The Sacred Oral Tradition of the Havasupai: As Retold By Elders and Headmen Manakaja and Sinyella 1918-1921

Chapter 3: History, Leadership, and Language

| 17 a lt hough spa n i sh e x pl or e r s i n t h e hopi cou n t ry probably heard about Indians living in the Grand Canyon as early as 1540 or perhaps 1665, it was not until 1776 that the first European visited the Havasupai village and wrote about his experiences. In his journal, Father Garces, a Spanish Franciscan priest, describes how he went “trembling” down the wooden ladder that then formed part of the trail.1 Only a few Europeans visited the Havasupai down in the canyon between then and when Leslie Spier arrived, just over a hundred years later, in 1918, when he struggled to describe the leadership styles of his main sources of cultural information, the headmen Manakaja and Sinyella. They narrated these forty-eight stories in Havasupai with interspersed songs, main characters, and words similar to those known by Yuman-speaking peoples throughout the Southwest. The Yuman-speaking Havasupai and Walapai, aboriginally located in the northwestern quadrant of what was later known as Arizona, are two of what were originally thirteen subtribes of what have collectively been called the Pai or the Northeastern Pai. Together with the completely separate but nearly colingual Yavapai tribe, these two groups are sometimes called Upland Pai.2 The first European state to claim sovereignty over aboriginal Pai territory was Spain; then, after independence, Mexico (1821–1848). Control then passed to the United States after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in Chapter 3 History, Leadership, and Language| catherine a. euler | 18 | part i 1848, but American settlement was limited until after the ending of the U.S. Civil War in 1865. Between 1848 and 1880 contact between Havasupai and Europeans was quite limited. No written account exists of European presence in the village itself between 1776 and 1861. In the 1848–1878 period most of what contact there was between the two cultures took place up on the Colorado Plateau, far from the main Havasupai summer village in the canyon bottom. The explorer Francois Xavier Aubry reported that his mule had been shot by Pai arrows up on the plateau in 1853,3 but Anglo reports during the 1850–1900 period confuse Upland Pai groups with Apaches, and are often unable to accurately distinguish between Havasupai, Walapai, or Yavapai. The U.S. explorer Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves possibly sighted the Havasupai in 1851, and they were briefly described by the explorer Lieutenant Ives in his 1861 report,4 though he himself did not venture down the ladder to the village.5 In 1862 the Mormon missionary Jacob Hamblin and his party met Havasupai up on the plateau, but spent only one day in the canyon village proper. The Indians urged them not to reveal its location.6 Although the summer village now known as Supai was isolated, late nineteenth-century events affecting surrounding tribes began to impact the Havasupai, who spent winters hunting in the upper plateau region. Between 1858 and 1873 Anglo-American and MexicanAmerican miners, settlers, and ranchers repeatedly came into conflict with Pai bands in northwestern Arizona. This ongoing conflict between peoples was partly a result of competition over scarce desert resources, like water, or new sources of animal protein, like cattle, horses, and mules, which were also used for transportation.7 Cattle grazing contributed to the destruction of the traditional Havasupai vegetable food base, particularly the much sought-after sele, a spinachlike plant, and ranchers began taking control of most of the regional water springs and tanks.8 In 1858 the U.S. Cavalry established a military post at Fort Mohave, on the Colorado, after a wagon party was attacked by some Mohave, a riverine Yuman group who traded with the Havasupai and spoke a similar language. U.S. armed forces were rather more preoccupied with the Civil War than with the Indian conflicts out west, however, until after that war ended in 1865. Then U.S. troops began moving primarily between Fort Mohave on the Colorado, across history, leadership, and language | 19 to Beale’s Springs for water, and on to Fort Whipple, in Prescott, because this was a major supply and freight route. The new communities were dependent upon regular shipments of goods transported by steamboat up the Colorado River and thence by mule train to northern Arizona. Because of this, most official military battles against Pai peoples in northern Arizona in the...