Members of a small tribe in Arizona are marking the renaming of a popular campground in Grand Canyon National Park as Havasupai Gardens.
Carletta Tilousi watches as a helicopter carrying fellow Havasupai tribal members prepares to land in the Grand Canyon on Friday, May 5, 2023. The tribe held a blessing ceremony to mark the renaming of a popular campground from Indian Garden to Havasupai Gardens. – Carletta Tilousi hit the trail as the sun rose, the light revealing a grouping of cottonwood and ash trees deep in the Grand Canyon.
The name change from Indian Garden came in November after the tribe lobbied for years to reclaim a part of its heritage and force a historical reckoning over the treatment of the Havasupai people, the last of whom the park service removed in 1928 from their onetime farmlands. The Havasupai Tribe was landless for a time after the removal until the federal government set aside a plot in the depths of the Grand Canyon for tribal members. It was slashed to less than a square mile and, nearly a century later, enlarged substantially in 1975 in what was one of the biggest land transfers to a tribe.
Many had their faces marked with red ochre, a pigment from the walls of the Grand Canyon that by tradition is tied to everything from a child's birth and its first steps to protection and as an expression of beauty. Carletta Tilousi trekked steadily along the rocky switchbacks, stopping occasionally to rest and talk to fellow hikers. One said the Havasupai Gardens name would be hard to get used to.
He encouraged those present to set aside their egos, to see the canyon as a source of medicine and hear it, feel it. And also to connect to the elements that Havasupai view as relatives — trees, rocks, birds, clouds, wind. “One day the grandparents, the parents and some of the family members might pass away, and they'll just have to carry on that tradition ... wearing the headdress, the regalia, and just walking in their footsteps,” Siyuja said of his generation.
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