Grand Canyon National Park Centennial Briefings: Cultural Resources

Centennial Briefings Purpose

When Congress established the National Park Service in 1916, Congress gave the agency a specific purpose: “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

During the summer of Grand Canyon National Park’s 2019 centennial, scientists and resource managers briefed fellow staff and the public about how they are helping to enable future generations to enjoy what is special about Grand Canyon.

This article is from a transcript of a July 3, 2019 briefing about cultural resources in Grand Canyon. Its conversational quality reflects the passion and personalities of the people behind the park.

Cultural Resources Presenters

Ellen Brennan is the cultural resource program manager for Grand Canyon National Park. Of her cultural resources career, she says:

It was really my interest in the history of the interactions between the United States government and the American Indians that set my career toward cultural resources. I wanted to understand the lifeways of present-day indigenous people and to understand what I could about their ancestors. As I worked in the NPS as an archaeologist, I came to understand that cultural resources includes so much more than archaeology. We work to protect historic buildings and structures, cultural landscapes, museum collections, and ethnographic resources. I love the broader scope of my work today, and my perspectives have changed a lot, too. I don't see it as my place to develop theories about how the people of the past lived and made the decisions that they made. We have living communities who know those things and can share with us what is appropriate for us to know. In terms of being an archaeologist I think my most important role is as a manager, saving our archaeological resources for the future so that tribes can continue to benefit from their presence on the landscape and that the public can learn to appreciate such places into the future without disturbing them.

Jason Nez is the fire archeologist for Grand Canyon National Park. Of the Grand Canyon landscape, he says:

As someone that has grown up in places like this and has become knowledgeable in the footprints of humanity, the different pueblos, rock art panels, and all that, and someone who has walked out there extensively, I love it, because I can just point – I can’t stop pointing, all the way across. I think, there’s just pueblos everywhere. There’s two rooms. There’s 20 rooms. There’s places where we’ve found Clovis points. There’s artifact scatters. There’s roasting pits. There’s trails in and out of the canyon. And that’s part of what we need to be conveying, is there have been humans here. There’s trails in and out that are important. They change over time. There’s structures out there that have meanings. There’s value systems that we practice now because places like this exist. Landscapes need humans, and humans need landscapes. It’s like, when have people not been part of this landscape? Maybe 15,000 years ago.

These Things Are Alive

This is What We Used to Live In
This is a big resource area. Navajos from the surrounding communities like Cameron and Tuba City areas used to come up here. This was prior to management rules like no camping, or limits on how long people could camp. People would come in and build like their parents did, their grandparents, and great grandparents. These are the types of structures we used to live in.

Fire Archeologist Jason Nez talks with Grand Canyon colleagues about structures on July 3, 2019.

Grand Canyon Conservancy/Jack Pennington

This is a Living Structure
Originally they’ll go out and get wood, and the living end goes down. That signifies this is a living structure. They’ll start out here in the east. They’ll have four main poles, and they’re pointing toward the sun. When the sun first came in in the morning, it would warm up the structure. Then they’ll stack logs, and then they’ll chink it with juniper bark. They’ll send all the kids out, and the kids will be out bringing back buckets of these, and we’ll be squishing them in there. Then we’ll cover the whole structure with mud so it’s sort of air tight, it’s water resistant, and it’s insulated very well. These things are alive until they totally decompose and they’re gone. They take care of us and they teach us. That’s how I can interact with these things.

We Don’t Just Live in These Things
If someone was going to live here for awhile, they’ll have a ceremony. They’ll have a house blessing and a house blessing way, and they’ll bury artifacts in different areas. We don’t just live in these things, ceremonies happen in here. Important events, they happen in here. Now you go to the hospital and have your baby. In the old days you did it here, or over there somewhere. This is both a religious structure and it’s just a habitation structure.

There Used to Be a Hearth There
I would say that the visitation this site has had is starting to damage it. If you look inside, you can see some scattered rocks and things in here. There used to be a hearth there, and it’s since been disturbed by people messing around, moving the rocks around. Wood is starting to come off the structure. This is one of the reasons that we have the site disclosure policy that we have. We’ve already lost one of the features that says this place was occupied. It had a warming hearth. People lived and cooked, kept themselves warm in here. It’s gone now.

They’re All These Little Footprints
They actually had summer hogans, too, that were built just like this, but they’ll take the branches off living trees, and they’ll just stick them all around. It breaks the wind and you can live in here, but it’s also breezy for those hot days. And then there’s a brush hogan. There’s a windbreak structure. There’s all sorts of different structures. They’re all just as important, because they’re all these little footprints and fingerprints of where we were before.

We’re Talking about the Navajo, Havasupai, Yavapai, and Apache
Of course, the Hopi and Zuni were here. The North Rim is the country for the southern Paiute people. In historic times they were heavily using the North Rim and the Bright Angel Trail corridor. But in terms of cultures that built wooden structures, collected pinon, who lived on the South Rim during the historic period, we’re talking about the Navajo, Havasupai, Yavapai, and Apache. The interesting thing is, there’s a lot of similarity in the construction of things like the windbreak Jason just described. The Yavapai and Apache will tell you that’s the only kind of structure that they built when they were up here. And most people won’t even recognize it, because it does look so natural.

Portrait of Havasupai woman Fannie Baanahmida circa 1902 in Havasu Canyon.

H. G. Peabody Collection, Grand Canyon Museum Collection 00831

Surely There Were Many, Many More
In 2006, we did a big project where we did 3D laser imaging of the structures like this that we knew about on the South Rim. We also did tree-ring dating. The tribes asked us not to date the structures directly, but to look for the trees where we thought the branches and other elements of the structure came from, so we did that. They dated between 50 and 100 years. Surely there are many, many more that existed on the South Rim that dated to much earlier times, but they were lost to fire, natural processes, and stuff like that.

It Means Hard Decisions

That’s A Down Payment
Pinons fuel a small, unique economy. Families will come from all over the reservation to the upper basin in the South Kaibab to pick pinons. Mostly kids, because that was me when I was younger. The pinons will be laying on the ground, and we’ll just sit there. We’re just playing a game, filling up our cans and taking them out of the cone. Taking them back to grandma and grandpa, who are sitting over there in the brush structure filling old flour bags. We leave with big bags of pinons. And then you get home, put them in a cast-iron skillet, put in a little water and salt, and then cook them up. They last longer like that. Then we just eat them, or sell them. You can sell a 20-pound bag of pinons for, like, $200. That’s a car payment. That’s a down payment. That’s your heating bill for the winter.

Something We’ve Got to Grapple With
If every Navajo came and took pinons for commercial use, then there’s no pinons for the future. That’s something the policy makers, we’ve got to grapple with. We need to hang on to this traditional practice, but everyone has a right to come here. When you actually explain it to people, if you brought your whole family here and everyone is taking 20 pounds of pinons, there’s going to be no pinons for anyone.

They Don’t Know the Places Where Their Grandparents Came
Now that they don’t have the access, it’s damaged a lot of those connections to landscapes. A lot of kids don’t know the history of coming up here. They don’t know the places where their grandparents came and used to live for months on end. There’s a lot of cultural disconnect because of policies like this 14-day rule that are policies we need right now, because we saw toilet paper all around the parking lot there. It’s one of those issues that we have got to put more thought to.

Navajo people harvesting pinons circa 1932

Grand Canyon Museum Collection 13943

He Was Trying to Make a Bridge
Five years ago, an archeologist named Ian Huff was working here. He was trying to make a bridge so that Navajo, Havasupai, Yavapai, Apache, and other groups could come back to the park and collect pinon nut during the season. In order to do that, they are restricted to collecting 25 pounds, in a shell, per day, which they are not allowed to sell commercially. So, it benefits them in that they can do a collection, but it doesn’t serve the purpose that it used to serve, where it could help sustain their lifeway, help them make extra money, and things of that nature.

To Extend That Use Life Without Changing the Structure

We Are Going to Protect It
There will be a fire, and the fire is going to come this way. We have a site here. We are going to protect it, but this is a very difficult structure to protect. If we wrap it, little ashes will get under it and it can burn from the inside out. We have all this new bug kill, and as the climate is changing, we have big stands of dead trees, all that fuel built up from years of fire suppression. It is going to burn hot. There’s all that grass; it’s just going to carry fire. These are normally spread out with open ground between them, so they don’t all burn at once. This is all going to burn at once. So I’ll probably come in with some volunteers, and all this dead stuff we’ll buck it up, pile it, find a good spot way out there where it can be burned by itself, like in the winter. And that will be the first step. Second step will be coming in and trying to mitigate some of these standing snags, if it’s safe.

It Proves Native Occupation
In terms of management, this has to be here, because it proves Native occupation recently. If these things are gone, all of a sudden our job becomes more difficult. From a Native perspective, they weren’t intended to last forever. That’s one of the issues that I’ve had to grapple with. We’re preserving things that were never intended to be a permanent fixture. It’s just difficult, but knowing that it’s a living structure, its intention was never to be permanent, it makes me feel better about giving it our best. We’re not giving up on it, but if it goes, it goes.

We Go There to Learn and Talk About Issues
When we come to sites like this, as a Native person, some people will ask me, how can you be around these sites? All over the reservation we have room blocks, we have artifact scatters, we’ve got giant pueblos, and it’s just this myth that we don’t go there. We go there to learn and talk about issues, rather than just to sightsee, which can be dangerous. Coming to a site like this with the proper interpreter, with the proper person, then they’ll teach us about it. They’ll teach us about how to build it. They’ll teach us about who lived here, and why they lived here. That would be the only reason we’d come back to a place like this. And eventually we become adults, and we come back with our kids and teach them about how to build these things and how lifecycles happen. So the way we go into places like that is with this mindset. I’m going to learn. I’m going to be taught.

You Know What Our Mission Is
The theory of pretty much all archeological sites is to extend the use life as long as possible, so that they can continue to be used for research and knowledge and understanding, but also because they are part of the history of Grand Canyon and its people. The stabilization that we do at Tusayan Ruin, while it’s important so that people can visit that site, there is no question that changes some aspects, because we’re adding new mortar, we’re doing this and that, so I am conflicted about that. I think we want to try and extend the use life of those sites doing the least intervention possible. We don’t want to change the archeology sites. We want them to be what they are, to tell the story that they have to tell, but so that they’re still here. Because you know what our mission is – we’re future generations to enjoy, right? It’s kind of a hard thing to walk, especially when you’re talking about archeological sites.

You Leave Everything Where It Is
NPS management policies direct us to leave sites in situ, which means you leave everything where it is. There are times when we don’t have a choice. Between 2007 and 2009, we excavated nine archeological sites along the river corridor. We’d monitored those sites for 16 years, and we tried to use methods and techniques to stop the erosion that was happening. All those methods did not work, and so, working with the tribes and consulting with the tribes, we came up with a data recovery plan where we excavated portions of the sites that could not be stabilized. We did collect those artifacts. We did public outreach, so that people could come and see what we were doing during the excavation. Those objects are in the museum. But as a rule, our program does not collect artifacts unless there’s an obvious threat that they will be stolen.

National Park Service staff excavate endangered archaeological sites along the Colorado River in 2008.

NPS/Allyson Mathis

It's Like We're Saving His Structure

Is It Going to Work?
During our last fire, there was a windbreak structure, and I’m there. We had already prepped it and I’m just fretting over it. The fire is coming. Is it going to work? Is my plan going to work? Because we had limbed up the trees, and there was just so much dead. It was going to be like a nuclear bomb went off. I just had some backpack pumps and the crews came and they lit fire and we were just all sort of there back to back watching the fire getting hot, sucking in all the air, and sort of like, is it going to make it? We had our safe zone, everything worked out, and then finally the initial heat died down. I was like, oh, it’s going to make it!

This Horned Toad, He Came Out of the Structure
So everyone kept going, and I just stayed there by myself, and this horned toad, he came out of the structure. He comes up and he’s sitting by me. And one of the other fire fighters came over, and was like, oh, look at the horned toad! He lives in this structure! It’s like we’re saving his structure! And it was really cool, because he would crawl around, and he’d do that looking at us with one eye.

You’re Safe, You’re Strong
When we look at artifacts, when we look at prehistory, in Navajo, when we find lithic scatters, when we find projectile points, we say the horned toad left it for us. You don’t just see a horned toad out of chance, we say. We believe that a horned toad is there telling you you’re safe, you’re strong, and the horned toad’s back represents a shield to protect you from evil.

Let’s Get to Work
So knowing that horned toad came out was all the confidence I needed, and I was just like, ok, let’s get to work. Let’s start burning off all this stuff. Let’s start moving this stuff out. It was a great time. And that horned toad just stood at the doorway and watched me the whole time as I was protecting that structure.