It was almost exactly three weeks until Election Day, and Representative Ruben Gallego was tramping his way through the red dust of the Grand Canyon, determined to make it down 3,000 feet to the bottom.
Shortly after Mr. Gallego, a Democrat, announced his Senate campaign last year, he made a promise to visit all 22 of Arizona’s federally recognized tribes — including the Havasupai people, a tribe of 639 people who live in a village nestled below the craggy rim of the canyon.
There are no roads into Supai village, only trails. So on Monday, Mr. Gallego found himself making the four-hour trek on foot, navigating through the earthen curves of the canyon and at one point taking off his hiking boots to traverse a small creek.
The unusual journey in the middle of campaign season underscored the importance of the Indigenous vote in Arizona, which is home to one of the largest Native populations of voting age in the country, and the extreme lengths to which candidates in competitive elections will go to meet voters, quite literally, where they are.
Mr. Gallego is facing off against Kari Lake, a Republican and close ally of former President Donald J. Trump’s, to succeed retiring Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Independent who is retiring, in a seat that Democrats must hold to maintain their fragile hold on the Senate.
The hike on Monday was part of a larger strategy he has pursued to cultivate support among less politically engaged voters, which also has included hosting pay-per-view prize-fight watch parties at a local boxing club and canvassing outside of concerts featuring young Latino artists.
“We’ll do anything we can to figure out how to actually take politics to people, instead of trying to force them to come to us,” Mr. Gallego said.
“If you actually physically can see” the challenges the tribe faces, he continued, “I think it actually makes you a better representative for them.”
It is rare for elected officials to visit Supai village, and even rarer for them to arrive on foot, members of the Havasupai tribal council said. Most favor taking a helicopter both in and out.
“You don’t see, when you’ve never made the visit, how deep in a canyon we live — the isolation,” Bernadine Jones, the chairwoman of the council, told Mr. Gallego. “And I think just hiking in made it a step further.”
The Havasupai people — a name that translates to people of the blue-green water, a reference to the lush waterfalls dotting their land — have lived in the canyon basin for the last 800 years. Their village once included an expanse of the Grand Canyon known as Indian Garden, but they were forcibly removed in the early 20th century amid efforts to designate the land as a national monument.
In 1975, when Congress passed the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act, the government returned 188,077 acres of land to the Havasupai.
Today, the tribe depends largely on tourism from hikers who make the descent down the canyon to see the translucent waterfalls and camp overnight before the eight-hour trek back up. It is a remote community that relies heavily on horses and a single helicopter to carry supplies in and out.
To mark Mr. Gallego’s visit on Monday, members of the tribe performed a series of traditional songs and dances, at one point drawing him into a circle dance.
But the ceremony also carried a political message. A small clutch of young girls, wearing traditional dress, chanted: “Water is life. Water is powerful. We respect water. We don’t want no uranium mining.”
The tribe’s pressing concern, they told Mr. Gallego, is stopping uranium mining at Red Butte, a swath of land near the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. The mine sits atop an aquifer that feeds the tribe’s creek and waterfalls, its only source of drinking water.
Tribal members worry that the waters will become contaminated, sickening their community and their livestock, and derailing their economy.
“Tourism is our sustainability of our life,” Shelton Manakaja, who sits on the tribal council, said. “The federal government put us here for a reason, for a purpose: to be the guardians of the Grand Canyon. We are doing that. We’re trying to keep doing that.”
Mr. Gallego told members of the tribe that he opposes the mining.
“It is much too dangerous for the Havasupai people and for the environment,” he said. “I was just astounded by — it’s my first time hiking down — just how beautiful this was. These places exist, but they can easily go away without proper management, and we just can’t have that.”
In their meeting with Mr. Gallego, members of the tribal council said they planned to vote for him in November, saying they appreciated his efforts to work with them. But they made clear that they expected his help in return.
“I understand you want our support to vote for you,” Juanita Wescogame, a member of the tribal council, told Mr. Gallego. “But we want you to support us and put a stop to uranium mining. This is our home; I want our land to be protected. We are counting on you.”
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