Vegetation Restoration in the Grand Canyon on the Hualapai Indian Reservation
Carrie Cannon1, Melissa McMaster2, Peter Bungart3
1 Hualapai Tribe, calisay17@hotmail.com
2 RiversEdge West, Flagstaff, AZ, USA; melissa.mcmaster@gmail.com
The Hualapai Department of Cultural Resources (HDCR) has received funding from the Bureau of Reclamation to conduct vegetation restoration at two sites in the Western Grand Canyon: Granite Park and Diamond Creek. The Hualapai Tribe has a special interest in the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River because Hualapai traditional lands begin at the Little Colorado River and continue downstream through the entire Grand Canyon and beyond, to the confluence with the Bill Williams River. For the Hualapai people, the cultural link to the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River corridor is both ancestral and contemporary, as the river is integral to Hualapai creation and migration traditions, as well as defining the extents of ancestral territory and the modern reservation boundary. The current Hualapai Reservation includes 108 miles of the Colorado River in the western Grand Canyon.
The overall approach to the restoration project has also been to incorporate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) along with western science-based principles of research and management. As the Hualapai people have inhabited the western Grand Canyon region for countless generations, they are unique in that they have a nuanced understanding of the ecological relationships of their traditional cultural landscape. As one elder noted during a past Hualapai river trip, as the trip approached Granite Park, she immediately started contemplating the different plants she would find there and how they could be used in making baskets, cradleboards, cooking utensils, and other items. The restoration project has focused on the removal of non-native invasives, the planting of native plants, and the involvement of tribal members so that these areas can be managed to improve ecological and ethnobotanical resources for current and future generations.