We’re excited to highlighted Kelkiyana Yazzie (Diné) who works at Grand Canyon National Park under the Tribal Affairs program. She started her career as an interpretive ranger at Navajo National Monument and now continues her efforts to provide Indigenous communities with resources through the National Park Service. Kelki also emphasizes the role that women fulfil in her culture and mentions several women who’ve inspired her journey. Join us as we celebrate Women’s History Month in this episode and enjoy!

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

I worked at Navajo National Monument, and that place honestly has my heart and soul, and it's actually my career goal to go back as superintendent of that park. But for the time being, this opportunity at Grand Canyon happened. It was actually the manager of the Interpretation Rangers.

He was just like, “we need to make this change here at Grand Canyon, and we think you would be a great fit to help us make that happen.”

[Lakin]

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Grand Canyon Speaks. This is Lakin.

[Meranden]

And this is Meranden

[Lakin]

Thank you for listening to Season 3, it’s been great interviewing our Indigenous athletes, however we’d like to feature some bonus episodes that highlight Women’s History Month.

[Meranden]

In many Indigenous cultures of this region, matriarchy has been the foundation of our traditions and values that we continue to practice as we did long ago.

[Lakin]

With that being said, we interviewed Kelkiyana Yazzie who works at Grand Canyon National Park under the Tribal Affairs program.

[Meranden]

Kelki started her career as an interpretive ranger at Navajo National Monument near Shonto, Arizona and now continues her efforts to provide Indigenous communities with resources through the National Park Service.

[Lakin]

We’re excited to celebrate Women’s History Month and Kelki’s success in this episode. We hope you enjoy!

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

[Introduces self in Diné]

Hello everyone, my name is Kelkiyana. I go by Kelki for short.

I am the Tribal Program coordinator here at Grand Canyon National Park. So what that is, is it's the tribal liaison, one of the tribal liaisons who work with the [Grand Canyon National] Park’s 11 tribes, which Lakin introduced earlier. But yeah, I'm a member of the Navajo Nation.

My traditional greeting includes my clan. So, (Navajo clan), that means I am of the (speaks Navajo) clan. (Navajo word) translates to Folded Arm People.

I always hope that means a good thing. And then I'm born for (Navajo word), which is my dad's clan. That's to Reed people.

And that actually has Hopi origin down the line. So somewhere in my ancestors, I have Hopi ancestors, Hopi relatives, because that's where that clan originated. But yeah, that's a little bit about me, and we can continue on.

[Lakin]

Yeah, thank you for that introduction, Kelki. So what sparked your interest in the Park Service, and how long have you been an employee for?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, so this coming year is actually going to be my ninth year with the National Park Service. I started out as an interpretive park ranger, meaning that I give programs for visitors.

And I previously worked at a small park called Navajo National Monument. I don't know if anyone here has heard of it or been there. It's a really small park on the Navajo Nation.

It protects three ancestral cliff-dwelling sites. And I'm actually a fourth-generation park ranger. So the photo behind us here is actually photos of my great-grandfathers, Floyd and Hubert Laughter.

Hubert was one of the first Navajo park rangers at that small park in the 1950s. So it's kind of astounding to me where that park became a park in 1909, but yet it took until the 1950s to hire local Native people in the Park Service. So yeah, he was one of the first Navajo park rangers.

Before that, he was working with the Navajo Nation Police. He's a veteran. And then his brother Floyd there, they're both medicine men, so they conduct ceremonies, healing ceremonies for our local community and our family.

So that's what really sparked my interest in the Park Service. I grew up on the Navajo Nation just five miles from this area. And growing up, I would be on the school bus, drive by it all the time, see all the visitors there.

And I'm just like, what are they doing? It's just a canyon and a bunch of old houses there. I was just like, why are they coming to visit this area? But after high school, I got to do Youth Conservation Corps, which is similar to what Meranden and Lakin are doing with their internships at Desert View. And that gave me the opportunity to work at this park.

And I just saw everyone come from all over the world and have this genuine interest and respect for the landscape, for our people, and our history. So that really reignited in myself my own connection to my culture, my connection to the land, and just started this lifelong passion I have for working with the Park Service. So that's how I ended up working with the park.

[Meranden]

Nice. That's really good. I think it really relates to why we're here as well.

We're here to show that kind of empowerment and be there for our tribes here. Like we mentioned, there's the 11 tribes. I'm Hopi and Navajo and Lakin is Zuni, so we're part of those 11 tribes.

And being able to represent and be here to show that we are here to take care of our land and things like that is really important. So with the number of years you've been here in the Park Service and the generations of park rangers in your family, how do you feel you have served your indigenous community?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, so a big thing, I'm pretty sure everyone in this room and whoever is listening to the podcast have been to so many National Parks across the country. And when you think about it, you see all these stories, even just looking at these quotes on the wall.

They're all from non-Native people. And that's usually the dominant narrative that's told in these National Parks, is that it's coming from a voice that's newer than the voices that have been here for generations. So that's something that I really want to bring forward is we call it first voice interpretation, meaning that our stories are coming from us as Native people.

And I really want to help share that. So when I first came here to Grand Canyon in 2021, I started working as a ranger here in the village giving programs. And I talked to the other rangers, and I'm like, what's the indigenous programs look like here or the signs? And they're like, ah, it's non-existent.

And that was in 2021. And there's actually signs here in the park. This one actually just got removed back in 2022, where it talks about Native people in the past tense.

On the sign, it says prehistoric people used this trail to hunt and gather. But we're like, what? We're not prehistoric. Like, we're still here.

So that's just something I'm really proud of working with the Park Service today. And this role is to bring our voices to the forefront. And we're not in the past.

We're not past tense. Like, how these dominant narratives have existed. Like, there's that sign if you've been out to Hermit Road.

It's at Powell Memorial. And on that sign, it calls him the first explorer of the Grand Canyon. But we're like, what about the Native people that have been here way before the 1800s? So yeah, that's just a big thing I really want to push forward in helping represent our tribes here at the park.

Because it's our homelands. And it always will be.

[Lakin]

In your introduction, you did mention that you're part of the Tribal Affairs Program and we'd like to know more about the Tribal Affairs Program and what some projects and work you've done and accomplished.

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, so the Tribal Affairs Program is fairly new. When you go to other National Parks, they really don't have a tribal liaison.

I actually work with two other people. Vincent, who's a member of the Hualapai Tribe, and Rising Buffalo, who's part Arapaho. And we're the only national park out of the 400-plus units in the country that has three people dedicated to tribal affairs.

And usually it's the park's anthropologists or their archaeologists, and it's a collateral duty for them. But here, our superintendent, our park manager, is really dedicated to tribal affairs. It's actually his number one priority as the manager of the park, is to bring these voices forward.

And so that's what the tribal program is, is that we work on various things. And just sharing our voices and our presence that has been here for generations. These are actually from the park's museum collection.

So there's some split twig figurines that have been found along the river corridor. Pottery. This is like the physical aspects of our presence in the canyon.

But we ourselves as tribal people, we have stories through oral history. A lot of tribes, we don't have a written language. If we do, it's fairly new.

So a lot of our stories and traditions are passed down through oral history, or through pottery, or pictographs and petroglyphs. Here throughout Grand Canyon, it's over 200 miles long, and there's so many ancestral sites and pictograph and petroglyph panels along the way. But a pictograph is painted onto a rock wall with a plant or mineral dye, and a petroglyph is etched into the rock wall with a sharp object.

But yeah, as a tribal program, we're really just trying to bring those voices forward and make it known that this canyon's a living landscape. And a big part of my job is just helping us connect, reconnect to the landscape. Because just like every national park, we do have that story of forced removal.

It happened back in the 1920s. The Park Service forcibly removed the Havasupai people from what's now known as Havasupai Gardens to make this a national park. So we're doing what we can to help reconnect that and welcome tribes back to this area, including supporting pilgrimages for ceremonial plant gathering, that the park is free for tribes because we shouldn't have to pay to access our homelands, supporting first voice interpretation.

Like I mentioned, the stories being told from Native people ourselves. This is a photo of some Havasupai working on the signage down at Havasupai Gardens from their own words. The cultural demonstration program is another example of that for people to share their crafts here.

The Grand Canyon Speaks program, which we're doing right now. This is a little different. We usually do it out at Desert View at the amphitheater there.

But it's a little chilly. Supporting tribes coming to the park and seeing what's in the museum collections. One of the curators, Colleen there, she was just like, wow, I didn't know that about this.

The tribes were talking about the different artifacts there and she was just learning so much new stuff. Supporting tribal internships. This is a photo from our bison.

If you didn't know, we have bison on the North Rim. So we supported live capture and transfer of bison to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Since this project started, we've helped transfer 382 bison to tribal lands.

Working with the Intertribal Working Group, of course. That's really important that this working group is made up of tribal community members. And we're the team that helps make it happen.

What they want to see in the park. So those are a couple of examples.

[Meranden]

That's more than a couple.

That's so cool. This might be an obvious question just based on how you answered this one. There's so many national parks that are around here.

You were able to work close to home and now you're at Grand Canyon. What made you choose Grand Canyon and what is the significance of Grand Canyon to you?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

That's a great question. Like I mentioned earlier, I worked at Navajo National Monument.

That place honestly has my heart and soul. It's actually my career goal to go back as superintendent of that park. But for the time being, this opportunity at Grand Canyon happened.

It was actually the manager of the interpretation rangers. He was just like, we need to make this change here at Grand Canyon. And we think you would be a great fit to help us make that happen.

So that's how I ended up here. It helped me develop in my career. Because at my old park, I was stuck as a seasonal park ranger.

But here I was able to get a permanent position. But my own connection to the Grand Canyon, Navajo and the Navajo culture. We have many, many stories that tie back to it.

I got to join a river trip with the Navajo Nation a couple years ago. And we were down in the canyon and saw old sheep campsites. Where Navajo families would be camping and tending to their livestock down there.

So yeah, we just have this long history and tie to the Grand Canyon. And of course the Colorado River itself. If you ever get an opportunity to go down there into the river, it's a whole other world.

And you can truly feel the spiritual presence down there. So that's how I connect to the Grand Canyon. Is spiritually living here. I've lived here for a couple years now. And I never get tired of that view. I always feel like I see it for the first time every time I look at it.

We're very, very blessed to have that here. And for us to be able to see it. And yeah, just be here in its presence.

[Lakin]

And we look forward to you fulfilling those aspirations. And continuing to inspire us and also the indigenous communities at large. So the next question is, as an Indigenous woman, what does Women's History Month mean to you?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, so Women's History Month is very important to me.

Especially as a Navajo woman because our culture is very matrilineal. Meaning that a lot of our practices, our traditions, even where we live, it's all done through the female side. And that just shows how sacred and how vital and important our Navajo people hold females and women.

I introduced my clans at the beginning. And that's how we continue and pass on the clans. If I ever have kids in the future, my first clan that Folded Arm People one will pass down to them.

That's my mom's clan, that's my grandma's clan, and so on. So having something like Women's History Month, it really kind of shines like that spotlight on our stories as women and females. Because usually, we just do so much that people may not realize.

So I think that's why it's really important to me. And some of the most important people in my life are women. And I think it's really important to show that appreciation to us as females.

[Meranden]

Yeah, definitely. And speaking of those inspirational and very important women in your life, is there a number of them that mean a lot to you? And is there specific names that you wanted to mention on that?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, so one being my mom. My mom's actually here today.

She's done so much. She's just the most hardworking person I know. And she's my favorite person who's just really taught me a lot.

And I really carry a lot with that with me. And she was diagnosed with cancer a couple years ago. And just seeing that challenge and seeing her go through that really gave me a lot of strength as well.

And another important person was my aunt Heather. Unfortunately, she lost her battle to colon cancer back in 2022. And yeah, it's just tough to see these health challenges come to our communities like this.

And yeah, see the strength and perseverance that people like my mom and my aunt Heather had. Other people would be my sister. Her name's Keline.

She just moved to San Diego. I already miss her. She used to live in Flagstaff, which is pretty close. And honestly, in my career-wise, this is the only picture I was able to include, but it's my mentor. Her name's Kalinda Blacksheep. She worked at my old park for over 20 years.

And she came here to Grand Canyon for a while. And now she's currently a superintendent, a park manager of Pipe Springs National Monument. I don't know if anyone's been there, but it's up north by Fredonia and that area at Kanab.

But yeah, it was just really cool to have a mentor. We really need that in this line of work, especially working for the federal government, you may realize. So challenges come with that line of work.

And having someone who looks like you and has your same similar lived experiences in this field of work is really important to just go to and lean on to be able to achieve, yeah, our career goals and where we would like to go. And then I would say another important person and people is our youth, like Meranden. She reached out to me a couple years ago through social media on Instagram when she was still a university student.

And she's just like, hey, I want to get a career at the Park Service. And, like, I really want to do, like, what you're doing is, like, telling these stories of Native people. So we developed a relationship, a friendship over that.

And I'm really, really proud to see her here at the Grand Canyon just, like, sending me a DM, a direct message over Instagram to this, like, where you get to do this interview and all these awesome programs and doing Native American Heritage Month and all those events. So, yeah.

[Meranden]

Yeah, I was going to say that, too.

It was just, like, a simple DM of, like, it was just, like, saying, like, hey, I'm a park my major was parks, recreation, and sports management. And I knew I wanted to be a park ranger. And then there was a post about Kelki that was, like, you got an award.

And I was like, okay, wait, I need to look up her name. So I looked you up on Google. And then I found your Insta.

And I DM’d you. And then I just told you, like, this is my passion. And I just want to be like you.

So then we kind of sparked this whole thing. And that's the whole thing of, like, scheduling this is, like, we came a long way. And we're here now.

And it's crazy, like, how just a simple thing like that can go to this. Like, when I first met her, like, I used to work for Grand Canyon Trust as an intern. And Jack was my supervisor.

And I met Kelki that way. And it's, like, I thought she was a celebrity when I first saw her. It was really, really cool. And I just want to thank mom for everything that you've done. And, like, you've raised her so well. And, like, she's literally the reason why I'm here today.

She's just inspired me so much. So I'm really grateful that you're here and you're able to talk to me. And this means a lot. So, yeah, I wanted to say that.

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Oh, thank you.

[Lakin]

And it's also great that we get to see you fulfill that leadership and mentor role for the next generation.

So we like to continue to see those kind of seeds and fruition develop over time. But now we like to get into a fun question.

So our question for you is, what's your favorite indigenous food?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

So, alright, has anyone been out towards Cameron? It's on the east side of the park. But if you haven't and if you have time, you can take the long way out of the park. And there's a little community called Cameron.

And there's a trading post there. And my favorite thing to get there is the Navajo beef stew and fry bread. So that's my favorite thing.

Like if I had like a last meal kind of thing, that would be it. Other than that, we have flea markets or swap meets or whatever you want to call it on the reservation. The one in Tuba City is every Friday.

So if you ever find yourself in the Tuba City area on Fridays, they have a lot of local vendors there selling roast mutton sandwiches. So it's a fry bread with roast mutton, potatoes, carrots, chili. It's so good.

But that would be my next favorite indigenous food.

[Meranden]

Nice. Yeah, we try to ask something like that every time because we're really big foodies.

So, yeah, it's always funny.

So we're getting to the end of this. We would like to open up to questions in just a little bit.

But as we wrap up here, is there anything that you would like to leave the audience with?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, so just thank you to every single one of you who is here. And, of course, shout out to the people listening on the podcast. And, yeah, it's just really important.

This is so rare, but we're working really hard to not make it a rare occurrence. And we're really hoping to see this across the Park Service itself. If you've ever been to Glacier [National Park], they do have like a Native America Speaks program.

Yosemite [National Park] has cultural demonstrators. So we're really trying to make ourselves known. And I just really encourage everyone here, when you go to your next park, your next destination, even where you're coming from, just thinking about what indigenous knowledge or stories exist where you're at.

You know, even just thinking internationally, there might be some people from not in the United States here. I got to visit Ireland, Northern Ireland a couple years ago and the Giant's Causeway up in Northern Ireland. Like they have their own folktales about places like that.

So I just really encourage people to learn these old stories of these places, of where you're going or where you're from. And I actually have a short video here. I think it's like a minute and a half long.

But where Meranden and Lakin's coming from, it's a place called Desert View. It's where the Watchtower is. If you've been out there, you may have seen a lot of construction going on.

And what's happening is an intertribal welcome center. So you may have noticed while you've been visiting Grand Canyon, you go to the village where all the hotels are. You see Hopi House, but that's a gift shop.

And then we always get asked, like, where can we learn more about Native people? And we don't have a place for it. But anyway, the intertribal welcome center is going to be out at Desert View. It was supposed to debut like a couple years ago, but, you know, the pandemic happened.

And working with tribes, especially 11 of them, it's really hard to agree on one thing amongst ourselves. So we went through this process with every single 11 tribe, and everything that's there that you'll see was designed by them. And it was picked by them, and it was wanted by them.

So I really hope you get the chance to come back in the future. We're hoping for a ribbon cutting at the end of this year. But I also said that the same thing last year at this time.

But I think for sure we're finalizing the exhibit panels and everything. So if you get a chance to come back to the east side of the park, Desert View, you'll see our new tribal welcome center there. And it's one of the first of its kind in the entire National Park Service.

And we're, again, really hoping that more parks will follow suit. But yeah, we're still here, despite what that sign at the Bright Angel Trailhead used to say, calling us prehistoric. That's honestly, like, not true.

Like, we're here. We're people. And again, we've always had this connection to the landscape, and we continue to do so.

And we will, yeah, always be here and doing what we can to have our voices heard and our connections supported. And there's this quote from a Navajo woman I usually like to end with, where she says, the canyon's a sacred space. You only go there with prayers in your heart, purpose in your steps, and then you leave it the way you found it.

So I really hope everyone here has a safe and respectful visit. And, yeah, we usually just, like, treat this place like you would your own home or your home of a loved one, because it's our home. Ahéhee’, thank you.

[Meranden]

Thank you so much, Kelki. Before we do wrap everything up, we just want to ask the crowd and audience if anyone has any questions.

[Audience member]

Thank you.

I'd actually like to ask two quick questions. The first is I want to give a shout-out to Mesa Verde, which is right near where I live in southwest Colorado. And the question that I have that relates to that is Mesa Verde is known for its cliff dwellings.

And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about whether there were ever cliff dwellings here or whether there may still be and they're just not really available to the public. And then the other question, totally different subject, is you guys have been mostly talking about the National Park Service. We have the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of Interior.

It supposedly interfaces with 574 nationally or federally recognized Indigenous Peoples groups. And I'm just wondering if you work with BIA or what you think of them and how that works and all that sort of stuff.

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, thank you for your questions. So with the cliff dwelling one, yeah, there's a lot of ancestral sites along here. We actually have some that are up on the south rim here.

So there's one called Tusayan Archeological Site or Tusayan Ancestral Site. That's along the Desert View Drive. So that one is there.

And then, yeah, there's several alcoves in the canyon that have cliff dwelling sites. A popular one is called Nankoweap. So if you ever get to do a Colorado River trip, it's a popular hike that people go up to.

There are granaries up there. But yeah, these cliff dwellings, if you don't know what I'm talking about, are those like sandstone houses in the cliff. So a lot of them, people did live inside.

We categorized them as living rooms. There's granaries. There's kivas, which is a name for a ceremonial space.

And a lot of those sites we like to refrain from calling ruins or abandoned just because today, us as Native people, we still have living connections to them. Even though they're not physically occupied by people today, we still have a spiritual connection to them. And a lot of our tribal members who visit these sites, they usually leave prayers and offerings at these locations just to acknowledge where we come from and to honor that.

Because without our ancestors, without that space that helped our people survive, yeah, we wouldn't be here today. So it's really important we acknowledge our past. It's very, very much in the present for us.

So yeah, there's lots of cliff dwellings here. For your second question with BIA, yeah, it is part of the Department of Interior, which National Park Service is as well. My dad actually works for the BIA, who's here too.

And so as far as us directly, I don't think we work with BIA directly. There is that opportunity because our current Deputy Superintendent, Brian Drapeau, he used to work for BIA with the Education Department, working with tribal schools. And a goal of his is to have tribal schools, like students from there, come here to work in the park.

So that's a dream of his, and we really want to help make that happen. It doesn't have to be a BIA school. It could be any tribal college where we want to support people there and get them jobs and employment here in the park.

So there is definitely potential for that.

[Audience member]

When did you start working at the Grand Canyon?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah, I started working here, 2021? Gosh, these years are going by fast. So it's going to be four years.

Yeah. What grade are you in? You're in third grade? Did you go to preschool? So when you're in preschool, that's when I started working here.

[Audience member]

What would be the hardest part of your job?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

The hardest part, I would say is, that's a really good question.

There's a lot. But I think I'll go with, like I mentioned earlier, working with the different tribes. So, you know, we're all different people.

We have different beliefs and different ways we all grew up. And so say, so I'm Navajo, and then I'll pick on Lakin, Zuni. He's from another tribe called Zuni.

And say we are designing this medallion for the [Intertribal] Welcome Center that the video just showed. And then there's something in there with water, and Lakin was like, hey, I want it in this way, the Zuni design. But I'm Navajo, and I'm like, oh, I want it like Navajo design.

So that was a big complication in working with tribes, is that we want different things to help represent us. So I would say that that's one of our biggest challenges, working in this position. And then when I was a park ranger, like giving programs, it was answering the same question all the time.

Which is like, where's the bathroom? Where's Mather point? So, yeah. So thank you for your question.

[Audience member]

I had two questions.

One is, I know you mentioned in 2021, they started updating the language and even adding more Natives. And that's pretty recent. So what are the biggest obstacles in getting your voices into the forefront? And as a public or non-American indigenous, how can we help in getting your voices into the forefront?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

That's a really, really great question.

Yeah, I think one of our biggest challenges is just the bureaucratic process of the federal government. Things move at such a snail pace, honestly. Like that sign that I showed earlier, it got removed right before the Havasupai Gardens renaming ceremony in 2022.

And we wanted to replace it with another sign. But if you go there today, there's no sign at all. There's nothing there.

So I would say it's like the pacing of these projects we're trying to do. Which is understandable, because, you know, there's a lot that ties into it. But lately, we've been working a lot with the Grand Canyon Conservancy, who is the park's official nonprofit partner.

And they provide a lot of funding that the federal government can't. They have donors, and they actually got like a half a million dollars. I might be wrong, but like a lot of money, we'll say, to help fund indigenous-focused projects here in the park.

So that funding will really help us move projects along and get that accomplished. And then as yourself, as a visiting member of the public, to help with these efforts. So I did a research project, a thesis for my graduate program, where I got to interview indigenous people all the way south in Tucson, all the way up north to Montana, like across the board. And I asked them how they wanted to be represented in national parks. That's what my thesis was focused on.

And a common thing that they said back to me is like, we just want to be mentioned, or we just want to be asked about. So I think that would really help if, say, you go to another national park, asking what their tribes are. Like, whose homelands are these? And getting that conversation, just a regular part of, yeah, the conversation that our park rangers provide.

Making us a part of, yeah, everyday topics. And I think the more that the visitors want to learn about our native people, the more you're going to see that information about us out there. So asking those questions wherever you're going, I would say, is a really big help.

Another is learning from tribes themselves. We're surrounded by three tribal reservations, Havasupai. Everyone's heard of the Skywalk, right? The glass platform over the Grand Canyon.

That's actually run by the Hualapai tribe. So I would say supporting tribal tourism. So visiting Grand Canyon West.

You see those turquoise blue waterfalls in the Grand Canyon? That's the Havasupai tribe. They're the ones who issue those backpacking permits. So supporting that.

Navajo Nation, you've probably heard of Antelope Canyon and Monument Valley. Those are all Navajo tribal parks. So I would really encourage visiting those places.

I would say 99, if not 100 percent of the time, people giving those tours are from the area and are tribal members themselves. So yeah, that would be my advice.

[Audience member]

I have about two questions.

My first question is, where is the majority of the tribes in the Grand Canyon? Like in the north, west, south, or east?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Okay, yeah, that's a great question. Which state are you from?

[Audience member]

I'm from Washington, D.C.

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Oh, okay. Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to compare it to state size.

Washington, D.C. would be very tiny compared to this. But Arizona is a really big place. Did you go to Phoenix?

[Audience member]

Yeah, we flew into Phoenix.

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Okay, yeah. It was a long drive to get here, huh?

[Audience member]

Yeah.

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah.

So that area between Phoenix and us, that's where Native people were and still are today. But then after the place became a country and Native people were being relocated, that's where our modern-day reservations are. And then to our east, so going back towards where Washington, D.C. is, we have the Navajo Nation and the Hopi.

And then if you go towards New Mexico, there's Zuni. And then if you're looking at the Grand Canyon, say if you go tomorrow and you look across the canyon, there's the Paiutes. So there's different bands.

There's the Moapa Paiutes, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Kaibab, Las Vegas, San Juan Southern Paiute, who are all on that side across the canyon. So does that help? Does that make sense? Alright. But, yeah, that's where our tribes are today.

But we consider the entire Grand Canyon our home. And the Havasupai people actually live on the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Did you see how big it is? They actually live all the way at the bottom.

They don't have cars. What they do is either fly in by helicopter, or they hike, or they have little ATVs like four-tracks. But, yeah, there's a thriving community who lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon today.

I think about 90 miles to the west of us is their reservation. So, yeah, that's where our Native people are today. So thank you for your question.

[Audience member]

And for my second question, do you guys have, like, any Native clothing?

[Kelkiyana Yazzie]

Yeah. So that's what Lakin, Meranden, and myself are wearing. I'll give you a chance to answer that.

But with Navajo, a very popular thing we wear is turquoise. So turquoise is usually worn for protection for ourselves. And we usually wear some type of turquoise on us at all times because we never know when our time in the physical world is up because this helps with our passage to the next phase of life, which is in the spiritual world.

And then this is a squash blossom here. So this is very popular we worn with us. We have a concho belt.

This is just like a regular belt with more sterling silver and turquoise. Women, we usually wear a skirt. I'm wearing my National Park skirt today.

And then we have moccasins here that are usually made from deer, from the deer hide. So you probably might have seen some deer while you were in the park, but we use that to wear on our feet. But Meranden, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about what you're wearing.

[Meranden]

Yeah, ours is a little similar. We usually wear dresses or skirts. And none of this stuff is just because we want to.

Everything has a meaning. So there's a certain reason why the red is on top and the green is here, why this is fringed like this, or the strings are a certain way like this, or why this one's out and this one's not. Everything has a meaning of why it's like that.

And we also have moccasins too. Mine are white, though. They're like fully white.

And then I have earrings. We usually wear earrings, necklaces, bracelets. And we also wear a lot of different kind of, not just turquoise, but a lot of different stones.

So I don't know if you want to say anything else, Lakin.

[Lakin]

Yeah, I'll just talk about my necklace because I didn't wear my full fit today. So, like I said, I'm from Zuni, and a big part of our jewelry is putting shells, seashells.

So we call them shodonne or shodo:we, which is plural, because a long time ago the rain priests would make a pilgrimage down to the Gulf of California, and they would collect these seashells. And they would put turquoise on top, and then the jet and mother of pearl, and these black and white lines. They can either resemble a rainbow or a pattern that resembles life and death, kind of that pattern.

It's popular among a lot of the Puebloan jewelry, such as Santo Domingo.

[Audience member]

So do you guys have a different guest every time?

[Meranden]

Yeah, we do. That's actually a great segway, because we actually have the next one with Kelli Jones, who is actually at the door over there.

We work with her at Desert View as well. So we have these Grand Canyon Speaks every now and then. We barely started with Kelki’s today.

It's the first one for the year. And then next week we have Kelli's. So, yeah, it's a good question.

Is there any more questions? Okay. So, yeah, thank you so much, Kelki, for being here today. We can give Kelki a round of applause.

[Ranger Jonah]

Grand Canyon Speaks is a program hosted by Grand Canyon National Park and the Grand Canyon Conservancy. A special thanks to Aaron White for the theme music. This recording reflects the personal, lived experiences of tribal members and do not encompass the views of their tribal nation or that of the National Park.

To learn more about Grand Canyon First Voices, visit www.nps.gov/GRCA. Here at Grand Canyon National Park, we are on the ancestral homelands of the 11 associated tribes of the Grand Canyon. These being the Havasupai Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, the Yavapai Apache Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, the Moapa Band of Paiutes, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.