A Legendary Sacred Place

Michael Chiago artwork, part of the wayside image

Commissioned art with restricted use

The remnants of monumental buildings and large walled compounds you see here have been slowly going back to the desert for more than 560 years. The people who used to live here left suddenly.

Many of their descendants still live in the Sonoran Desert today. Others moved to northern Arizona and western New Mexico. Our visitor center film, Casa Grande: House of Many Stories, explains the deep meaning of this place to the descendants of the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People. They regard this place as sacred.

"Siwan Wa'a Ki is a place ... to pray or sing songs to the Huhugam Spirits. The non-O'odham call this sacred place Casa Grande Ruins ... (it) is well known to all people and mentioned in O'odham legends."
Danny Lopez, Tohono O'odham elder

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A PDF of this wayside (13,323 KB) is available.

 

• Revered Site

  
  

  Leigh Kuwansiwma, the director for the Hopi Tribes Cultural Preservation Office, and Barnaby Lewis, of the Gila River Indian Community, try to explain why the Casa Grande is important to their people.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS, movie outtakes, thanks to volunteer editor Jenise Cook

  Date created:

  10/14/2020

  Audio Transcript

  [Leigh Kuwansiwma] Well, every village has a soul as the Hopis describe it. The remains of our ancestral people reside within or in proximity to Naas a-vee or Casa Grande. They’re still there. The spirit is still there. So while we may literally see this as a room, it still a living part of the Hopi people. We lived there, our ancestral people still reside there, and our spirit is still there within the village we call Naas a-vee and Casa Grande.

  [Barnaby Lewis] In as such the National Park Service are stewards for the site. I believe that people, visitors, when they come, should come to know this place as more than what they believe is a park. This identification of a park is maybe misleading. It should be more in their minds to think of it as a cultural site. It’s almost like the same way that when people go to church, there is a spirituality in that place, that church that they go to. With that they should be conscious of the fact that this is not a park, but something that is of great significance spiritually a lot of O’odham people.

  Barnaby Lewis, tribal member of the Akimel O’odham of the Gila River Indian Community