Editor's Note: Three eighth-grade reporters who interviewed Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne at Glen Canyon Dam at a multiagency event on March 5, 2008, wrote the following article. They drew their story from a history project on Glen Canyon Dam that they prepared for a state competition. Lara Schmit, a communications and outreach coordinator with the USGS Southwest Biological Science Center, arranged for the young reporters to meet Kempthorne at the event and asked them to submit their story to peoplelandandwater.gov.  Schmit has since learned the girls have won first prize for their project and will be representing Arizona at the national competition in Washington, D.C., this summer.

For the past three years, we have participated in the National History Day program. The theme this year is Conflict and Compromise. We choose our topic for research while we were hiking in our “backyard”. There is a popular hiking trail that edges the mesa on which our city, Page, Arizona, is built. From the northwest corner of this trail, we were overlooking the Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell and the Colorado River. We thought choosing the Glen Canyon Dam would be an interesting history topic because we had grown up with so many stories of the building of the dam. We see it from our window every day reminding us of its magnificent history. 

We conducted our research by interviewing our family and friends. They shared their feelings and memories of the dam’s construction and what the river experience was like before the dam. We also asked them for photographs, letters and diaries. Next, we went to our local library and used the computer to research the Colorado River, the Glen Canyon area, and the construction of the dam. We contacted Kay Cowan with the Glen Canyon Dam to set up a guided tour and interviews of past and present Bureau of Reclamation employees. One of our interviews was with Sue Martin Tsosie, a Dine’ woman age 87. With the help of an interpreter she shared with us her life story, which included memories of washing clothes and watering sheep in locations that over look the present day dam. She told us that she was glad that ancient ruins lie beneath the water of the lake so that white men (five finger people) would leave sacred things alone.

After our tour of the dam, Kay Cowan (Glen Canyon Public Relations) contacted us and invited us to come watch the historic high water release from the Glen Canyon Dam on March 5^th, 2008. She knew that we had won our regional competition and we were headed to the state competition and that we were looking for more information to improve our project. We were thrilled with the opportunity to participate. What we thought would be a good opportunity turned into an outstanding experience. We were able to meet employees from the USGS. We were able to interview scientists like Matthew Anderson and Helen C. Fairley.   The information Helen shared with us helped us understand why they were releasing water from the dam. She said it was to help the ecosystem to regain beaches that had been lost over the years the dam has been in operation. She also shared with us about how they had documented the artifacts that were buried under the waters of Lake Powell. Matthew helped us understand about the endangered species. We learned that when they had built the dam that they did not consider how the dam would affect the wildlife. We were interested to find out that the Humpback Chub was already recognized as a threatened species at the time the dam was being built.

We listened to Jeffrey E. Lovich explain to us about the wildlife on the Colorado River. We love turtles and really liked what he had to say about a turtle that he said looked like a pancake. Its shell is like leather and you can bend its shell. 

As we have researched our topic we have learned that conflicts lead to compromises, which lead to more conflicts that lead to more compromises, and it never seems to end.  Some seem to be pleased with the compromises while others are upset. Not everyone ever seems to be happy with the compromise.

We had the opportunity to meet Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne. We liked his answer to our question and it seems to answer this quandary that we have learned during our research. His answer to us was “It is our responsibility to do positive things so that when you grow up and you have children and they have children that this is still a wonderful river and that the Grand Canyon is as ever bit as Grand. So we have that responsibility and stewardship.”

Our research has been turned into a ten minute documentary that has taken 100’s of hours to make.  We have learned more than can possibly fit into a ten minute documentary. We love the Colorado River that runs through our backyard and have came to learn that we should continue to work together making compromises and finding solutions to problems, so that we can use our natural resources but preserving them as best possible for future generations.