“A big dam like that is holding back all the rain from coming in, because all that was supposed to go down to the ocean where our ancestors come back as moisture, as rain, any kind of precipitation. That’s our ancestors feeding us with the gift of life, which is water.”

-Ronnie Cachini, Head Rain Priest, A:Shiwi (Pueblo of Zuni)

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Ronnie Cachini. We are deeply grateful for all he taught us during his many years of close partnership with Grand Canyon National Park.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Ceili: This episode is dedicated to the memory of Ronnie Cachini. We are deeply grateful for all he taught us during his many years of close partnership with Grand Canyon National Park.

Jan: Every year we would have these big floods that would just cover everything over and make a new flood plain. It's only when you stop the sediment supply did those things start becoming available to see, and that’s the legacy that we're looking at, is all of those things, all of those thousands of years. People living around along the river and every year they would come back. There would be a flood they’d come back, they’d plant, do whatever, whatever you know next year it would flood again, they come back there's a new flat surface because everything was buried in sand again. Everything was an annual cycle and it just kept happening for thousands of years until 1963 and then that stopped.

Kate: What stopped at the Colorado River in 1963 that was so important? Like rivers and bodies of water around the world people congregate around this river. For thousands of years it has been home to multiple native tribes. They watched the river, sat on the bank and listened to the water flowing. For over 100 years Grand Canyon has been protected as a National Park. The mission statement of the Park Service is to preserve and protect this place for future generations, but in the process some people's voices have been excluded. The people who have lived here for thousands of years. Hello I'm Kate, and this is the second episode in our two-part series on dams in Grand Canyon. In today's episode of Behind the Scenery we'll explore how the installation of the Glen Canyon Dam impacted Grand Canyon’s traditionally associated tribes and the sacred and ancestral grounds in the river corridor. One of the reasons I found this story is because in my job I'm a Ranger who lives at the bottom of the Canyon. I work several river miles below the dam. Every day I go on a walking patrol and I say hello to the Colorado River. One of my favorite spots by the beach is an archaeological site of Ancestral Puebloans. I like to imagine the families who used to have the Colorado River as their backyard. They took stones from the heart of the Canyon and beautifully crafted them into pink and black walls. Now we can only see the foundations of the plaza, living spaces, a ceremonial kiva. When the Pueblo was complete people would have been lounging on the roof. From there they would have been able to watch their kids playing on the beach. In today's world there are plenty of people still playing on the beach, but there are also river trips and blue, yellow, or orange rafts, sometimes even a small wooden boat, and they pull into what is now called Boat Beach. Once the dam was put in beaches like Boat Beach started eroding away. The Canyon was not only losing its beaches, but also the archaeological sites along the river became in danger of being lost forever. Jan Balsom was the park’s archaeologist from 1984 through 1995. She was in the field documenting how cultural sites by the river were being impacted. She has since filed several leadership positions in the park, including senior adviser to the Superintendent, and Jan is a lead advisor on cultural resources at Grand Canyon.

Jan: Recreational boaters on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon were sitting on beaches watching the water come up and down because they operated the dam in a way they call a cash register dam. When people turned on their lights they would let more water out and when people turned off their lights they would stop the water flows, so we had wide fluctuations that would be in the neighborhood of 20 to 30,000 cubic feet per second changes in a day. That would result in 10 or 15 feet downstream of stage change.

Kate: 10 to 15 feet is a huge change within 24 hours, especially if you're a boater and it's below where you made your home for the night. If you're new to the Canyon, think about narrow granite walls rising above you. On your side, sandy beaches line parts of the Canyon. You dock your boat and set up camp to sleep. What you didn't realize was the damn caused the river level to rise the height of a one to two-story building while you were sleeping.

Jan: As archaeologist for the park, I was most concerned about looking at the archaeological resources and how the dam flows were affecting the integrity of those properties.

Kate: Unfortunately, the dam was created before or key environmental legislation was in place. The National Environmental Policy Act wouldn't come about until three years later, and it requires federal agencies to complete an environmental review to assess potential impacts of a project. The dam was excluded from this environmental assessment until the Bureau of Reclamation had the need to replace the eight generators that powered the dam in 1982. Scientists, river runners, members of the public, and environmental groups began to push for scientific studies that could measure the adverse impacts of the dam. In 1989 a grassroots project pushed for an environmental impact statement.

Jan: So as the parks archaeologists, I then became a member of the EIS writing team for the Glen Canyon Dam environmental impact statement that was done. In combination with that we had to begin doing the archaeological inventory survey then of the Colorado River corridor. We spent the better part of nine months with the crews working under a cooperative agreement with Northern Arizona University to do the 100% inventory the river corridor that resulted in documenting 475 properties in the near shore environment from the dam down to the lake.

Kate: 475 remnants of homes, agricultural structures, religious sites, and petroglyphs of the people who had lived by the Colorado River. Jan was curious about who these places were important to, the people who felt that these places were in the family. Jan did something unusual for the Park Service and archaeology at the time. She looked at these places and realized that their descendants still live near Grand Canyon. She invited them into the conversation.

Jan: And a piece of that was bringing our tribal colleagues down onto the Colorado River so that they could help us design the research module, how we're going to do this, so that they understood what we are looking for and that we could understand from them things that we may need to be looking for. It was the first time, and I didn't realize this at the time, but it was the first time that we anybody had done a river trip where we had invited the traditionally associated people back into the Canyon and that led to a whole other legacy of the tribes’ involvement. We were doing a project to build a parking lot up on the East Rim and we had an archaeological site there. I knew enough from my studies and working at the state historic preservation office that we needed to contact the tribes. We sent out letters to the five tribes that we worked with, and the entire Havasupai Tribal Council showed up to the superintendent's office. And the Superintendent at the time was a fellow named Jack Davis. He looked at me and he said I think we need to have somebody who does tribal liaison, I guess that will be you. And so I added that to my portfolio of responsibilities. So we started working along the river and we knew that the archaeology was pretty extraordinary, even the limited amount that we knew about. We contacted tribes early on to let them know we're going to be doing this, got them engaged with at least that portion of the project, and also as we began moving towards the environmental impact statement (Luhan identified in 1989 we're going to do the EIS) we started having an EIS writing team. And upon the insistence of a couple of us we convinced Bureau of Reclamation that they needed to include the tribes as part of the cooperating agencies, part of the writing team, because these are resources of concern to the tribes not just to us as the National Park Service, or to the American public who we are all responsible to. But even at that time we knew the Hopi, for example, have significant histories in the Canyon. The Navajo border the river for 60 plus miles. The Havasupai and Hualapai to the West, we knew that they have ancestral areas. The Southern Paiute to the north. So, you know, we worked with Reclamation. It wasn't something they had ever done, and it challenged them a little bit to think about a different way of inclusion.

Kate: Jan found that the best way to assess the cultural impacts of the dam was to consult the direct ancestors of the people who had histories extending back sometimes thousands of years in the Canyon. Archaeologists learned more by listening to the tribes.

Jan: And certainly from a tribal perspective, only you as a tribal member can know if the traditional resource that you are concerned about is doing OK. Does it need help, is it still as functional as it was, are the spring sources that you rely on for traditional purposes still functioning the way they have or have there been changed? And only you would know that. So it's important for the traditional people to be able to come down and evaluate within their expertise how well specific resource is adjusting to this changed environment. When you think about some of the political discord between the agencies, the federal a