A Las Vegas developer has built a $40 million dollar glass-bottomed walkway, cantilevered over the edge of the Grand Canyon and giving a view of the bottom 4,000 feet below. It’s sited on reservation land.

The local Hualapai Indian tribe was divided. The tribe numbers about 2,000 tribe and a third live in poverty. 50% unemployment. Tribal members worried about disturbing nearby burial sites. Environmentalists decried the further conversion of the canyon into a tourist trap. In the end, the tribal leaders weighed these “concerns” but gave their approval, citing the benefits of tourism money. The developer gave the structure to the Hualapai in exchange for a percentage of the profits.

This project drew my attention because I think it illustrates everything that’s wrong with tourism and reliance on our definitions of “poverty” and “wealth”. There’s an eye-opening essay by Cheryl Shanks titled the Nine Quandaries of Tourism. Take a look at these quandaries applied to the Skywalk project and tell me what you think:

1: The only way to give tourists authenticity is to artificially create it.
The Skyway will be part of an artificial tourist oasis. To quote one article:

Tribal leaders are betting that people will flock here, braving the rugged terrain — including a twisty ride through unpaved roads — to walk its transparent surface. The Skywalk, they hope, will become the centerpiece of a budding tourism industry that includes helicopter tours, river rafting, a cowboy town and a museum of Indian replica homes.

And more simply, unless they create a marketable destination with some tremendous “wow” factor, they can’t make much money–and few people will come.

2: To capitalize on what you already have, you must borrow.
The tribe has its land, the Canyon, the view, some culture. The tribe is borrowing additional millions to improve roads, upgrade an airport and build supporting structures that will accomodate the tourists.

3: What is environmentally sustainable is often unprofitable and insulting.
The Skywalk and the planned surrounding development aren’t in any way “sustainable.” Neither is the hoped-for thousands of tourists, tourist vehicles, airplanes and buildings. But without some sort of giant metaphorical sign that says “HERE”, where’s the profit? And it won’t represent “culture” to tourists–just a rocky outcropping.

And this quote:

Others in the tribe have been critical of what they say is the development’s lack of sustainability, pointing out that water used here is trucked in over miles of unpaved, rutted roads, and that there is no sewer, trash, telephone or electrical service. The airport, which is expanding, operates on diesel generators.

4: Commodifying culture simultaneously preserves, transforms, and destroys it.
Here’s one tribal member:

“The canyon is sacred ground and our ancestors’ bones are buried there,” said Dolores Honga, 71, who has performed ritual dances on the lonely, wind-swept rim for decades. “You have to love the land … and not see it with dollar signs in your eyes,” she told Reuters.

And from the tribal leader that oversees the tribe’s business:

“I don’t see it as desecration … I believe that it is a safe, unique means of seeing the canyon, and a catalyst for the future development of the nation,” Yellowhawk told Reuters.

It seems clear that the project, especially when mixed in with other efforts such as a cable car to the canyon floor, a large hotel and a host of other amenities, will turn the small tribe into–service workers. The tribal rituals, already minimal, are likely to be reduced to performances in the hotel lobby.

5: Money tourists spend to vacation in the south never reaches the south.
This simply means that the tourist money won’t likely benefit the members of the tribe. It’s possible, after investors, the government and the cost of doing business take their cut. The tribe plans to partner with corporations and investors that’ll build a hotel and other amenities there. The tribe won’t get much of that money–they’ll get a fraction, or none at all. The money tourists spend on getting to and from there will never reach the tribe.

6: Governments pursue tourism to benefit the local people, but in the process become oriented toward outsiders and away from their citizens.
In this case, government involvement is minimal. But as the development on the site grows, the site becomes outwardly oriented, not tribe-oriented. A small number of the tribe of 2,000 will be running an expanding tourist show that will require more than just oversight. And the rest of the tribe becomes service workers, outwardly focused on the tourists and the outside world to feed, clothe and shelter them.

7: Attempts to present living nature or culture to tourists (or those to protect them from tourists) have the effect of deadening them.
Shanks describes this one best:

Tourists can’t be attracted, however, to an unstable and ambiguous culture, nor to a natural site that is in the process of transforming itself. As a consequence, efforts are made to fix and standardize: folk dances, tortilla-making, and peace pipes, bird habitats and the course of the Amazon have all been bounded and defined. Real life proceeds around them. Had they not been fixed, however, they would not be accessible.

8: Tourism is at the same time the best possible development sector and the most treacherous.
If the Hualapai develop the site and lots of tourists continue to come, it will produce significant revenue. But it presents the inevitable problem: growing dependence on the operation and disaster if natural disaster, competition or fickle tourist spending changes. In other words–there will be lots of money until there is no money–and the more dependent on that money you are, the worse a downturn will be. The small tribe will apparently be dependent.

9: Tourism pretends to be apolitical, but it encapsulates problems of power and worth on a grand and global scale; it pretends to be passive, yet it is produced by an encounter between host and guest in which anything is possible.
This one’s much like #4 and #7. In effect, the tribe gives up a lot of power to the tourist. They will serve them, depend on them, possibly gauge their worth based on how well the operation is doing.

And so it goes. Why is tribe not doing something else? Why should they? they’ve decided to follow the road that our majority culture follows–development, profit. Build, expand, grow. The tribe, in an effort to realize the economic benefits that many others take for granted, wants to do it the same way. We want to imagine the tribe somehow conforming to a Dances With Wolves-esque image, intimate with the land and living in harmony with it. Several million pounds of steel and a mater site plan later, it seems unlikely that harmony with the land is their goal. Hard currency is.

Surely, they and the land will never be the same.