History and tribes of the Grand Canyon

8 min read Updated November 2026 Compare all tours

“We gratefully acknowledge the Native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather,” the National Park Service writes on its page about the tribes of the Grand Canyon. It names eleven tribes with historic connections to the land inside today’s park. Navajo, Southern Paiute and Hualapai communities lie along the rim, and the Havasupai live in the last remaining tribal village inside the canyon. This page follows the canyon’s human history in the order the park tells it, with the places on the South Rim where you can still see it.

The eleven tribes

In the park’s own spelling, the tribes are the Havasupai Tribe, the Hopi Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, the Navajo Nation, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni and the Yavapai-Apache Nation. Five of them are Southern Paiute bands, which the park counts separately. Several of the places that day tours visit near the South Rim lie on tribal land with its own rules, not in the national park.

Before the Europeans

The National Park Service divides the human story of the canyon into broad periods: Paleo-Indians from 13,000 to 9,000 years ago, the Archaic period from 9,000 to 3,000 years ago, the Basketmakers from 3,000 to 1,300 years ago and the Ancestral Puebloans from 1,300 to 800 years ago. On the South Rim, the clearest trace of the last of these is Tusayan Ruin, 3 miles (4.8 km) west of Desert View. Its builders began the pueblo around 1185 CE, and it was lived in roughly 800 years ago. A level self-guided path of 0.1 mile (200 m) loops around the walls. The park’s pages disagree on whether the small museum next to it is open, so ask at a visitor centre before you rely on it.

The Desert View Watchtower nearby is not ancient. Mary Colter built it in 1932 after the architecture of the Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region, and its Hopi Room holds paintings by the Hopi artist Fred Kabotie. The Watchtower page covers the building.

This jeep tour includes the standard park entrance fee. Non-US residents aged 16 and older owe the 100-dollar nonresident fee in addition, which the operator collects after booking; children aged 15 and younger pay neither (National Park Service, as of November 2026). Our entrance fees page explains the rules for tours.

Desert View as a tribal heritage site

The park and the tribes are turning Desert View into the Desert View Inter-Tribal Cultural Heritage Site, with demonstrations, exhibits and direct encounters with tribal representatives and artisans. The partners named are the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, representing five bands of Southern Paiute, and the Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Navajo, Zuni and Yavapai-Apache tribes. A new welcome center run by the tribes is planned; no opening date had been published by November 2026. The Cultural Demonstration Program, running since 2014, sets out to bring forward the voices of members of the associated tribes. Demonstrations are free and take place at various spots at Desert View, in the Watchtower during spring, summer and autumn, and some may be held at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center. The park pages we checked set no rules on photography at demonstrations; we would ask the artist first.

The Havasupai and Havasupai Gardens

The Havasupai village of Supai lies outside the national park, on land the tribe administers. It cannot be reached by road. The trail starts at Hualapai Hilltop, 191 miles (308 km) by road from Grand Canyon Village, and leads 8 miles to the village. Every hiker and camper needs a reservation from the tribe, day hiking is not allowed, and the tribe treats entry without a permit and wristband as trespassing.

Inside the park, a place on the Bright Angel Trail was long called Indian Garden. To the Havasupai it is Ha’a Gyoh, and the park’s own account says its policies forced them out, and the last residents were removed in the 1920s. In November 2022 the U.S. Board of Geographic Names voted 19 to 0 to rename the place Havasupai Gardens, a step the park described as a measure of respect for the undue hardship it had caused. Earlier, in January 1975, the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act returned 185,000 acres on and near the rim to the Havasupai, together with the use of a further 95,000 acres.

Navajo land east of the park

East of Desert View, Highway 64 runs into the Navajo Nation. Cameron, 25 miles from the East Entrance, is a Navajo Nation town. Cameron Trading Post was founded there in 1916 by the brothers Hubert and C. D. Richardson to trade with Navajo and Hopi people, after a suspension bridge had crossed the Little Colorado River in 1911. Just west of Cameron, the Little Colorado River Navajo Tribal Park charges 5 dollars per person at its overlooks, and national park passes are not accepted. Alcohol is prohibited on the Navajo Nation, drones are banned in its tribal parks, and from March to November the Navajo Nation is one hour ahead of the rest of Arizona, including the national park.

Some tours from Sedona and Flagstaff stop at Cameron Trading Post on the way. On this one, non-US residents aged 16 and older pay the nonresident fee separately, by card to the tour company before the tour date, and bring photo ID.

Spanish soldiers, surveyors and Powell

Europeans first reached the canyon in 1540, when Hopi guides led soldiers under García López de Cárdenas to the rim. The Spanish found it “an impenetrable wasteland”. In 1857–58 the Ives expedition judged that his party would “doubtless be the last” to visit “this profitless locality”. On 24 May 1869 John Wesley Powell set out from Green River, Wyoming, with four boats and a crew the park describes as ex-trappers, mountain men and Civil War veterans like himself, and on 28 August the party reached the end of the canyon. A second expedition followed in 1871–72.

Miners, toll roads and the railway

Prospectors came for gold and copper in the late 1800s, and many found tourists more profitable than ore. Pete Berry mined copper on Horseshoe Mesa and opened the Grandview Hotel with his wife Martha in 1897. Ralph Cameron charged a toll of one dollar per rider on his Bright Angel toll road from 1903; his mining claims were found in 1909 to have been “salted”, and after a fight of more than thirty years the trail passed to the National Park Service in 1928. Uranium was mined at the Orphan Mine near today’s Hermit Road from 1953 to 1969.

The railway changed everything. The first train ran from Williams to the rim on 17 September 1901, the Santa Fe Railway brought in the Fred Harvey Company to provide lodging and food, and El Tovar opened in 1905. The Grand Canyon Village page covers those buildings.

Protection, from forest reserve to World Heritage Site

The rocks are older still

The park’s geology page dates the oldest rocks in the canyon at about 1.8 billion years, while the Kaibab Limestone on the rim formed at the bottom of an ocean around 270 million years ago. The canyon itself is young by comparison: the National Park Service estimates its age at five to six million years, though some studies argue that parts are much older. On the Trail of Time, dedicated in 2010 between Yavapai Geology Museum and the village, each metre you walk stands for a million years, and you can touch samples of the rock layers along the way.

This day trip from Sedona includes park admission and time in Grand Canyon Village and at the Watchtower. Non-US residents aged 16 and older pay the 100-dollar nonresident fee to the tour company by card before the tour date.