Grand Canyon National Park

Indigenous peoples

A broken spear point found in Marble Canyon shows a hunter passing through about 11,000 years ago; Puebloan people were farming the rims and river deltas by about 1,500 years ago, and split-twig figurines, masonry rooms and rock art show that the canyon sheltered people for millennia — a span the brochure puts at 600 generations. Eleven tribes — Yavapai-Apache, Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Kaibab Paiute, Las Vegas Paiute, Moapa Paiute, Navajo, Paiute Indian, San Juan Southern Paiute and Zuni — still use it for trade, gathering and ceremony. [1]

The park itself displaced people. Havasupai families farmed Ha’a Gyoh, below the South Rim, until Park Service policies forced them out in the 1920s; in 2022, at the tribe’s request, the place long called Indian Garden was renamed Havasupai Gardens, and the superintendent called the renaming long overdue. The 1975 enlargement act returned 83,800 acres of park land to the Havasupai Tribe and guaranteed traditional use of another 95,300. [4] [3]

Women

Four buildings on the edge of the South Rim are the work of Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, a Pittsburgh-born designer hired by the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway. Her Hopi House (1905) replicated part of the Hopi pueblo at Oraibi; Hermit’s Rest and Lookout Studio (both 1914) took their forms from the landscape, the studio rising out of the rim’s edge — “You can’t imagine what it cost to make it look this old,” she told railroad men who found Hermit’s Rest dingy. For the Desert View Watchtower, completed in 1932, she spent about six months studying ancestral Puebloan tower sites across the Southwest (Anasazi, in the form’s 1986 wording), and its Hopi Room murals are by the Hopi artist Fred Kabotie. A 1986 Park Service nomination argues that her landscape-shaped buildings helped form the architectural aesthetic for development in the national parks. [5]

Climate & environment

Grand Canyon is getting hotter. A 2024 Park Service report finds the park warmed significantly from 1895 to 2020 — 1.89 °F per century on average, and at a rate of 6.31 °F per century since 1970 — while total precipitation did not change significantly. Changes in the region already attributed at least in part to human-caused climate change include drier soils, reduced Colorado River flow and a doubling of the area burned by wildfire across the western United States; drawing on the literature, the report projects more drought, more large fires and worsening threats to archeological sites, cultural landscapes and historic structures. [6]

Mining is the other pressure. In 2012 Interior Secretary Ken Salazar closed federal lands in the Grand Canyon watershed to new mining claims until 2032, partly because, Interior found, impacts to tribal resources likely could not be mitigated. A USGS report published in 2024, co-written by Carletta Tilousi of the Havasupai Tribe, expands the risk framework for uranium mining to include the Havasupai perspective and applies it near Red Butte, a place sacred to the Havasupai, Hopi, Navajo and Zuni. [7]