Grand Canyon a leader in Native American-National Park relations

The six young Hopi and Navajo workers finished their Otter Pops and started hauling parts of 240-pound picnic tables into neat piles inside rope nets.

It was a Tuesday morning in late June. Every few minutes, a helicopter hovered down into Indian Gardens at Grand Canyon National Park and hooked a net loaded with old metal and wood. Later in the day, the team of conservationists would start assembling the new picnic tables that had been lowered into the campground below the South Rim.

This team was part of the first all-Native crew working in the park through the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps, a 7-year-old program affiliated with Americorps and the Arizona Conservation Corps. Team members had been living and working on the rim and in the inner canyon since May, repairing trails and doing various manual labor projects.

But perhaps most importantly, they were serving as ambassadors for Native American culture whenever they encountered curious tourists.

"You can tell people about the history, and how Native Americans have been involved in the canyon," said Navajo and Hopi crew member Jeremy Yoyetewa, 19, of Tucson. "You know the Kolb brothers (who in 1903 established a photography-based business at the Canyon), but people don't know the stories of our ancestors."

People ask about what life is like on the nearby reservations, and about their tribes' connections to the Grand Canyon.

"We don't always know all the stories, but we can tell people about ourselves," said crew member Noelle Kooyahoema,who grew up on Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation.

Navajo Skylar Begay, 21, of Flagstaff, said, "It feels so good to be a part of something that brings us back to the places our ancestors were and be able to contribute something."

The Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps is just one way the park is working to deepen its ties to the 11 tribes whose ancestral home ranges included what is now Grand Canyon National Park. The park facilitates tribal trips to culturally important sites and ongoing archaeological preservation efforts. Two years ago, the park founded an Inter-tribal Advisory Council.

And with a recent $500,000 grant, the second most-popular park in the country is starting to act on a two-year old plan to become a leader in tribal-National Park relations.

ArtPlace America, a national grant-making organization, gave the money to the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Associationon behalf of the park. The plan is to empower the 11 traditionally affiliated tribes to tell their stories, develop internships and jobs, and bring sustainable tourism opportunities to their lands, many of which share boundaries with the park. Once the grant is spent, the park has plans in place to seek sustainable funding.

"We're going to be able to provide a platform, which is tourism, where people come to an area ...to hear different tribes tell their stories, their perspectives of the same place," said Edward Hall III, tourism coordinator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a member of the Native tourism association.

"It's important to our youth," continued Hall, a member of the Hidatsa and Arikara Nations of North Dakota. "It gives them the sense that our culture is important even outside our homes."

The plans mean big changes for the park's 4.7 million annual visitors. And, organizers hope, for the tribes involved.

Much of the money will go to the transformation of the Desert View area on the far eastern edge of the park: building an inter-tribal visitor center, invigorating the Native cultural demonstration series and preserving the murals inside the 83-year-old Watchtower, the Pueblo-style historic landmark.

There will be new interpretive programs, updated wayside signage and remodeled buildings, all aimed at more authentically communicating the culture, history and modern lifeways of the affiliated tribes – Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Havasupai, Hualapai, Yavapai-Apache, and five bands of Southern Paiute represented by the Kaibab Paiute.

Park not alone

Once enacted, this plan will allow the tribes to drive tourism onto their own lands. They want to encourage Grand Canyon visitors to continue on to places such as Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, about a three-hour drive from the park, Havasu Falls on the western edge of the Canyon, just outside the park, and the Pueblo of Zuni, about a four-hour drive.

The creation of a visitor center that points tourists to tribal lands is new for the National Park Service. But of the 408 areas managed by the Service, there are almost countless Native American initiatives, including cultural demonstrations, educational programs and internships. In addition, the parks, historic sites and monuments protect and preserve hundreds of thousands of Native American archaeological sites.

Visitor programs abound, such as the fireside storytelling called Native America Speaks at Glacier National Park in Montana. And at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, members of the Lakota Sioux tribe have been working as seasonal rangers since 2008, educating visitors about the Sioux relationship to the Black Hills.

Behind the scenes, the Native Conservation Corps has been doing work for four years at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Rainbow Bridge National Monument, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, all in Utah. And Death Valley National Park in California is run in partnership with the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, members of which still live in the park.

"For a long time, the Park Service has been the one developing the (signage) and having the park rangers tell the Native story through the NPS lens," said Desert View Park Ranger Brian Gatlin. "And the intent here is to take out the NPS as the intermediary voice and have the members of the relevant tribes be the primary voice.

"At the Grand Canyon, I think we're doing a lot of good now. But in the 1920s, the park was evicting the Havasupai from Indian Gardens.

"National parks are not just about the monumental landscapes. They also protect America's history, and in doing that, they represent the progress of America, and the struggles and the injustices people had to overcome... and those difficult stories are part of the national park story and America's story."

Changes on Eastern Edge

The Desert View Watchtower's circular Kiva Room was designed to hold great crowds on the eastern edge of Grand Canyon National Park, a place where visitors could step in out of the gusting winds.

For years, the first floor held gleaming glass jewelry cases. Hanging T-shirt racks studded the stone walls. Key-chain displays obscured windows big enough to frame the canyon.

But in January, the gift shop was closed and the three-story tower, modeled after the designs of the Ancestral Puebloan people of the Colorado Plateau, was restored to architect Mary Colter's original intent. Families gather by the hearth to inspect the stonework; couples point out the details in the wood cribwork ceiling; everyone takes selfies by the windows.

The biggest change is up a winding flight of narrow stairs. The park put an opaque cover over a sand painting called the Snake Altar.

Made by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie shortly after the tower opened, his tribe today sees the artwork as inappropriate for public viewing. The park is working with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office to figure out what to do with the artwork, and to find a way to tell the story of shifting cultural norms, why what once felt acceptable now feels exploitative.

(It has to do with how, by whom and for what ceremonial purposes sand paintings are made. They're neither decorative nor intended to be permanent.)

Soon, remodeling will start on the now-empty Desert View visitor center to turn it into an inter-tribal visitor center. It's the first thing visitors will see as they walk from the parking lot to the rim. Weaving, silversmithing, dancing and other cultural demonstrations will take place on an adjacent plaza, or, if windy, inside the Watchtower.

With an eye for formal and informal cross-cultural exchanges, the park will also increase the number of Native Americans it routinely hires as interpretive ranger interns and conservationists. Conservation crew member Noelle Kooyahoema has found tourists fairly quick to ask questions.

She takes them in stride, she said. As the only Native woman in many of her classes at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., Kooyahoema, 20, said she's used to questions about growing up on the Hopi Reservation. At school, sometimes it wears on her. But at the Canyon, she is open to it.

"Being a part of the Corps, people are learning about how you can be an interpreter and tell people about your culture and your tribe, and you can do conservation work all at the same time," Kooyahoema said.

Changes in, out of park

The inter-tribal visitor center will be designed as an intermediary space where it's OK for visitors to be unfamiliar with Native histories and lifeways without seeming insensitive. It will be a place where the tribes can welcome visitors where they are, literally and intellectually.

"Desert View could end up being a world-class destination for a beginning introduction to what the tribes have to offer and entice a lot of visitors and tours to go out to these places, depending on what the individual tribes determine," said park superintendent Dave Uberuaga. "It's kind of a springboard for them to take advantage to the extent that they want."

He envisions the park helping the tribes develop "sustainable, culturally sensitive" trails systems, guided tours and other tourism offerings.

But some reservation lands aren't developed well generally, let alone for tourism. And understanding the norms of reservation life can be intimidating for tourists who might underestimate how different parts of reservations are from the rest of America.

These issues are not barriers, however, according to Hall, the tourism expert with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

"Visitors can appreciate our indigenous foods, our art..." Hall said. "It doesn't mean that we have to share everything, nor should we. But it does mean that we can feel like there's an appreciation and a willingness for people to experience what we honor, and what we enjoy, and what we want to share – that we don't have to put on a facade to help them enjoy us."

Many government employees interviewed for this story said the developments at the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon are also a new chance for Americans to acknowledge parts of U.S. history that they don't often know about, or think about.

"It's so heartening to see (park management) at the table, open to a different perspective," Hall said.

"Rather than saying, 'This is what we know, and this is what we've been telling,' you have lead interpreters saying, 'We're open to doing it a different way and we're open to doing it in your voice.'"