Word: havasupai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Havasupai men able to work, only eight hold permanent jobs. While the tourist season lasts, the tribe's 300 horses are used to pack visitors to the canyon (at $16 a round trip). Some 6,000 came by foot or horseback last year, but the tribe has almost nothing in the way of handcrafted goods, restaurants or inns that might encourage visitors to leave their money behind. Moreover, the horses help to keep the tribe isolated. Efforts to put a cable car line or Jeep trail into Supai have been resisted by the Indians, who fear that their only...
...Havasupai are forbidden to bring alcohol onto the reservation, but it is bootlegged into the canyon and sold at exorbitant prices. Increasingly, the younger tribe members have been the best customers. "I suppose it's because there's so little to do here," says John Greenfield, a fundamentalist missionary and one of seven whites in Supai. "It's a terrible problem-that, and sexual immorality...
Sequential Marriage. The Havasupai family structure is almost nonexistent. In a society without privacy, children imitate their elders and begin sexual activity early. Illegitimacy is rampant, birth control ignored. Havasupai men, notes...
Social Anthropologist John Martin, practice "sequential marriages," taking one wife after another. Matches between first cousins are routine; mental retardation is common. Disease, poor diet and high infant mortality combine to give the Havasupai a life expectancy of only 44 years (U.S. average: 70). They also have a suicide rate 15% above the national average...
Until now, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has invested only limited funds and manpower to ease the tribe's plight. Little in the way of imaginative social work has been attempted. Putting shingled rooftops over each Havasupai's head is a questionable response to his needs, and even this will be done only gradually. According to Government plans, five houses will be lowered into the canyon each year, which means that the project will not be completed until...