An interview with the late Charley Bulletts
By Taylor Graham and GCI Staff
In 2018, filmmaker Taylor Graham interviewed Charley Bulletts for the documentary film Glen Canyon Rediscovered. Bulletts was a member of the Southern Paiute Consortium, a member of the Adaptive Management Program in for Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon, and the Kaibab Paiute Tribe’s Cultural Resources Director. Bulletts had a deep wealth of knowledge about Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon, and the surrounding areas that he learned from his extensive family including his grandparents who were traditionalists and healers from the region. Those who knew Charley like Sarah Bauman of Grand Staircase Partners describe him as a bridge builder who helped conservation groups understand the importance of Native voices and culture. He was a believer in education, hosting youth powwows to pass on indigenous knowledge to younger generations and an indigenous “teach-in” to educate nonnatives. Charley passed away in 2020.
Taylor Graham: Would you mind giving me a bit of the history of the Kaibab Paiute territories in this area and about the folks who lived in those regions?
Charley Bulletts: Well, it just wasn’t the Kaibab Paiute, it was blends of the Southern Paiute from the Antarianunts, and the Kaiparowits, the Kaibab, the Uinkaret, the Shivwits, and also the Moapa and the Las Vegas bands along the Colorado River. And then on the other side we had our sister band, the San Juan, which range from Colorado all the way down to the Little Colorado River, where their ancestral lands go all the way back to Kayenta. And Monument Valley was ancestral land of the San Juan Paiute too.
But right now, we’ve all learned to live together. There are some things we all had to do to actually still be here. It’s like you and your ancestors, your ancestors are not all full-blooded Germans or anything like that, you’ve got a little Swedish or Spanish or stuff like that. That’s kind of the way we view ourselves. Because over the years, over the centuries, we’ve had to take in other bands that were slowly disappearing.
Paiutes are well known for structured family lifestyles. Small families, taking care of what you guys refer to as “seep springs.” So, there were many along the Colorado River, a lot of seep springs and areas to farm, and side canyons to farm in as well. That’s what we were always told, was that to take care of the water because that’s who we are as people, as Paiutes. We refer to ourselves as Nuwuh. But you get further past Shivwits and the Moapa and Nevada areas, and they say Nuwuhvee, which means “people of the land.”
TG: Talking about those springs, and the connection, the way people managed those springs. What was the connection to the river? Were there a lot of people who spent time along the river and farmed in those areas?
CB: There was a lot of farming going on. But when you look at it, they say, “All river flows downhill.” At that time, all rivers and seep springs flowed to the Grand Canyon. They still do today, but more of them are underground rivers which still connect to certain places, like Paiute Mountain, over there on the Navajo side. Or like San Francisco Peaks, there’s still water sources that flow into those mountains that go into the Colorado River. But each spring would flow, especially those that were there around Glen Canyon area that are covered today, some of them still flow and some of them don’t.
We have a lot of ties to that area on this side of the river. It’s keeping those families acknowledged that used to live around there. Most of them live here in Kaibab. Some of them moved to Shivwits, some of them moved in with the Paiute and tribe of Utah, and the Koosharem and Kanosh bands.
TG: Can you talk more about those families who live there? What their lives were like before the dam and how the reservoir coming up affected them and where they moved to?
CB: For a lot of families that grew up in that area, it was very devastating to have to leave and know you can’t come back to the area where you were born. You know, when we’re born, when our umbilical cord falls off, we buried that back in the place where we come. To have this place backed up with water was sad because you couldn’t go back there, you couldn’t show your kids your history. All you can show them is the most powerful element in the world and that’s the water that was built up and covering our ancestors, the human remains that are still there to this day.
And the San Juan’s say they lost a lot of farms, but they lost a lot of their history with the people they cared about the most. When two cultures meet, you can’t stop what they refer to as “love”. And you have kids with them, and it’s hard. And I think that was my cousins’ downfall, the San Juan, was that love for the people that they took in and in and eventually lost their land, lost their land because of the dam.
A lot of people ask, “How do you feel towards the dam?” There’s no feeling towards the dam, it’s not the dam’s fault it was there, it’s politics. Politics is the reason the dam sits there. At the time, politicians wanted to provide electricity for the Southwest, not looking at the longer impacts, because of politics. Politics still leads the way today in everything we look at.
TG: Can you talk about how downstream areas are being affected by the dam?
CB: There’s always some kind of conflict or inaccuracy with the science that takes place in the (Grand) Canyon. Since we’ve been doing monitoring, a lot of my predecessors have seen a lot wrong with science and people who continue to do the same science, expecting it to change. Since that dam’s there, there’s no longer fresh sediment and to come in and provide nice farmlands, enriched soil for growing crops. It’s really not there. Even with these mimic floods that we have, I’ve always said that science tends to forget that there’s somebody higher than them, and that’s Mother Nature. Sometimes she doesn’t want certain fish there, sometimes she doesn’t want certain landscapes to be open or backwaters to be open for certain species of animals, and it’s not our decision to make.
TG: Have you put any thought into the idea of draining Lake Powell, or storing water in Lake Mead if there wasn’t enough water for both? What would that mean to the people who were forced to move away, or for the tribe in general, if that became a reality?
I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any good or bad to letting the water out. It’s just dealing with the consequences of what the dam has covered and what the dam has possibly lost in certain places. Because, you know, to see the water run free is great. That’s something that we as Paiute people say that water should do — it should always run free. When we go to side canyons and see areas where people have built dams to hold back the water to cool off, like in Deer Creek and the Little Colorado River, we knock ’em down and throw the water back because it’s not healthy to see something laying there. Water isn’t meant to lay like it does there, it’s meant to flow like our blood line. You know everybody says that the Grand Canyon is the blood of mother earth. It runs to the ocean, which it doesn’t anymore. But I think time only will tell. Hopefully, a lot of it we’ll eventually see it touch the ocean and run free through the Colorado River.
TG: What are your future hopes for the river?
CB: Well, a few years back, when they were redoing the interpretive center at Carl Hayden visitor center on the dam, they asked the tribes, “Do you have pictures of the tribal people by the river, before the dam was built?” And we were like (rolling his eyes) did we have people down…? I mean it wasn’t like we were down there taking pictures while we were on an outing. We were down there farming and enjoying life. We never took pictures. To us, the pictures were the rock writing. The rock writing that’s covered back underneath the dam right now. But it was quite interesting to have that question asked, “Pictures of Paiutes down by the river?”
But I think in the long run, I think that if people start to understand and accept that you can’t make change happen, and sometimes change happens slowly, that in an environment such as the Grand Canyon and the Glen Canyon reach or any environment that comes after a dam. The environment factors. As long as people start to broaden their minds and sometimes take a step back and let Mother Nature take her course in healing herself, just like the body heals itself from an addiction or anything like that, our bodies start to heal themselves. That’s the way people should view the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon.
