This historian dug into the controversies around Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks

Controversy has surrounded the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff for several years — most recently, the debate centered on treated wastewater being used by the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort. The peaks are considered sacred by a number of Native American tribes.

William Holly has researched the history of the peaks and the controversies that’ve come up related to them over the past several decades. Holly is an historian of the American West and specializes in the San Francisco Peaks and Flagstaff.

His work, called “The Mountain is Part of Us: Tourism, Community, and American Indian Sacred Land in Northern Arizona since 1969” is the winner of an award given out by Brigham Young University. He’ll be teaching at the University of Idaho this fall.

Holly joined The Show to talk more how for most people, the idea of tourism and development in Arizona centers on the Phoenix area. But northern Arizona has had a very interesting history in terms of preserving the past, trying to bring more people in and market itself to the wider world.

Full conversation

William Holly

WILLIAM HOLLY: You know, the interesting thing about that is the history of tourism in northern Arizona is much more extensive, and it’s been around longer than tourism in the Phoenix area, for example.

That goes all the way back to the Santa Fe Railroad being built across northern Arizona in the 1880s, long before Paradise Valley or Scottsdale ever were thought of in anybody’s wildest dreams.

And a lot of that tourism has been geared towards, even since the railroads, not just the natural wonders. Of course, everybody knows the Grand Canyon, but the human wonders, and what I mean by this is the gateway to what we call Indian Country.

BRODIE: Well, so what's the balance between trying to market especially Indian Country with keeping the people who live there, maybe sort of doing right by them and making sure you're not bringing people to their communities that maybe they don’t want there?

HOLLY: And that's something that I wrestle with with my work, with the writing I’m doing, the research I’m doing on a regular basis, because we see multiple instances of — and especially surrounding the San Francisco Peaks, what we're talking about today — of the tourism industry — historian Hal Rothman termed it in one of his works “the Growth Coalition,” so I use that term quite a bit — wanting to grow tourism, bring people in. It’s good for the economy, it’s good for everybody.

But oftentimes that “everybody,” and even in some of the things they say in the hearings that have to go about this and publications. An interesting side note, the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce up until the 1970s had a publication that they gave to retailers in the community called “They’re People, Too.” And it was all about how to deal with Indian customers because they are people. They’re not us, but they are people.

And this balance, it often forgets that those people are there until they get loud enough to be forced, they forced the growth coalition to hear them.

BRODIE: Well, and one of the areas that that you spend a lot of time studying about is the San Francisco Peaks, which, of course, in recent years, there's been a lot of discussion about Snowbowl and what kind of of snow and water used to make that snow should be used on the peaks.

But as you’ve been writing, this is a controversy. This area has been kind of controversial in the tourism and growth area for a lot longer than just Snowbowl.

HOLLY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Flagstaff entered the tourism age relatively quickly after its founding, with the 1926 building and the Route 66 and of course the railroad. And almost instantly, they found themselves straddling this line where they were holding the Flagstaff All Indian Powwow starting in the late 1920s, inviting these people in.

We want the Indians here. We want the Native people here. We want them to do their dances, and we want them dressed to the nines — that kind of a thing. Yet the participants were segregated in an Indian village. The participants weren't welcome to stay around after the powwow.

And this kept going on and on. And of course the Snowbowl though, ever since it was built in 1937, the Snowbowl has really been this driver of tension within the Flagstaff tourism industry, not just with Native American peoples, but with environmentalists, with people who felt that maybe skiing was — and prior to World War II, it definitely was — skiing is a rich person’s sport, and everybody else is getting left out.

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BRODIE: Within the community, how do all of those various interests, not align but like how do they work together or maybe how much conflict are they in, even now? I mean, some of these seem like very much at odds, competing interests.

HOLLY: Yeah, and one of the interesting things that I found in my work is it depends on what we’re talking about. And there's there’s limits, I have found. There's limits in the community.

And let's exclude the American Indian community from this for a moment. Let’s just talk about in Flagstaff, the predominantly Anglo community for a moment. There are limits.

So for example, in 1969, a man named Bruce Ledbetter from Flagstaff, he had experience building ski resorts in Colorado, Steamboat Springs, Aspen area, and being from Flagstaff, he decided, you know, there's this the Hart Prairie at the base of the peaks, perfect area for a resort village on the scale of like an Aspen or a Vail or a Steamboat Springs.

Now, this caused a lot of problems. This is what we call the Hart Prairie controversy when we're talking about conflict in Flagstaff over the peaks.

And you saw a lot of the Anglo residents, environmentalists, business owners, students, professors, all walks of life in Flagstaff — and this has, you know, late ‘60s into the mid-’70s — stand up and say, “This is too far.”

Now bringing back in the American Indian perspective, none of these are OK for them. And so from their perspective, it has to be very difficult to find allies, alliances that could be feeling where it could sit and it could be a good alliance for them.

So yeah, it's an interesting thing. And I see strange bedfellows and people who at one time were yelling at each other in public hearings, two years later are working together. And everybody just kind of flip flops.

BRODIE: Well so, how do those sort of shifting alliances, what kind of impact does that have on how the peaks are handled and what kind of projects are allowed and maybe even how people in the community, both Indigenous and otherwise, feel about this?

HOLLY: That's a really interesting question because in the first, I would say 15 years or so, from 1969 into 1983, which covers the first two major conflicts regarding the Snowbowl and the peaks and where American Indian peoples especially had a large voice, it worked OK because there was a key landowner who was also involved and had money to spare, if we will, and help with lawsuits that perhaps may have been more difficult to have done if it was just the tribes standing alone.

You know, fast forward 20, 25 years, we get to the wastewater. Tribal nations are much more stable now. They have more sovereignty. There’s a lot more federal laws in place regarding how sacred sites can be used, what can be used, things of that nature.

So when we get to the wastewater, the tribal nations, they went alone. They didn’t wait for anybody in the community to say, “Hey, we're gonna stand up with you.” They went on it by themselves.

And I think just looking at some of the things I’ve read about that and some of the thing — and I lived in Flagstaff during part of that time, so I remember some of that. It created some tensions that maybe had started to dissipate in Flagstaff, and then it just kind of erupted them again.

This is real, legitimate issues to people who have a claim on this peak, this mountain from long before any of us ever got here.