Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin

By Jennifer Bess

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing examines the ways in which the Akimel O’odham (“River People”) and their ancestors, the Huhugam, adapted to economic, political, and environmental constraints imposed by federal Indian policy, the Indian Bureau, and an encroaching settler population in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. Fundamental to O’odham resilience was their connection to their sense of peoplehood and their himdag (“lifeway”), which culminated in the restoration of their water rights and a revitalization of their Indigenous culture.
 
Author Jennifer Bess examines the Akimel O’odham’s worldview, which links their origins with a responsibility to farm the Gila River Valley and to honor their history of adaptation and obligations as “world-builders”—co-creators of an evermore life-sustaining environment and participants in flexible networks of economic exchange. Bess considers this worldview in context of the Huhugam–Akimel O’odham agricultural economy over more than a thousand years. Drawing directly on Akimel O’odham traditional ecological knowledge, innovations, and interpretive strategies in archives and interviews, Bess shows how the Akimel O’odham engaged in agricultural economy for the sake of their lifeways, collective identity, enduring future, and actualization of the values modeled in their sacred stories.
 
Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing highlights the values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation fundamental to Akimel O’odham lifeways and chronicles the contributions the Akimel O’odham have made to American history and to the history of agriculture. The book will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous, American Southwestern, and agricultural history.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646421053

Book preview

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing

The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin

Jennifer Bess

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Louisville

© 2021 by University Press of Colorado

Published by University Press of Colorado

245 Century Circle, Suite 202

Louisville, Colorado 80027

All rights reserved

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-1-64642-082-7 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64642-105-3 (ebook)

https://doi.org/10.5876/9781646421053

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bess, Jennifer, author.

Title: Where the red-winged blackbirds sing : the Akimel O’odham and cycles of agricultural transformation in the Phoenix Basin / Jennifer Bess.

Description: Louisville : University Press of Colorado, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021001175 (print) | LCCN 2021001176 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646420827 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646421053 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Pima Indians—Agriculture—Gila River (N.M. and Ariz.) | Pima Indians—Gila River (N.M. and Ariz.)—Economic conditions. | Gila River Indian Reservation (Ariz.)—Agriculture. | Gila River (N.M. and Ariz.)—History.

Classification: LCC E99.P6 B47 2021 (print) | LCC E99.P6 (ebook) | DDC 979.1004/9745529—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001175

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001176

Portions of chapters 1 and 4 were previously published as Jennifer Bess, The Right to More Than a Cabbage Patch: Akimel O’odham Sacred Stories and the Form and Content of Petitions to the Federal Government, 1899–1912, Ethnohistory 63, no. 1 (2016): 119–142. Reprinted with permission.

Portions of chapter 2 were published as Self-Fashioning for Survivance: Akimel O’odham Story and History in the Hispanic and Early American Periods, The Journal of the Southwest 61, no. 4 (2019): 725–764. Reprinted with permission.

The epigraphs for chapter 3 and the conclusion are exerpts from Nathan Allen, Excerpts from: Keeper of the House. Wicazo Sa Review 9, no. 2 (1993): 50–61. Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 5 and portions of chapter 6 were adapted from Jennifer Bess, The Price of Pima Cotton: The Cooperative Testing and Demonstration Farm at Sacaton, Arizona, and the Decline of the Pima Agricultural Economy, 1907–1920, Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2015): 171–189. Reprinted with permission.

Portions of chapter 6 were previously published as Jennifer Bess, The New Egypt, Pima Cotton and the Role of Native Wage Labor on the Cooperative Testing and Demonstration Farm, Sacaton, Arizona, 1907–1917, Agricultural History 88, no. 4 (2014): 491–516. Reprinted with permission.

To my mom, Lindsay, and my husband, David

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Adaptation, Innovation, and Co-Creation: World-Building in Story and History

2. Strategic Adaptations in the Pimería Alta through the Hispanic and Early American Periods

3. The Akimel O’odham and the Growth of the American West, c. 1846–1871

4. Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Contest for Inclusion during the Years of Famine, 1871–1910

5. Pima Cotton and the New Egypt: US Agricultural Development, the Agricultural Experimental Station in Sacaton, and the Allotment of the Gila River Indian Reservation, 1907–1920

6. The Price of Pima Cotton: Wage Labor and the Akimel O’odham Agricultural Economy, 1907–1920

7. Agriculture and Peoplehood in Transition: The Akimel O’odham in the Interwar Period

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1. PIMA LAND, by Uretta Thomas

0.2. "Kéhivina, Tramping Out Wheat," by George Webb

1.1. Map of Hohokam Culture area

1.2. Kâ’mâl tkâk (Thin Leather), 1902

1.3. Superstition Mountains

2.1. Map of the northern Pimería Alta, 1691–1767

2.2. Threshing wheat

2.3. Winnowing wheat

2.4. Map of the Territory of New Mexico, 1853

2.5. Detail of Parke’s map

2.6. Akimel O’odham and camp, 1848

2.7. Map of the Gadsden Purchase, 1858

2.8. Detail of Ehrenberg’s map

2.9. Antonio Azul, before 1884

3.1. Maricopa Wells Stage Station, 1878

3.2. Map of the Territory and Military Department of New Mexico, 1859

3.3. Detail of the War Department’s map

3.4. The Pima Agency in 1871

3.5. Map of southwestern Arizona showing wagon roads and trails, 1860s?

3.6. Detail of the southwestern Arizona map

3.7. Drawing of a Pima village, by George Webb

3.8. Antonito Azul, 1872

3.9. Woman loading kiâhâ, 1902

4.1. George Webb, October 30, 1941

4.2. Map of Arizona near Camp McDowell, 1867

4.3. Gila River bed, January 1902

4.4. Map showing location of Pimas and available water

4.5. Gila River Reservation and surroundings, 1879

4.6. Gila River Reservation and Pima Agency, 1883

4.7. Pima and Maricopa Indian Reservation and environs in 1859 and today

4.8. Hugh Patten, 1908

4.9. Lewis D. Nelson, 1908

4.10. Antonito, Antonio and Harry Azul, c. 1870

5.1. Pima cotton seed bag

5.2. Map of the US Experimental Station at Sacaton and surroundings, 1908?

5.3. Prize-winning agricultural exhibits, sixth annual Indian Agricultural Fair, 1916

5.4. Blueprint of Experimental Station irrigation works

5.5. Layout of Experimental Station sections, 1921

6.1. Women working at the Experimental Station in 1909

6.2. Promotional pamphlet with land prices, profit estimates, and illustrations

6.3. Women gathering boughs from willow trees along the Gila

6.4. Women preparing materials for their baskets

6.5. Weaver with miniature baskets, early 1930s

7.1. Front page of Skoek Oi-Dak Chick-Pan, July 15, 1936

7.2. US Experimental Station at Sacaton, c. 1929

7.3. Farm agent Nelson José demonstrates garden planting

7.4. The first irrigation water on the South Side Area, January 1935

7.5. Map of Gila River Reservation Areas under cultivation, 1937

7.6. Cartoon illustrating The O. & M. Disorder 1937

7.7. Farmer mowing his crop, 1932

7.8. Pure-bred Hereford heifers going to pasture, 1934

7.9. Bailed cotton being transported to market in Chandler, c. 1930

8.1. PIMA LAND, by Ivan T.

8.2. Chief Antonio Azul in front of his home, 1900

8.3. Repurposed utility poles on the Gila River Interpretive Trail, 2019

Acknowledgments

I came to the history of Akimel O’odham agriculture by way of a winding road illuminated by many guides and mentors. As an Anglo-American scholar with a doctorate in Early Modern British literature, I began my studies on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean with my dissertation on nature, empire, and visions of the Americas from the perspective of British explorers, scientists, and poets. But in 2001 the death of my friend and colleague, Carol Weinberg, set into motion a series of radical changes not only to my career path, but to my values and priorities. After numerous turns, her legacy brought me into the ideological and geographic landscape that has given birth to this manuscript as my study of the exercise of power expanded to include its abuse and the lived experiences of challenging and resisting forces of disempowerment and hegemony. After having spent years exploring the view from the east, I became curious about the view from the west and sought out memoirs and essays penned by Native American authors. As an educator, the federal boarding schools attracted my interest, and in writing about foodways at the Chilocco Indian Industrial School, I stumbled upon a reference to the USDA Experimental Station in Sacaton, Arizona. The intersection of US government agencies, Egyptian plants, and Indigenous labor and traditional ecological knowledge captured my attention and has held it ever since. From that beginning, I have endeavored to understand the nuances of the Experimental Station’s operations and its effects in relation to Akimel O’odham history, agriculture, and lifeways, all of which are essential to the story that follows.

Every book, despite the number of authors on its cover, is the product of many contributors. I am indebted to more guides than I could possibly recognize here, but I’ll begin by acknowledging the importance of the frameworks and meaning-making strategies of Native American storytellers, scholars, and authors including N. Scott Momaday, Jennifer Nez Denatdale, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Mark Trahant, Matika Wilbur, and Ofelia Zepeda, all of whom I’ve been fortunate to hear speak and respond generously to audience questions. In addition, artisans including my longtime friend and weaving teacher, Katherine Paymella (Diné), and the O’odham basket weavers present at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Celebration of Basketry and Native Foods in 2015 have been generous in sharing the many ways in which art reflects and informs their values and lifeways. These perspectives shaped my inquiries and inspired the inclusion of Akimel O’odham poetry and artwork in this manuscript. I extend my thanks to all of the artists, collectors, and archivists who created, preserved, and/or contributed the illustrations and maps that appear this work, and I include a special thanks to the Ramsey family for sharing the photographs of Robert E. Ramsey.

This research was undertaken in conjunction with the Gila River Indian Community, Cultural Resource Management Program, and the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project under funding of the Department of the Interior, US Bureau of Reclamation, under the Tribal Self-Governance Act of 1994 (P.L. 103-413). I extend my esteem and gratitude to the people who live and work in the Gila River Indian Community today. Their support has come in many forms, and I owe special thanks to historian and Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project Director David H. DeJong, M. Kyle Woodson and Chris Loendorf of the Gila River Indian Community Cultural Resource Management Program, and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Barnaby V. Lewis for the resources they provided and for their feedback, contributions, and wisdom. I would also like to express special gratitude to the George and Hattie Webb descendents for permission to include George Webb’s artwork in this text. In particular, I thank Community Elder Robert P. Johnson, who is Webb’s grandson and serves the community as a language specialist at the Huhugam Heritage Center, for sharing his interests, insights, and artistic impressions.

I thank all of my academic mentors through the years, and, in particular, Sr. Anne O’Donnell, SND, who has modeled thoroughness and attention to detail as my dissertation director and ever since. In addition, librarians from around the country have demonstrated to me the importance of tenacity and creativity in seeking and understanding sources. I take this opportunity to express my appreciation for all librarians and extend particular gratitude to those who serve the institutions where I have spent the most time: the National Archives and Records Administration, the John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, the US Department of the Interior, and the University of Arizona Library Special Collections in Tucson. I owe a particular debt to the librarians of the Interior Department librarians and my home institution, Goucher College, for they have gone out of their way to assist this journey and locate rare sources. The Arizona Historical Society archivists have worked equally hard to locate sources, and I thank them as well.

I’d also like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues and students at Goucher College. In addition to providing funding for travel and interlibrary loan services, Goucher’s environment of support and inquiry has been fundamental to the development of this work. My special thanks go to Professors Irline François, Seble Dawit, and Rick Pringle for their encouragement.

The following work was also encouraged by Colleen O’Neill, editor of the Western Historical Quarterly at the time when I submitted my first essay on Pima cotton’s genesis. Her feedback on my 2015 essay was challenging and encouraging in precisely the right proportion. The anonymous readers serving the University Press of Colorado provided equally valuable feedback on early drafts of the manuscript and helped to refine and focus it. I extend my gratitude to them, to the Editorial Committee, and to the careful attention of the entire staff, especially Charlotte Steinhardt, Daniel Pratt, and Laura Furney. Thanks also to copyeditor Alison Tartt for her sharp eyes. I thank all of these professionals for their expertise and guidance through the long process of transforming a manuscript into the following work.

Finally, I thank my friends and family for their encouragement and, in the case of my Uncle Scott Keep, for connecting me with so many knowledgeable people. To my mom, for your faith in me, your affection for maps, and your love of life-long learning, and to my husband, for understanding my need for solitude and for taking on the task of formatting the figures that appear in this text—my most profound thanks.

Introduction

The name Pima was given to the tribe in a peculiar way. It is said that at one time some Spaniards came to an old woman and talked to her, probably asking her the name of the tribe of Indians, but the old woman, not understanding, only shook her head and said pimatch, or in English: I don’t know. This, I presume, the Spaniards took as the name of the tribe and so they are now known as the Pima Indians.

—Mary Breckenridge, The Pima Indians, in The Native American, 1912.¹

With their poetry and artwork, Akimel O’odham or Pima students celebrated PIMA LAND, home to their people since time immemorial (figure 0.1). Murray Pachecho illustrated the broad valley dotted by the Sonoran Desert’s characteristic saguaro cacti and agave as Uretta Thomas’s poem brought the landscape alive with the sounds of birdsong, drums and rattles, and the life-sustaining water of the Gila River. At the time these students were attending the Phoenix Indian School, the Salt-Gila or Phoenix Basin had also become home to Phoenix, Arizona.² The city had a population topping 65,000 and was unknowingly growing toward an explosion of aviation-related development sparked by World War II.³ As ancient features of the landscape were being destroyed or obscured by development, the students sought traces of the past and strove to understand the environment that sustained the Akimel O’odham (River People) and their ancestors, the Huhugam. Translating Huhugam as those who have perished, today’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Barnaby V. Lewis emphasizes that, while archaeologists tend to mark the beginning of Huhugam tenure in the Gila River Valley c. 300 CE, the O’odham believe their ancestry dates much earlier.⁴ The O’odham tradition, he details, is that they have lived on this land since the time of the first humans, a period that for archaeologists extends from the present back to at least 10,000 B.C.⁵ At the peak of their irrigation culture, c. 800–1100 CE, the Huhugam constructed a network of canals branching from the Gila River and its tributary, the Salt River, into over 100,000 acres cultivated with food and fiber crops. In the centuries following a downsizing of the local prehistoric culture (c. 1100–1450), descendants living in small villages met late seventeenth-century Spanish missionaries with fine cotton blankets and ample supplies of food. By the mid- to late eighteenth century, the Akimel O’odham had added the cultivation of Spanish crops such as winter wheat and melon varieties to ancestral crops including corn, squash, tepary beans, and cotton.

Figure 0.1. PIMA LAND, by Uretta Thomas, illustrated by Murray Pachecho. From The New Trail: A Book of Creative Writing by Indian Students (Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Indian School, 1941), 27.

Since the Gila River remained at the edge of the Spanish frontier, the Akimel O’odham were free to choose how best to express their collective identity in relation to new opportunities, and they chose growth. So rapid was their restoration of Huhugam irrigation canals in enabling the expansion of their agricultural production that eighteenth-century missionaries lavished praise on their wheat fields. Two to three generations later, Akimel O’odham farmers were able to feed approximately 60,000 argonauts passing through their villages on their way to California between 1848 and 1854.⁶ By 1859, the Phoenix Basin had come into American jurisdiction, and Congress established the Pima and Maricopa Indian Reservation (also called the Gila River Indian Reservation or the Gila River Reservation and, today, the Gila River Indian Community) as the home to approximately 3,770 Akimel O’odham and 472 Pee Posh (Maricopa).⁷ Although the Sonoran region had attracted its earliest Anglo-American residents for its mining possibilities, by the 1860s, Arizona’s first Territorial Assembly was promoting the agricultural potential of the fertile and well watered valleys of the Gila and its tributaries.⁸ Military detachments had appeared during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the gold rush had brought the Phoenix Basin to federal attention as a strategic respite for migrants. The first step in the transformation of Anglo settlement from a cluster of modest hay camps growing alfalfa for soldiers’ horses into a center of commercial agriculture arrived soon thereafter with the coalescence of public and private interests embodied in legislation such as the Desert Land Act of 1877.⁹

Due to the success and generosity of the Akimel O’odham, whom weary forty-niners called the Good Samaritans of the desert, the town of Phoenix rose from the metaphorical ashes of Huhugam irrigation technology, and Anglo settlers began diverting upstream water from the Gila and Salt rivers, depriving Akimel O’odham farmers of the natural resource critical to arid-land farming.¹⁰ In his memoir, A Pima Remembers, George Webb eulogized the transformation that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries: The green of those Pima fields spread along the river for many miles in the old days when there was plenty of water. . . . Now you can look out across the valley and see the green alfalfa and cotton spreading for miles on the farms of white people who irrigate their land with hundreds of pumps running night and day. Increasingly aware of the potential of this desert oasis, by 1900, Anglo agronomists compared the Gila River to the Nile and labored to convert its ancient irrigation canals into the bloodstream of Arizona agribusiness. Referring to the riparian birds that had serenaded his people’s fields in the days of his grandfather, Webb continued, Some of those farms take their water from big ditches dug hundreds of years ago by Pimas, or the ancestors of Pimas. Over there across the valley is where the red-wing blackbirds are singing today.¹¹

A partnership between the Indian Office of the US Interior Department and the newly formed Bureau of Plant Industry of the US Department of Agriculture marked a major advancement in the development of the local agricultural economy that separated Webb’s age from his grandfather’s. In 1907, the two federal agencies established a jointly managed Cooperative Testing and Demonstration Farm, located in Sacaton, Arizona, home to the Pima Indian Agency located on the Gila River Reservation. This cooperative farm, known as the US Experimental Station or Field Station, was a prototype for further efforts coordinated by the two agencies on reserved Native American lands, and its success depended upon skills the Akimel O’odham had developed over centuries of cultivating staples such as native cotton.¹² Cotton, as the botanists of the Bureau of Plant Industry believed, was to be the white gold of the Southwest, and the quest for new, marketable varieties lured plant hunters to arid regions around the world. The collaboration led to the development of Pima cotton, an American-Egyptian variety still celebrated today for its strength and softness. Its genesis provides a focal point to the following study and one of many chapters in the ongoing story of an adaptive, resourceful people able and eager to change in ways that were consistent with O’odham himdag, the Piman lifeway.

As is the case in many Native American languages, O’odham (or O’otham) translates as People; himdag (or himthag) denotes a way of life or culture and bears additional resonances of Indian Rights or Human Rights, worth or dignity.¹³ As defined today by the Gila River Indian Community’s Huhugam Heritage Center, Our Himthag teaches us to respect all things; the rivers, the mountains, all plants and animals, rain, dust storms, the heat, the cold, the earth. It teaches us to respect our elders, our spouse, our children, our relatives and non-relatives. It teaches us to walk this world in a humble way and to give thanks for the crops and animals that give us nourishment and our entire O’otham Universe. The Heritage Center’s definition, with its emphasis on actions (respecting, walking, thanking), evokes additional meanings of himthag, or -thag, which include being able to walk or accomplish work with the hands—both being characteristics of being human, moving through the world with intentionality and performing one’s labor in ways that actualize the values of dignity and humility.¹⁴ More specifically, the O’odham worldview links their origins with their responsibility to farm the Gila River Valley and to honor their history of adaptation and their obligations as world-builders.

World-Building and the Akimel O’odham Agricultural Economy

The Akimel O’odham agricultural economy shaped and was shaped by the opportunities and adversities brought by Europeans and Euro-Americans. To do justice to the ways in which the Akimel O’odham acted as agents of change in the agricultural economy of the Gila River Valley and beyond, the following story strives to live up to two imperatives: first, to begin with the Huhugam–Akimel O’odham relationship with their homeland and the values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation that are fundamental to their worldview and revitalized, defended, and advanced through their lifeways; and, second, to demonstrate Akimel O’odham contributions to American history. Regarding the first imperative, the present study builds on Donald M. Bahr’s emphasis on the theme of world-building as conveyed in O’odham oral tradition, extending the idea to their collective identity as world-builders in story, in ideology, and in history, all of which evidence their experience of cycles of expansion and contraction and their commitment to self-renewal and self-determination.¹⁵ In addition to introducing the ancient history of the peoples of the Phoenix Basin, then, the first chapter endeavors to live up to the call to action articulated by Polly Stewart, Steve Siporin, C. W. Sullivan III, and Suzi Jones in Worldviews and the American West: To appreciate, acknowledge, and value the multiplicity of worldviews . . . is one of the highest goals we can ethically aspire to in the world of scholarship.¹⁶ This study thus begins not with settler-colonialism, but with the story the Akimel O’odham tell of their ancestors’ relation to the Phoenix Basin, its waterways, and the lifeways they evolved to actualize and reenact their values.¹⁷ The O’odham worldview as articulated in sacred story will be presented not only as history, but as an analytic tool as valuable to making sense of the past and understanding the present as are Western heuristic lenses.¹⁸

After the first chapter, with its multiple functions, subsequent chapters examine the historic period that began in the sixteenth century with Spanish penetration into the Southwest. Regarding the second imperative, each begins with some background regarding the colonial, national, or international trends relevant to understanding the ways in which the Akimel O’odham—with their responsibility as world-builders—participated in the changing economic landscape. In the early historic period, Akimel O’odham interaction with the Spanish introductions, contextualized by the experiences of their linguistic and cultural relatives throughout the Pimería Alta (the northern region of the Sonoran Desert), provides insight into their acts of resistance, self-advocacy, and self-reinvention in the face of adversity, as well as their attempts to foster culturally relevant growth through the Hispanic and early American periods (see figure 0.2). The story then follows the tensions, conflicts, and synergies of the American period in the Phoenix Basin. After a brief Golden Age of agricultural productivity in the mid-nineteenth century, water shortages and the Forty Years of Famine between 1870 and 1910 subjected the Akimel O’odham to environmental and economic challenges to which they responded with strategies inherited and adapted from their ancestors throughout the Pimería Alta. Complementing previous scholarly examination of the ways in which they negotiated their exclusion from the dominant economy by re-creating economic niches for themselves, chapters covering the period between the mid-nineteenth century and World War II will explore a suite of strategies employed by the Akimel O’odham farmers, wage workers, and leaders aiming to maximize the opportunities afforded by Anglo-Americans and minimize or mitigate threats to their lifeways.¹⁹

Figure 0.2. Kéhivina: Tramping Out Wheat, by George Webb. The Akimel O’odham adopted Spanish wheat-threshing techniques. Courtesy of George and Hattie Webb’s descendents, including Robert P. Johnson, and the University of Arizona Library, Special Collections. From George Webb, A Pima Remembers, c. 1958–1959, AZ 154, University of Arizona Library, Special Collections.

Among their leaders, Head Chief Antonio Azul (Uva-a-Tuka, Spread Leg, or Mavit-Kawutam, Puma Shield) stands out not only for his long tenure as chief of the Pee Posh and Akimel O’odham (1855–1910), but for the significance of his adaptive and multifaceted means of negotiating change. Today the Gila River Indian Community’s Governor Stephen Roe Lewis honors him as A warrior, a statesman and ambassador and a person of moral authority.²⁰ Speaking at the Third Annual Antonio Azul Day in 2018, Lewis praised the many roles Azul played in defending the autonomy of his people. Whether cooperating with allies, practicing self-advocacy, challenging injustice, or, potentially, enabling the acts of resistance organized by his contemporaries, Azul protected, advanced, and reinvented O’odham lifeways for generations to come.²¹ As Lewis elaborated before the crowd gathered at Azul’s gravesite, It’s important what Chief Azul left for us his teaching, his example of traditional O’odham leadership that sometimes we don’t see very often. We commit ourselves to not forget about those teachings.²² Azul embodies O’odham values that unite the past, present, and future of a people who navigate periods of expansion and contraction with hope, adaptivity, and tenacity. During his tenure, the 1870s brought resource deprivation that resulted in extreme hardship, including water shortages that left fields barren for decades to come and, by the mid-twentieth century, led outside observers to conclude that Akimel O’odham farmers had become as rusty as their farm tools.²³ But even in times of famine, the Akimel O’odham eschewed presenting themselves as victims and instead continued to strive to live up to their responsibilities as world-builders, emphasizing their agency and their rightful role in America’s economic network.

The stories of individuals like Jabanimó, Antonio Azul, Koovit Ka Cheenkum, Chir-Kum, Hugh Patten (or Patton), Lewis D. Nelson, Lloyd Allison, Manuel Lowe, Anna Moore Shaw, George Webb, and so many others bear witness to the ways in which the Akimel O’odham have acted as agents of change in the Southwest. In specific reference to its agricultural economy, as summarized by the Button family, who own and operate Ramona Farms in the community today, the farming traditions of the Akimel O’otham must be acknowledged for their importance to the development of this great country we live in. This has been left out of the history books.’ ²⁴ In response, this history of south-central Arizona’s agricultural economy highlights Akimel O’odham actions and voices, traditional ecological knowledge, innovations, and interpretive strategies.²⁵ As self-fashioned world-builders, the River People have demonstrated their ability to negotiate and initiate change in ways that revive and reinvent their vision of themselves as co-creators of an ever more life-sustaining environment and as participants in flexible networks of economic exchange. From their ancient histories as told in sacred stories, through their adaptations of Spanish crops, to their increasingly multifaceted efforts to preserve their natural resources and augment their self-determination, the Akimel O’odham have actualized their skill in survivance, a term coined by Gerald Vizenor to signify the reciprocal relationship of survival and resistance characterizing Indigenous victories over the forces of settler-colonialism and its long wake.²⁶ While an examination of Akimel O’odham history from World War II into the twenty-first century merits a study of its own, the following study of their agricultural economy from prehistory through the implementation of the Indian Reorganization Act ends with a concluding chapter intended to provide a snapshot into some of the forms that O’odham values and lifeways are taking today.

Economic Anthropology and the Peoplehood Matrix

This economic history is indebted to several heuristic lenses. As indicated above, these include the analytical tools articulated in Akimel O’odham sacred stories and expressed through time-tested values including adaptation, innovation, co-creation, generosity, and reciprocity. The whole of chapter 1 will be devoted to exploring their story and their history of world-building. Additional interpretive strategies are drawn from economic anthropology and the Peoplehood Matrix. Economic anthropologist Stephen Gudeman developed a general economic anthropology that knits together the concept of culture with the study of economics by drawing from André Gunder Frank’s dependency theory, which described the unequal flow of goods and services as the Development of Underdevelopment.²⁷ Gudeman also expanded the work of Marshall Sahlins, who argued: "Structurally, ‘the economy’ does not exist. Rather than a distinct and specialized organization, ‘economy’ is something that generalized social groups and relations, notably kinship groups and relations, do. Economy is rather a function of the society than a structure."²⁸ Synthesizing these materials, Gudeman then detailed the relationship between the making of culture and the making of value or surplus and focused his argument on the role innovation plays in wealth, emphasizing that the creation of new value occurs within the context of human relationships, community, and networks of communities.

In The Anthropology of Economy, he explained that wealth is created when aspects of a community’s base (foundation or commons) are transformed into items of exchange, commodities and capital.²⁹ The base, for Gudeman, "consists of a community’s shared interests, which include lasting resources (such as land and water), produced things, and ideational constructs such as knowledge, technology, laws, practices, skills, and customs.³⁰ As his theory emphasizes that local human and natural resources, technologies, and ideas share equal places in affording opportunities to develop wealth and augment collective well-being, Gudeman offers one alternative to dualistic core/periphery or Western/non-Western paradigms that pose a dilemma to scholars who seek to de-center Europe without mimicking its traditions of historiography.³¹ In Native American studies, Tressa Berman’s examination of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara women’s work complements Gudeman’s studies by illuminating multiple dimensions of Sahlins’s claim: as an economy is a function of culture, so is culture reenacted, made visible, and reinvented, through the economic exchanges, mechanisms of wealth redistribution, and relationships of reciprocity typical to Indigenous communities. Duane Champagne has called such reenactments tribal capitalism," emphasizing the ways that wealth is used to strengthen relationships.³² The Akimel O’odham, as Barnaby V. Lewis emphasizes, are not interested in the acquisition of wealth for its own sake; their base consists of their ideas of world-building, their agricultural economy, and the networks of exchange it has afforded over time.³³ World-building, in other words, is relational.

Scholarship focusing on the political economy has been able to highlight Indigenous persistence and influence without minimizing the violence of war, colonization, and resource extraction. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has insisted that Native American scholarship acknowledge the colonial framework of US history and document the ways in which Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques.³⁴ Indigenous adaptations, as demonstrated in works such as Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire and Michael Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations, have shaped economic development at local, regional, and national levels.³⁵ Taking a regional approach to economic power analysis, Thomas D. Hall traced the local manifestations of capitalistic growth in the Southwest in the context of the transition of the United States from a peripheral into a core economy as defined by Immanuel Wallerstein. In addition to providing a discussion of a continuum of economic incorporation, he acknowledged the ways in which Indigenous southwestern economies affected global markets and thereby demonstrated that the world-system paradigm is not limited to top-down or unilinear examinations of divestment: smaller, marginal economies, he insisted, play a more active role in the process [of incorporation] than is typically accorded them.³⁶ In allowing for a dialectic notion of regional development and uncovering the previously invisible ways that smaller communities have contributed to and shaped the global economy, Hall’s work joins forces with more specific case studies of Native American negotiations with the national economy, all of which reveal the ways in which the warp of colonial power and the weft of self-determination and resistance have intertwined to create the fabric of America’s development.³⁷

For the Akimel O’odham and their sense of peoplehood, that weft of self-determination is rooted in O’odham himdag, which, as detailed by O’odham scholar David Martínez, is more than the set of customs outlined by early twentieth-century ethnologists. It is a specific, place-based collective identity invented and reinvented as the River People adapted to their desert environment, developed their traditional ecological knowledge, and passed it on in their sacred stories and lifeways. Most often, continued Martínez, himthag is translated as ‘a way of life,’ ‘culture,’ or ‘tradition.’ However, in the case of O’odham Himthag, the concept becomes more specific to a people and a place. He points out that the stem -thag signifies ‘belonging to’ or ‘being related to’ a group, emphasizing the essence of learning in, with and about people-in-place.³⁸ Their himdag defines, grounds, and expresses their peoplehood in constant relationship with the Gila River.

The Peoplehood Matrix bridges the seemingly disparate interpretive lenses of Akimel O’odham sacred story and economic anthropology by highlighting the significance of place, relationships, and spiritual life or time-tested values as aspects of worldview. Developed by Edward H. Spicer, the concept of enduring peoples as defined through connection to territory or homeland, retention of language, and enduring religion or spiritual life illuminates the motives, collective resources, and strengths the Akimel O’odham have brought to the opportunities and hardships they have faced and to their interactions with allies and enemies over the centuries. To Spicer’s model, Robert K. Thomas added a fourth element, sacred history, and coined the term peoplehood in order to transcend the notion of statehood, nationalism, gender, ethnicity, and sectarian membership. Tom Holm, J. Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis then named and advanced the Peoplehood Matrix to be used as an epistemological framework in Native American studies.³⁹ For the Akimel O’odham, peoplehood, especially as related to land and sacred story, is expressed in and through the development and celebration of their agricultural economy and their ability to actualize their worldview.

Pima land, in Webb’s words, gave his forbearers all they needed. It was easy for them to be generous.⁴⁰ Theirs was an economy of plenty that, by the 1870s, had degraded into an economy of scarcity as Indian agents and settlers were followed by scientists and entrepreneurs who accelerated the extraction of Akimel O’odham natural resources, human resources, and what is called intellectual property today. The Phoenix Basin of the mid-nineteenth century marked a cultural crossroads linking east and west as Anglo-America depended upon the generosity of the Akimel O’odham to feed and protect the flood of gold-seekers heading to California. Soon after the Gila River Indian Reservation was established, forces of marginalization and exploitation devastated its landscape and threatened the survival of the Akimel O’odham; yet they continued to see themselves as farmers and world-builders, as allies in regional economic development, and as innovative co-creators involved in constant processes of adaptation and innovation. Referring specifically to upstream diversions of their irrigation water, anthropologist Frank Russell wrote at the turn of the century, A thrifty, industrious, and peaceful people that had been in effect a friendly nation rendering succor and assistance to emigrants and troops for many years when they sorely needed it was deprived of the rights inhering from centuries of residence. The marvel is that the starvation, despair, and dissipation that resulted did not overwhelm the tribe.⁴¹ Their story is one of cultural continuity and economic transformation despite and because of their geographic stability in their desert oasis and their protocols of hospitality, through which generosity functioned to win favor and sustain cooperation among allies.⁴²

The Huhugam–Akimel O’odham agricultural economy has played a part in local and regional and, later, national and international history from the extensive trade networks of the Huhugam between 800 and 1100; through the surplus grain and produce production in the Hispanic period and the movement of people and goods across the continent in the nineteenth century; to the Southwest’s entrance into the US cotton industry in the twentieth century. Akimel O’odham collective identity, self-fashioned from history and story into a set of political strategies, aims, and expectations, reveals not only the strength and fragility of identity through times of plenty and times of hardship, but the multidimensional nature of the Akimel O’odham economy as if it were a verb, as opposed to a noun. Through the centuries, their agricultural economy was something the Akimel O’odham did; it was and is an action executed for the sake of their self-interest, their lifeways, their collective identity, and their enduring future. It is an action, in other words, that has actualized their worldview and expressed the values and meaning-making strategies modeled in their sacred stories.

Additional Preliminary Comments

In relation to worldview-as-history and worldview as an interpretive tool, this study is limited by the fact that I am not an Odham but a Euro-American. My scholarship led to my relationship with the Akimel O’odham rather than growing from previous roots in the Gila River Indian Community. Acknowledging the limitations of a mind clouded by the fog of an Anglo-American education and the assumptions that accompany it, I have undertaken the journey of this scholarship striving to be as conscious as possible of the fact that even the words we use in describing another culture inevitably recode it to fit our own.⁴³ I am indebted to the insight and wisdom of others and imagine the following study as one small piece of an expansive, multigenerational process of learning and sharing. With the aim of minimizing or balancing such bias and recoding, I have endeavored to highlight Akimel O’odham perspectives throughout this study as much as possible within the context of an archival record dominated by Euro-Americans. Storytellers Thin Leather (Kâ’mâl tkâk or Kamal Thak, also translated Thin Buckskin) and Juan Smith tell the prehistory of the Phoenix Basin. In the early historic period, eye-witness accounts of O’odham actions, supplemented by collective memories and O’odham scholarship of today, must suffice to illuminate their aims and guiding principles. But following the turn of the century, the voices of Antonio Azul and his contemporaries, boarding school students, alumni/ae including George Webb, Governor David A. Johnson, and his contemporaries representing the Gila River Indian Community in the 1930s form a chorus of testimonials to the important contributions the Akimel O’odham have made to the Southwest’s agricultural development.

Regarding this volume’s utility to the Gila River Indian Community today, I hope that it replies to the Button family’s call to action regarding documenting the importance of Akimel O’odham contributions to American history. In addition, the final two chapters’ coverage of the US Experimental Station from the 1930s through the 1950s responds to the Gila River Indian Community’s Cultural Resource Management Program’s invitation to future research on the agreement between the USDA and the Indian Office and the reasons for the station’s closure.⁴⁴

Before beginning, I will also add that nomenclature posed various challenges. As explained by Akimel O’odham Phoenix Indian School student Mary Breckenridge in the epigraph above, the name Pima was given to the Akimel O’odham by the Spaniards and sometimes includes all Pimans or O’odham speakers, although it also refers specifically to the people of the middle Gila River.⁴⁵ Today the people of the Gila River Indian Community refer to themselves as Pima or Akimel O’odham. Contemporary historians and linguists tend to use the name Pima while archaeologists are more likely to use the Indigenous name. I have chosen to privilege the Indigenous name for the River People, although source use and chronology at times called for the non-Indigenous name, especially in relation to the earlier periods that include discussion of Piman peoples of the Pimería Alta. Similar consideration has gone into the decision to utilize Huhugam over Hohokam when referring to the ancient ancestors. As Lewis has explained, Huhugam is not the same as the archaeological term Hohokam, which is limited by time periods. And the archaeological term does not acknowledge ancient ancestors nor living O’odham who will become ancestors today or tomorrow. Painting a verbal picture of the relationship, he explained, "The term Hohokam encompasses only part of what O’odham refer to when they refer to their ancestors as Huhugam, and as a result, specific descriptions such as Hohokam ball courts are acceptable and may be clearer in terms of identifying a specific context of time and place.⁴⁶ Stressing a cultural continuity integral to enduring peoples, he elaborated: In the O’odham traditional view, Huhugam refers to O’odham ancestors, identifying a person from whom an individual is a lineal descendent. The O’odham family tree is inclusive of all O’odham. This has been related not by one particular person but has as its basis the Creation story that places the existence of life on earth from time immemorial.⁴⁷ This work will maintain the O’odham spelling, emphasizing these aspects of continuity or belonging to" as detailed Martínez in his etymological comments.

Since the Sonoran Desert was home to additional Indigenous groups and occupied by Spaniards and Anglo-Americans, chapters below offer clarifications regarding the evolution of ethno-racial categories where appropriate, but the subject has warranted its own studies.⁴⁸ I have distinguished between Euro-Americans and Anglo-Americans in order to emphasize the significant role of Anglo-Saxonism in American settler-colonialism. In keeping with my decision to privilege the name Akimel O’odham over Pima, I also have used Indigenous names for the Tohono O’odham (Desert People, whom the Spaniards called the Papago), with whom the Akimel O’odham share a language and a history, and the Yuman-speaking Pee Posh (or Piipaash).⁴⁹ I also note that, although the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh have lived together in the Gila River Reservation since it was established in 1859, this study focuses on the Akimel O’odham. The Pee Posh culture and experience is unique. Finally, since the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh adopted the name of the Gila River Indian Community in 1939, the year before this study’s principle content terminates, I employ the chronologically appropriate name, Gila River Reservation, for their territory until concluding remarks extend after the name change took place.⁵⁰

1

Adaptation, Innovation, and Co-Creation

World-Building in Story and History

THE legends I have told were told by the old Pimas many, many years ago to entertain and instruct their children. Today, these old stories are almost forgotten by the younger Pimas. I don’t think they should be forgotten. They are a part of Pima tradition. They show what life was like in those old days and what bothered the people such a floods and drought and old Ho’ok’s bad manners. They show what our ancestors thought was important. They help us to understand what is important today.

—George Webb, A Pima Remembers¹

Figure 1.1. Map of Hohokam Culture area. While nomenclature regarding the watershed differs among scholars, many see the Phoenix Basin as a portion of the Salt-Gila Basin or watershed. Courtesy of the Cultural Resource Management Program, Gila River Indian Community, Sacaton, Arizona.

Akimel O’odham sacred stories reveal a shared a faith in processes through which partner agents (natural and supernatural) co-create sustainable environments, grow in security, and reinvent prosperity together. They attest to the ability of dreams to come true and the power of agents of change and restoration to coax from the sky a rain of corn and pumpkins sufficient to feed hungry people and provide surplus for years to come.² In their oral traditions, the Akimel O’odham thus honor images of building, recovering, and progressing in ways that actualize O’odham himdag, which concerns and preserves the rights, dignity, and propriety—as well as the potential power—of human beings, of ceremonies, of living things, and of such life-giving entities as salt, the sun, and the ocean.³ In the O’odham worldview, cycles of abundance and hardship do not preclude evolution, but they do link past, present, and future. Devastating floods, journeys to the underworld, epic battles, peace with old enemies, and prophecies of newcomers connect the history of the Huhugam with present-day Akimel O’odham.⁴ As Barnaby V. Lewis explains, one translation of the word Huhugam is ancestors of the O’odham; but another, those who have perished, indicates that each Odham person becomes Huhugam after he or she dies.⁵ Emphasizing the oneness of the Huhugam–Akimel O’odham and referring to their continuous connection to the Phoenix Basin and its ancient ruins, he continues: "It is meaningless to say [the ruins] were occupied by the Huhugam people as if the Huhugam were different from the O’odham."⁶ People and landscape have endured and changed together.

Evoking the imperative that his people reinvent their values by reinterpreting his teachings, culture hero Siuuhu (Elder Brother, I’itoi, The Drinker, or Montezuma) sings, The earth is spinning around/And my people are spinning around with the earth.⁷ His is a plastic, dynamic way of knowing, in which cycles of expansion and contraction do not follow linear time and do not signify repetition, but instead denote continual change that will test his people and prompt their need to adapt, innovate, and seize opportunities to enter into relationships in order to co-create a life-sustaining world. One version ends:

And then it came down to where the Government stopped this fighting again, and now the Apache are our friends.

And that is why the old people say that this story is all true, what Siuuhu has done and said to the people from the beginning.⁸

To affirm sacred story as history, Lewis refers specifically to stories recorded in 1775 by Father Pedro Font and those provided by Thin Leather in the early twentieth century. He observes that "the stability of the O’Odham oral tradition for more than 125 years makes it highly plausible that these oral narratives do indeed refer to actual events that occurred five to six centuries in the past, events which transpired at sites that archaeologists refer to as Hohokam."⁹ Although he makes a distinction between the written versions and the sacred stories he and other storytellers share orally over the four longest nights of the year, Lewis affirms the value of both forms, citing the importance of the former in preserving the past and thereby communicating a timeless sense of collective identity.¹⁰

Echoing George Webb’s passage regarding the importance of storytelling in this chapter’s epigram, Lewis affirms: The O’odham are primarily an oral-history society. O’odham origins and history are recorded through oration and are passed from one generation to the next by practice of traditional protocols to memorialize significant events in the passage of time. O’odham oral traditions identify Huhugam as the ancestral relatives of the present-day O’odham, and that knowledge lies at the core of O’odham cultural identity.¹¹ He highlights characteristics intrinsic to peoplehood: a vigorous interest in their origins, an intrinsic relationship to their homeland, a commitment to preserving language and oral traditions, and a ceremonial cycle