Existing comment:
People and Place:
The Verde Valley has been a shared landscape and home to various indigenous groups. The Wipukpaia (Northeastern Yavapai) and the Dil zhe e (Tonto Apache), both traditionally semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, are still here. Ancestral Puebloan clans built numerous villages in the valley and farmed for centuries before migrating to other homelands.
For Hopi, the Verde River drainage was one of the primary south-to-north migration routes, known as Payunawit, "Back and Forth Design the River Along." Payanawit links Hopi people to their ancestral past, represented by Archaic, Sinagua, and Hohokam archeological cultures.
Oral traditions of the O'odham and Piipaash (Maricopa) of southern Arizona link them to the Verde Valley as groups moved and mixed. |