Zuni Youth Set to Explore Grand Canyon Ancestral Homelands on Backpacking Trip

Eight young people from the Pueblo of Zuni are departing today for Grand Canyon National Park, where the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project will lead them through ancestral homelands their people call Chimik'yana'kya dey'a, the place of emergence. The four-day expedition runs March 16–19 and marks, for many of the participants, their first visit to the canyon.

The group ranges in age from 17 to 23. Leading them are ZYEP Youth Development Coordinator Kiara "Kiki" Zunie, Operations Manager Josh Kudrna, and Built Environment Leader Enric Tsalate, who also serves as the trip's cultural advisor. Together, the three will guide participants through ancestral sites inside Grand Canyon National Park and facilitate learning sessions with National Park Service staff, framing the experience through Zuni history and culture rather than conventional tourism.

The journey begins with a stop at Walnut Canyon National Monument, identified as one of the Zuni people's ancestral settlements, where the group will walk among cliff dwellings before continuing west to the South Rim. The group will camp at Mather Campground for the duration of the trip.

The distinction between visiting and returning shapes how ZYEP structures the experience. "For a place that is popular among tourists, we teach participants that the Grand Canyon is sacred ground and how to visit such places with respect," said one of the trip's male leaders. "We are not visiting for the sole purpose of recreation, but to give offerings and pay respect to our ancestors and the land. We let participants see the Grand Canyon through a different lens — through the eyes of our ancestors, through the eyes of all living things and through the eyes of the canyon itself."

The expedition is part of ZYEP's ongoing Connect to Land programming and was made possible through support from the National Recreation Foundation and the 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation.

Access to Grand Canyon National Park has historically been limited for tribal members, often because of transportation and financial barriers, a challenge that organizations working across the Colorado Plateau have documented for years. Grand Canyon is home to 11 tribal communities, and the gap between those communities and their ancestral landscape has been particularly acute for younger members. ZYEP's Connect to Land programming addresses that gap directly by funding and organizing immersive trips like this one.

The Pueblo of Zuni's connection to the canyon is not incidental. Chimik'yana'kya dey'a anchors Zuni cosmology as the place of emergence, and the trip is designed to let participants encounter that significance firsthand, not through a classroom or a screen but through the land itself.