Havasupai Tribe

We are the Havasupai, and we want to share our story with you. Our name is very special to us because it describes our home. Havasupai means "People of the Blue-Green Waters." Our home is a wonderful and beautiful place, deep inside the Grand Canyon. A creek, called Havasu Creek, flows through our lands, and its water is a stunning, bright blue-green color. It is from this colorful water that we get our name. This canyon is not just a place where we live; it has been the home of our ancestors for a very long time. We know that our people have lived here for many, many generations, for at least 800 years. Imagine your family living in the same special place for that long! It is a deep part of who we are.

For centuries, our way of life followed the rhythm of the seasons. We moved between two different homes each year to live with the land. During the warm, sunny summers, we lived on the floor of the canyon. Down by the creek, we were farmers. We planted crops in the rich soil and grew food for our families. But when the weather turned colder and winter arrived, we moved. We would travel up to the plateau, the high, flat land that sits above the canyon. The plateau was our winter home, and there, we were hunters. This seasonal journey was an important part of our tradition, allowing us to care for and use all parts of our homeland.

A very difficult change came to our people a long time ago. In the year 1882, the United States government made our reservation much smaller than the lands we had always known. Our winter home on the plateau was taken away from us. This created a great challenge for us. We were forced to stay in the canyon all year round, instead of moving with the seasons as our ancestors had always done. Living only on the canyon floor meant we could no longer hunt on the plateau in the winter. We had to change our way of life completely to survive in our smaller homeland.

Today, we, the Havasupai people, continue to live in our ancestral home. Our village is named Supai, and it is located on the canyon floor. Even with the challenges our people have faced, we are proud of who we are. We work hard to keep our culture and our language alive, passing them down to our children and grandchildren. We still see our homeland as sacred, and we feel it is our duty to care for it. We protect the land and the beautiful blue-green waters of Havasu Creek. Our story continues in the Grand Canyon, just as it has for hundreds of years.