Word: canyoneering
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Each spring, two Harvard-Radcliffee students descend the Canyon walls to spend three months in Supai. Usually the students have never been farther west than Pittsburgh. The West, they think, must be no more complex than jostling down a narrow trail on a donkey piled with gear, or pulling catfish out of the Colorado River above the rapids...
They enter the Canyon with no notion of what they are to do for the summer. Phillips Brooks House has promised to pay for their maintenance while they "assess community needs" and develop projects to "mobilize community interest...
Harvard volunteers are received graciously by the tribe, but the Havasupai are reluctant to confide their fears about what is happening to their dwindling poulation, to their tenuous economy, and to the precious Canyon that is threatened by a dam upstream...
This particular kind of poverty is as unfamiliar to Harvard students as the West and the Canyon. The Huvasupai subsist on Stone Age agriculture. What they know of towns and civilization is the backsides of the silver boomtowns on Highway 66: cheap wine, pool halls, dusty '51 Pontiacs parked near pseud-adobe cafes, hostility from merchants who won't give Indians credit...
Only in the desert and within the walls of their plateau, property of the tribe for centuries, do the Havasupai feel comfortable. Yet the world beyond Highway 66 is now beginning to shatter that security. The Grand Canyon Dam is rising up river, meaning water and power for California. The Havasupai lands won't be flooded, but their rapids will disappear and the familiar will be rendered strange...