PEACH SPRINGS, Ariz. — “Do we have the radios?” Rachael DeFord asks.
Four girls, all members of Walapai Media’s youth radio club, have piled into a blue Chevy Silverado. They plan to loop around Peach Springs, an enclave of 1,100 people and the largest town on Hualapai Tribal land in northwest Arizona.
They cross Hualapai Way onto Historic Route 66. The Tribal land spans a million acres in three counties.
In places, roads are scarce. So is cell phone service.
That’s why the radio deliveries matter.
Radio is a lifeline here — broadcasting weather alerts, locating missing people and sharing local news when it is not playing music. Unlike many community radio stations where funding cuts loom, Walapai 100.9 has tribal and grant support. And its mission — to build community through language, culture, events and education — aligns with other rural, tribal stations across the country. But Walapai 100.9 also gives kids a role in making it happen.
Walapai Media’s 100.9 FM station broadcasts music, cultural programs and tribal news. It also runs the afterschool radio club. This summer, it has 14 students from elementary through high school. The students put together a radio show with music, trivia, ads and more.
While the radio club is a fun afterschool program, it has serious goals: to preserve language and cultural identity. Station programming also teaches Hualapai (Wal-lah-pie) language and plays tribal music.
The radios are the size of a baking soda box. They are simple — with a dial and two buttons. But the power of the radio is how it builds community.
The radio club in the Silverado crosses rolling hills, around bends and up to the driveway of the Hualapai Tribe Fire & EMS. Through the door, DeFord, the Walapai Media outreach coordinator, lets staff know the girls have a delivery.
’Aolani Navenma, 14, hands the bluetooth and standard broadcast band radio to Fire Chief Tony DeMaio, who poses for a picture with the club.
“You can hear us on here,” ’Aolani says.
“Radios were popping”
Just after 11 a.m., the group discusses lunch while scrolling their phones.
They locate lunch via Facebook and Instagram. Families have posted what they’ve made that morning: Fry bread, burritos, fruit cups are all available at homes in Peach Springs.
You have to be fast. A half-dozen burritos can sell out before you reach someone’s house to make a purchase via their front door or window.
“This is how the locals get our lunch,” DeFord says. “And it is good.”
If a resident of Peach Springs wants to buy a radio, they’d have to drive at least 37 miles east and off tribal land to Seligman. Peach Springs has no chain retail store, no chain grocery store, no Wal-Mart, no Walgreens or CVS, no Dollar General. It has Walapai Market — part-Circle K with a gas station that bills itself as an “Internet cafe” with some outdoor tables and Wi-Fi connection that can be picked up from your car in the parking lot.
The next radio deliveries are to the Hualapai Game and Fish Department and Hualapai Cultural Center. At each stop, the girls file out. DeFord holds doors open and the whoosh of air conditioning blows on each as they head inside on this 95-plus degree day.
A radio is handed off at the Tribal Cultural Resources Center. More photos. Director Ka-Voka Jackson greets club members.
“They get to go out, they get to experience the world and they get a lot of support from their radio program,” says Jackson, Hualapai Tribe director of cultural resources. “It’s also bringing kids from different schools together so I think it’s building their own internal youth network.”
“The station’s been around for such a long time and has a big presence in all of our community events,” Jackson said. “It’s a creative outlet for youth.”
Traveling to interviews at a Phoenix Suns NBA game and to the Las Vegas Knights NHL fan development team exposed the club to new areas of the region and varied voices to include on their show.
For Walapai Media intern Jordan Butler, the radio is where she learned about music and community news.
“I have, like, a little radio,” said Jordan, 16. “They were just giving out radios when I was a kid. But then that was a long time ago. So at that time, radios were popping.
“I always heard people giving little shoutouts about themselves like ‘oh I’m listening to 100.9 — KWLP,’ ” said Jordan, who attends Music Mountain High School.
“So I learned about the station with the little radios and listening to music,” she said. “It basically introduced me to music, because that’s all the signal we basically have out here too.”
New radio gear means growth
About 29% of Indigenous people live in rural communities across the United States. Sometimes public radio is the only option for news and information. Arizona is home to 10 tribal radio stations, with 60 across the country.
Peach Springs, just off the original Route 66, was named after the peach trees that grew at a nearby spring and is the capital of the Hualapai Tribe, or People of the Tall Pines. Peach Springs served as inspiration for the fictional Radiator Springs in the movie “Cars” according to the Arizona Office of Tourism.
The Tribe’s land runs along 108 miles of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.
Upon arrival, a cell phone screen urges users to use a satellite connection to receive calls and texts. Cell phone reception varies from hillside to hillside.
But the radio signal for 100.9 is consistent and strong. It can be heard on your car radio about halfway east to Flagstaff and west almost to Kingman.
Originally, the station lived online through a 2010 grant collaboration with the tribe and the University of Arizona to promote exercise and a healthy lifestyle. It was part of a study to reduce cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes risk factors in the community. That effort was aimed at youth to become influencers and, ideally promote health in their community.
By 2015, — after the four-year, $765,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health and Indian Health Service ended — the station could be found on FM airwaves.
The station now operates on a modest budget with grants and support from the tribe, DeFord said. It rebranded to become Walapai 100.9 “Walapai’s Best Variety” in October 2025.
The station earned a $4,200 grant this summer from the Arizona Local News Foundation for new equipment. Most of the station’s equipment is about 20 years old, DeFord said.
Radio club members from elementary to high school are eager for the new gear while training in the booth to put together their show. Later this month, they will deliver 250 more radios to Peach Springs residents. For now, they write and read copy, conduct interviews and infuse their personal music taste into the show, picking favorite songs.
Eight-year-old Dahvie Hornell is an Olivia Rodrigo fan. He quietly clicks around in the booth computer to find two songs for that day’s show. “Driver’s License” is a fave, he says.
Like sneaking vegetables into brownies and smoothies, the club has fun while also growing critical thinkers. Some say they aspire to be reporters, others are building new skills. About 1% of journalists identify as Indigenous, according to the American Society of News Editors.
Jordan’s station experience — writing, coming up with questions and conducting interviews — has her considering the craft as a career. But she’s also into drawing.
“I like talking to people too, because I kind of feel untouchable,” Jordan says. “It’s a good way to connect and build more communication. And sometimes you just try to get through the public speaking.
“You’re trying to learn leadership too, because you have to talk and do what other people wouldn’t do,” she said.
“The value is priceless”
The mirrored sunglasses on Duane Clarke’s shaved head give off law enforcement vibes.
But that’s only part of the story.
His three-decade career in public safety included working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Huapalai Tribe, with more than 2,300 enrolled members.
But at heart, Clarke is a DJ.
The radio waves connected Clarke to the wider world when he was a Peach Springs teen in the 1980s.
Living with his grandma and then family friends, his passion became clear: As he hooked up a radio antenna to his stereo, he found voices and music that made sense to him — all the way from Las Vegas to a kid on Hualapai tribal land.
“My mom had no idea. My grandma had no idea. Why I would be asking, can we go to Vegas? Visit the radio station?
“I was a very shy guy. Very shy, Hualapai kiddo and I told them I want to be a DJ,” he recalled. “When you grow up in a reservation, you don’t have that many friends or people to look up to.”
But the voices from 160 miles away became his inspiration. The shy kid sent out audition tapes and little by little, a career began. He earned a GED, his on-air name of Chris Kelly and a part-time job. Then a full-time gig in Verde Valley. He was headed to Vegas before he decided to explore public safety.
“That first time I was on the air for one hour,” he said. “I remember my first walk-up song — by Donna Summer.”
Now, he is the chairman of the Hualapai Tribe.
And the radio station is the heartbeat of the tribe, Clarke said.
“The station is really special because it’s not only having that voice on the radio. It’s your friend, it’s your relative,” he said. “No matter who that voice is, they’re part of your household, and they provide that information. If there’s something major that’s happened in the community, they provide that comfort for you. We laugh with you, we cry with you, but we’re with you. And that’s how I feel about radio.”
He sees radio as both the glue of the community and as a possibility for the youth.
Today, voice work and radio are a hobby, Clarke said. And they are an example to the radio club and others to dream big, to know your voice can be heard and you can listen for others’ and those can move you toward a career and a larger life.
“It’s not just that boy in the box that is going to play the music for you,” he said. “It’s going out meeting the people, greeting, and I think that’s what made me today is if I never got into radio, I would have never carried those skills into law enforcement. What I learned from radio to law enforcement to where I’m at today is what I carry through.”
“The value of this station is very priceless because it’s not just a radio station that plays music. It’s just not a radio station that informs. But at the end of the story, this is the community’s radio station.”
GamYu and Han’kyu
“GamYu” (gahm-yoo) is both hello and how are you.
It is one of the hundreds of Hualapai daily phrases on Walapai 100.9.
As part of tying the station to the tribe, daily phrases including “play nice” and “grandmother is making bread” and “my mother is boiling beans” are recorded and spliced into content on air throughout the day.
“It was hard to get our community members to be present to speak, but at least we can put out the Walapai daily phrase,” said Walapai Media Program Manager Lyndee Hornell. “We do have books, we do have materials, and so to make it simple to at least have the language out there in the community, it was easier to say a phrase.
“So if we weren’t having a speaker in our studio every single day, at least there was that little component to have the language out there,” she said. “That’s the part of the revitalization, that way our community members can at least hear the language out there.”
Hornell, whose family worked at McCormick Ranch in Scottsdale, said her grandmother, Vivian, encouraged her to learn English.
“Because she wanted her kids to live in a life without the harshness,” she said. “It just goes back into how they were treated and everything.”
When Hornell was in eighth grade at Peach Springs Elementary, there was a bilingual class but it went away in the early 2000s, she said.
“So now we are trying to revitalize that, to have the community at least hear a segment,” she said, adding her advice to the radio club. “I was telling the kids we should at least start and end with two words: “GamYu and Han’kyu.”
The words for hello and thank you (honk-yoo) are a start, she said.
“So at least you can do those two words in the beginning and end,” Hornell said. “Then the person you’re talking to can at least learn two words.”
That vocabulary, the music — from country to EDM and tribal beats — news and even advertisements, is the language connecting Peach Springs residents, the tribe and anyone scrolling radio stations while driving along Historic Route 66.
“You can play whatever you want on the radio, but each and every person in our community will take that time, no matter what, in this digital world that we are in,” Chairman Clarke said. “They will go back to the old terrestrial radio, 100.9 on their radio dial, in their office, and they will listen to their friends, their relatives, meaning the community.”
“And this station will always bring this community together, no matter what.”
Shannon Conner’s education reporting is funded through an Arizona Local News Foundation grant.
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