“In order to restore the land, we must re-story it.”
---Gary Paul Nabhan
Land acknowledgements have become common practice as a way to honor past, present, and future contributions of Indigenous people. Here in Maricopa County, we occupy the unceded lands of the Akimel O'odham and Pee-Posh people.
Collectively, the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh call themselves the People of the River, both the Gila River, which flows into the Colorado River, and the Salt River which flows into the Gila.
The Akimel O’odham have been here in this place thousands of years. They are the northernmost group of the O’odham family, which includes the Hia C-ed O’odham – the People of the Sand – and the Tohono O’odham – the People of the Desert. Together, the O’odham are the people of the Sonoran Desert, which encompasses part of northern Sonora, Mexico and most of southern and Central Arizona.
The word Arizona comes from an O’odham word meaning “many springs”.
The Pee-Posh moved here from their traditional home further south on the Colorado River sometime in the 1500s as an alternative to enduring ongoing attacks from the Mojave and Quechan peoples. In the 1800s a formal alliance was made and the Akimel O’odham invited the Pee-Posh to be of this place, too.
Today, these peoples co-exist on the Gila River Indian Community, a sovereign nation of around 20,000 residing on around 375,000 acres, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, a federally recognized tribal community of around 10,000 residing on a little over 50,000 acres. There are more than twenty federally recognized Indian Communities in Arizona, and more than a quarter of Arizona land is tribal land.
Spanish colonizers who came into this place in the 16th century are the ones who called the Akimel O’odham the “Pima” and the Pee Posh the “Maricopa”. I live in Maricopa County. My in-laws live in Pima County.
As People of the River, the Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh relied on river water to irrigate their farm crops. But as early as 1868, their farmers started reporting unexpected water shortages. The cause of these shortages was that settlers from the United States were moving into the upper parts of the Gila River and diverting Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh water without consideration of the native communities downstream.
At about the same time, in the 1870s, other mostly Anglo-European settlers were also starting to farm in the Salt River Valley where Tempe and Phoenix are now. There were no active Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh communities in the Salt River Valley at that particular time; when the settlers found the eroded walls of multi-story homes, plazas, granaries, and outdoor ballcourts from what had been a thriving community, they were quick to call them ruins and attribute them to an ancient, long-gone people. When the settlers also found nearly 600 miles of irrigation canals created by the ancestors of the O’odham, they immediately started putting those canals to use for their own farming, without making a connection to or an acknowledgement of the existing native communities.
There was a time when the O’odham Tribes completely disappeared - hence the word “Huhugam”, which is the label for this period when the O’odham suddenly packed up and left.
By the beginning of the 20th century water shortages and crop failures were so common that the People of the River begin to go hungry and many starved. As one way to feed their families, they cut 100,000 acres of mature mesquite trees on the reservation to sell as firewood to get money to buy food. In 1925, an irrigation project that was supposed to restore water to the Akimel O’odham and the Pee Posh ended up effectively drying up the Gila River. After that, the People of the River went to court, and in 2004 – after nearly 80 years in court and nearly 150 years of active resistance and self-advocacy – the Gila River Indian Community won a decisive Water Rights Settlement – one of the largest in U.S. history – access to over 650,000 acre feet of water annually.
(The image at the top of the post is the great seal of the Gila River Indian Community.)
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