Copyright © 2006 ISAAA.
Weather-carved, wind-beaten, water-hewed rocks make the Grand Canyon true to its name: with layers of fossils and stone, and gorges as deep as eons gone by, the Canyon is the first place on earth to find history, and the last place to plant crops.
A Native American tribe, however, has long lived in what the unacquainted see as a barren wasteland. Deep in the Grand Canyon are smaller, lesser canyons, some of them bedecked in brush, others encircled by creeks. One, in particular, is surrounded by four waterfalls, whose columns and shelves anchor them to the valley below. This is Havasu Canyon, home to the Havasupai tribe.
The Havasupai – the people of the Blue-Green Waters – consider themselves the traditional Guardians of the Grand Canyon. They were originally hunters and gatherers, but with the changing seasons and passing years, they eventually took to practicing intensive agriculture. During the winter, they moved to the Havasu canyon’s plateau, where the rock and bush provided them shelter. In the summer, however, they moved to the bottom of the canyon, built mud dwellings, and planted crops in the canyon and near springs.
A lake once stood in a side canyon close to the Havasu, and the silt it had left behind also provided fertile land – a provident, rock-strewn field on which the tribe could build its village. For years, the Havasupai irrigated their main crops of corn, red and spotted pinto beans, and squash. They gathered pine nuts, mesquite pods, prickly pear, yucca, and the flower stalks of agaves. They also mined basalt and red ochre for their tools and dyes.
While the fame of the Grand Canyon spread, history was not as kind to the Havasupai. With the coming of a new age of exploration came progress, visitors, and diseases hitherto unknown to they who had long lived in isolation. Only a little over a hundred Havasupai were left at the end of the 19th century, after a series of epidemics swept through the tribe and nearly wiped them out. A federal grant, however, came a few decades later, aiding the development of a cooperative which would later build the Havasupai Reservation tourist industry, as well as improve Havasupai farmlands and farming techniques.
To farm and live amongst rock was a feat that history would not suffer to go unnoticed.
A few years ago, sunflower growers in the North American Southwest found that their crop was inflicted with blight. Research into equipping future sunflowers with blight immunity moved scientists to search in local seed banks, where they found a sunflower strain containing the blight resistant trait. This allowed scientists to breed the strain into commercial cultivars and thus saved the industry millions of dollars.
The source of the resistant sunflower? The seed reserves of the Havasupai.
For more information on the tribe, visit http://www.public.asu.edu/~hbalasu/havasu.htm
The U.S. is a founder biotech country. It commercialized biotech maize, soybean, cotton, and potato in 1996, and has grown more biotech crops than any other country in the world.
In 2005, the U.S. planted biotech soybean, maize, cotton, and canola, as well as virus resistant squash and papaya, over a total of 49.8 million hectares. This comprises 55% of the global biotech crop hectarage. Herbicide tolerant alfalfa and sugar beet have recently been approved, and are expected to be deployed in the near term.