Bryce Canyon National Park

Indigenous peoples inhabited the Bryce Canyon region for at least twelve thousand years before Western contact. The Southern Paiute, whose oral traditions explain the hoodoos as the petrified Legend People, consider the canyon part of their ancestral homeland. The Hopi recognize it as sacred territory they describe as heaven. Western protection came in the 1920s after the Paiute had already been displaced from the land.

According to Paiute oral tradition, before humans existed, the Legend People lived in this place. There were many of them—birds, animals, lizards, and such things—but they had the power to make themselves look like people even though they were not people. The Legend People were bad. They did something wrong—perhaps fighting, perhaps theft. Because they were evil, the all-powerful Coyote spirit called Sinawava, the Trickster, turned them all into stone.

You can see them standing in rows now. Some are sitting down. Some are holding onto others. Their faces still show the red and orange paint from before they became rocks. This is why the Paiute call these formations Anka-ku-was-a-wits—the red painted faces. The Paiute name for the entire place, Unka-timpe-wa-wince-pock-ich, means 'red rocks standing like men in a bowl-shaped recess.'

This story was shared with park naturalists in 1936 by Indian Dick, a Kaibab Paiute elder. The Paiute traditionally share such stories only during winter months—spring, summer, and fall were reserved for hunting, gathering, and storing food. That Indian Dick chose to share this narrative with outsiders ensured its preservation in the public record, though the fuller corpus of Paiute understanding remains within the tradition.