"This one will be done the way I want to do it: just me and Mother Nature," Nik Wallenda
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| Photos from ABC13/AP |
"Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, said his biggest concern is a cultural one. The Hopi Tribe has identified the Little Colorado River Gorge as a significant clan migration route.
“The Gorge and the Canyon are not about taking lives,” he said. “They’re about life, especially the spiritual lives of our ancestral people.”
Kuwanwisiwma said when a base jumper died in the area last year due to a parachute failure, it presented a cultural burden to the Hopi people—and, he suspects, to the Navajos living nearby."
How Nik Wallenda’s Tightrope Walk Benefits Navajo Nation, Angers Hopi
Let’s set the record straight: Nik Wallenda may have completed a death-defying tightrope walk Sunday night, but it wasn’t at the Grand Canyon, as the buzz may have led you to believe. Wallenda was actually on tribal land -- the Navajo Nation, to be exact -- and the Native American group has a lot invested in his big Discovery Channel-sponsored stunt.
National Park Service officials made it abundantly clear over the past week that such a spectacle would never have been approved at the actual Grand Canyon. Representatives claimed events “must not unreasonably impair the park’s atmosphere of peace and tranquility,” noting that stunts “don’t meet that [criteria].”
