In this episode, Cory Ahownewa, a Hopi Kachina doll carver and an advocate for protecting and sustaining cultural knowledge and sites throughout the Grand Canyon and southwestern region, walks us through moments in his life that have influenced his journey not only as an artist, but as a father and servant of his community.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Cory Ahownewa: So, for me to see that those kids are dealing with all their hardships and all that. For my second trip, when I got picked to go again, I made prayer feathers for all them kids, because they didn't choose to be brought into this world like that, with all the hardship. And they're the strongest people for our human race.

Lakin: Welcome back to Grand Canyon Speaks. This is Lakin.

Meranden: And this is Meranden.

Lakin: In this episode, Ranger Dan sat down with Cory Ahownewa, who is a Kachina doll carver and advocate for sustaining Hopi culture, traditions, and knowledge.

Meranden: Yeah, through his work with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Program, he's been able to sustain traditional connections to the Grand Canyon.

Lakin: Cory continues to work on river trips in the Grand Canyon, not only with Hopi, but also other programs from various tribes that call the Grand Canyon home.

Meranden: He also shared moments in his life that have shaped him into the leader, artist, and father he is today.

Lakin: So, take a listen and we hope you enjoy this episode.

Cory: Hello. Good evening there. Welcome to the Grand Canyon Watchtower [Desert View]. This will be my third year here, and I would like to give thanks to Dan and all the people that put together this program. And it's a pretty great program. It's first year for my wife, and it's a great opportunity for the people to get to know the Grand Canyon from the bottom all the way up to the top. And for the Hopi, we have ancestral ties here with the Grand Canyon.

Cory: And I always wanted to bring my wife here after I did my first trip. And for her to come up here and to come to the edge and get to experience that, where she came from, and to feel that in her heart, she gets to know that this is where we, our ancestral ties are from. Yeah, and this will, I've done four trips so far, and three were with the Hopi Cultural Preservation.

Cory: And just last Friday, I was able to get with the company in Flagstaff, Ceiba, and they hired me for the first year this year. So I was able to become a swamper for them, and I lucked out and got on a Cultural Preservation trip with the Yavapai. Yavapai, they live probably like three hours down more, but they still have ancestral ties with this area.

Cory: And theirs is from National [Park] all the way down to Diamond Creek, and that's their ancestral land that way. And Hopi is from the Little Colorado River, or majority of it is from the Four Corners region all the way up past Page, all the way down this way. And the Badger Clan, my clan, they once, when we came up from below the Grand Canyon, and we came up and we formed clans, and that's when the Badger Clan, they went as far as Mesa Verde.

Cory: And after that, they went to Old Oraibi, and that's when they formed the villages there. And they decided that area, the Hopi Reservation, was a good source of dry farming with all the sand that they had over there. Yeah, so thank you everybody for coming, and this is a great experience to finally to get able to start speaking to larger crowds, and it helps me to get a little better with my talking and stuff, because I'm slowly trying to work on going to the high school, or to the elementary schools, talking to the youth, and on up, and giving them the teachings of all this area, and that Hopis have all this, our ancestors chose this area because it's all rich of all these resources for us to do our ceremonies, and I always crack up when we were doing our river trips.

Cory: We were once fishermen, and we lived right down there, right next to the side of the canyon, all the way from the granaries, all the way, even Nankoweap down here. I always wonder why is it called like a different tribal name, Nankoweap, but to me, what it kind of slowly showing itself, like the people that left last, I think that's what they were trying to pertain to, they followed us, they were the last people, the last of the Hopi people that were down here. This was inhabited at the same time as Old Oraibi, and they had pottery, the archaeologists took studies of the pottery from both areas, and they noticed that there was Hopi pottery that was being brought from down here, and from down here was other pottery that was brought to the Hopi reservation at that same time in the early 1900s.

Cory: So, on each trip, I slowly get more and more knowledge of the Hopi ties to this area. Yeah, and we leave from Lee's Ferry all the way to Diamond Creek, that's 226 miles, 10-day river trips, and those are pretty harsh conditions on monsoon, and people will be coming back all black, all tired. The last two, three days, people will be so tired, they'll be trying to stay in the shade.

Cory: Even on the second to the last day, it was 114[°F] in the shade, that was almost by Diamond Creek, or Diamond, yeah, on the takeout. And just this past trip, we ran into the Yavapai, cultural, the youth trip, and they were all so tired, they almost ran out of gas, and then we had to siphon them gas, and they tried to do a dry run without pop down there for the youth group, so they were starting getting mad at each other and having fits and stuff, so we gave them pop and all that stuff. Instead of being in the front, I was in the back, doing my work, taking care of all the, we had 17 members of the Hualapai tribe, and it was a new experience for me to get hands-on experience on how they do their cultural preservation trips.

Cory: So I waited for a while, and then I finally walked up to where they were doing their ceremonies and stuff at Deer Creek Falls, I was waiting there for a minute, then I let them do their ceremony, then I walked up, then they were doing smudging, and the guy that runs that was running that, I didn't know all this time, and he was one of the founders that helped started this cultural demonstration, his name is Bennett Wakayuta, and that was a good thing to experience to meet that guy too, and knowing that he has, his dad is Hopi, and those four other people, they also had Hopi affiliations with them too, so getting to meet them and learning their cultural background and all that stuff, I was pretty amazed that even though we're way up here, we still have ancestral ties with that tribe down there, I was like wow, that was pretty awesome to meet a whole other group of pretty much my cousins, I would say, from down that way.

Cory: Yeah, so it was a pretty good experience, and this coming September I'll be, we'll be taking down the Zuni for their cultural trip, and we'll be doing five days from right below here all the way to the LCR, we'll all be on this side, we'll be doing five days of cultural preservation, of learning more of our ancestral ties down in the canyon. Yeah, so thank you for all of you guys showing up and getting to get our background, cultural background, and on my first trip.

Cory: I was barely on my second year of sobriety, after having my wife have my boy, it changed my life, I grew up into an alcoholic family, and my mother and my father are still real bad at it, and from 6th grade all the way to the age of 32, I was an alcoholic real bad, then I had my son when I was 30, or my wife had my son at 32, then after that, two years went by and it happened so my brother, my clan brother, he was running the cultural preservation office, his name is Stuart Keiwakotua, my clan brother, then he came up to me one day and “Heard good things about you, I was wondering if you would be interested in doing this cultural preservation trip, where you go down the canyon and the Glen Canyon Dam, they're the ones that fund the project for four to five tribes that come down and they make sure that the river runners don't stop at these sacred sites down there within the canyon, and they don't mess it up or alter anything that's within these sacred areas.”

Cory: So. I was all like, “oh okay, I'm interested.” So, on that first trip, my boy was probably 5 then, now he turned 8 on the 18th of this month, so on that first trip, I went for my son, because we didn't know when he was going to have open heart surgery, and he has two different areas that are leaking in his valves, so I came down, stopped at the sacred areas, prayed for my boy for a strong recovery, got down to Diamond Creek, came out, got home, not even a week later, the heart specialist called and asked when we wanted to do the surgery down in Phoenix at the Phoenix Children's Hospital, so I was like, oh okay, right now, because I already stopped at all these sites and I already prayed for our boy, so we went down that Monday morning, 6 in the morning, he did his surgery, recovery, and in the evening time, they put him up in the upstairs, Tuesday morning he was already walking with his IV bag in the recovery area, and the sad thing about it, in the recovery area, there was like 20 plus kids all in there, and me and my wife and my boy, we walked all the way around that thing, and what I noticed, there was no mother and father with their kids there, and that 5 days that we stayed there, none of the parents stayed there like how we did, we slept in the room, we were determined for my son to get.

Cory: So that Friday, he was already released, so for me to see that those kids and dealing with all their hardships and all that, for my second trip when I got picked to go again, I made prayer feathers for all them kids, because they didn't choose to be brought into this world like that with all the hardships and stuff, and they're t