The swirling cloud of fine, red, volcanic desert dust rose into the sky like an immense crimson tornado, obscuring the dangerous edge of the Grand Canyon mesa, which drops off two-thousand feet to the Colorado River below. The helicopter rotors slowed and finally stopped. The dust cloud dissipated, as my father exited with the Havasupai pilot.
September Two weeks ago, he was in the high mountains of Bolivia, consulting on a silver mine. He will spend the next ten days working on a water project at the bottom of Havasu Canyon, in one of the most isolated Indian reservation in America. Water is life for these First People who have lived in this area for almost a millennium.
The Havasupai were not originally canyon dwellers. Their ancestral lands were on the plateau of the south rim of the Grand Canyon, extending as far as Flagstaff and Williams, Arizona. It is an old story: silver miners and railroad barons displaced the tribe and the US Government established a tiny reservation. As the Grand Canyon National Park developed, the National Park Service took more of the native plateau lands, hemming the tribe into the narrow canyon.
The tribe financially depends on the 20, visitors each year who hike a ten-mile trail to the famous blue-green waters of Havasupai Falls. The tourist destination has become so popular it is almost impossible to secure a reservation without going through a tour company. The lack of winter sunlight stops all agriculture from November to March, and the canyon turns from a lush oasis to a barren place of confinement.
My father tells me that he peered over the edge of the Grand Canyon at Hualapai hilltop, looking for the village of Supai. This is where they will go in the helicopter to inspect the construction site for concrete pipes and cistern. For six hundred years the Havasupai had constructed ha ya gewa ditches which ran on both sides of the creek. They need the water to grow their crops of corn, squash and beans and irrigate clusters of fruit trees.
