles a sea change in federal relations with American Indian tribes.

I read the original version of this book, titled Life in a Narrow Place, when it came out 30 years ago. My copy had vanished, so I was glad to have the chance to buy and re-read the reissued and retitled edition.
The author and his wife lived with the Havasupai in the bottom of Grand Canyon for six years, and got as far inside their beliefs and lore as white outsiders could hope to.
The two most valuable chapters recount the spiritual and practical life of the Havasupai in the days of old, and the account (altogether different in tone and style) of their successful David-and-Goliath struggle in Washington to recover then 195,000 acres of tableland that the U.S. government screwed them out of a century before. Readers will learn a lot about Native American ways of thinking, and about injustices wrought by our government upon this small and unoffending tribe.

Havasupai people lives around havasu falls. Hava means air/sky and su means water in Turkish. It means that the water coming/falling from the air which describes the waterfall. There are lots of similar words and culturel habits between native americans and their Turkish roots. I suggest all readers to search other similarities between Turkish and their relevants in South & North America.