Ethnographic Overview And Assessment: Zion National Park, Utah ...

Ecosystems
Two major watersheds drain southward from the divide between the Colorado Plateau
and the Great Basin towards the Colorado River. Kanab Creek drains the more eastern of these
two watersheds and the Virgin River drains the one in the west. For purposes of this study each
of these is being treated as a separate ecosystem. Taken together these two ecosystems
incorporate most, but certainly not all, of the significant hydrological drainages within the
ecoregion.
Parks
Zion National Park and Pipe Spring National Monument are the Federal land
management units that receive special analysis in this study. The NPS selected these two units
to begin the analysis of Southern Paiute cultural resources issues. Through a process
technically known as tiering, the study builds on previous applied ethnography studies
conducted in northern portions of the Grand Canyon and below Glen Canyon Dam. Other
Federal parks in the ecoregion which have not been the subject of Southern Paiute cultural
resource studies are Cedar Breaks and the portion of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
located above the dam.
Places
There are many places that are special within this ecoregion. These tend to have obvious
and often spectacular geological and biological characteristics: the dramatic cliffs of Zion
Canyon, the narrows in the Virgin River, the natural gravity spring at Pipe Spring, the hot
mineral spring where the Virgin River breaks through the Hurricane Cliffs, multicolored
sandstone near Kanab Creek, and the black volcanic center cones next to hot pink sand dunes
near Quail Creek. Often physical and biological features of the ecosystem are combined with
places of historic or traditional cultural significance to create places that are special in many
related ways.
1.6.2 Holism
This applied ethnographic study is holistic to the extent that it includes the widest range
of cultural resources as possible within the constraints of the contract. Special efforts were
made to identify and provide a Southern Paiute cultural evaluation of (1) plants, (2) animals, (3)
minerals, (4) archaeology sites, and (5) petroglyphs and pictographs. While this approach may
seem to include an extensive variety of cultural resources, this applied ethnography study fails
to be as holistic as Southern Paiute people would like. Often it takes a few years of tribe-park
consultation before a clear list of management and natural resource issues emerges. For example,
after almost ten years of consultation, the 17 tribes and Indian organizations with cultural ties to
the Nevada Test Site provided the following holistic list of studies that should be conducted for
a complete Native American assessment of cultural resources (American Indian Writers
Subgroup 1995:16):
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