The Havasupai call themselves Havsuw’ Baaja, “people of the blue-green water,” for Havasu Creek, and they have lived in the Grand Canyon for at least the past 800 years. This map follows the canyon from Hualapai Hilltop out to Supai, and it prints Havasu Falls, Beaver Falls, the Havasu Campground, the Havasupai School and the Havasupai Tribal Administration, with Chikapanagi Mesa, Dead Horse Mesa and Explorers Monument in shaded relief.
The Havasupai Indian Reservation is in Coconino County, at the southwest corner of Grand Canyon National Park.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of Chikapanagi Mesa, Dead Horse Mesa and Explorers Monument comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. The reservation is the land base of the Havasupai Tribe, a federally recognized tribe. Its constitution, passed on March 27, 1939, set up a seven-member tribal council led by a chairman chosen from among its members, and its capital is Supai, Havasuuw in Havasupai, at the bottom of Cataract Canyon, also called Havasu Canyon.
People of the blue-green water
Havasu means “blue-green water” and pai means “people.” The Havasupai and the Hualapai are, ethnically, one people, though today they’re politically separate groups; the Havasupai were the Havasooa Pa’a band of the Plateau People. Their land once reached across an area the size of Delaware. For centuries they farmed in the canyon in spring and summer and moved up to the plateau for fall and winter. On the canyon floor they built and kept up a gravity-fed irrigation system of hand-dug earthen trenches that carried water from Havasu Creek to their fields, following the land’s own contours with no pumps. Families worked small headgates to share the water fairly, and the silt it carried renewed the soil year after year. The knowledge behind it was handed down from generation to generation, and it let them farm one of the most arid places in North America. Corn was the main crop, with beans, squash, sunflowers, gourds and some cotton, and growers heaped soil around each stalk, a method called cepukaka, to keep the corn from blowing over. They traded a great deal with the Hopi, who brought them the gourd and the sunflower.
In 1882 an executive order cut the tribe’s land to 518 acres inside the canyon. Through the 20th century the Havasupai used the courts to fight for it. When a Grand Canyon superintendent proposed taking over the reservation in the 1950s, the tribe turned him down. In 1968 they won their case before the Indian Claims Commission, which found the land had been taken illegally. They kept pressing for the land itself, with support from the Nixon administration and major newspapers, and on January 4, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act, which returned more than 185,000 acres of plateau and canyon land to the Havasupai. That land is the reservation today.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: Sage Brush Point Rd, Pasture Wash, Sinyala Tank Rd, Hualapai Hilltop Hwy, Indian Rte 18, Supai Rd and Havasu Creek.
Supai and the falls
Supai is 8 miles from the nearest road and has no cars. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has called it “the most remote community” in the lower 48 states, and you reach it on foot, by mule or by helicopter. The trail starts at Hualapai Hilltop and drops about 2,000 feet over 8 miles. It’s also the only place in the country where the mail still goes in and out by mule. The tribe runs its own tourism office, a café, a lodge and a general store, the Havasupai Tribal Museum, and the campground about 2 miles past the village. Every year on the second weekend in August the tribe holds its Peach Festival. Reggae is a favorite in Supai, and in 1982 the musicians Tyrone Downie and Cedelia Booker flew in by helicopter with a grand piano to play a concert.
Havasu Creek runs through Supai to the Colorado River, and calcium carbonate in its water gives it the blue-green color the people are named for and builds the travertine along its banks. Havasu Falls, Havasuw Hagjahgeevma, is about a mile and a half from Supai and drops over a cliff of 90 to 100 feet into a chain of plunge pools; before the flood of 1910 it fell in a near-continuous sheet and was called Bridal Veil Falls. Beaver Falls, about 6 miles downstream of Supai, is a set of falls over limestone ledges where Beaver Canyon meets Havasu Canyon.
The Havasupai speak Havasupai, a Yuman language, and the Havasupai page says it’s the only Native American language in the United States spoken by all of its people. The Havasupai School, the Bureau of Indian Education’s elementary school in Supai, dates back to at least 1895, and in 1988 it was teaching in both English and Havasupai, along with the culture of the Havasupai people. The Supai Cafe has its place on the sheet too.
This map of the Havasupai Tribe is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Havasupai Tribe home, from Hualapai Hilltop out to Supai, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the land as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Havasupai Tribe map.
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