Gila River: Thirteen Thousand on O'odham Land

The Akimel O'odham of the Gila River Indian Community had watched their water disappear for sixty years before the federal government built a prison camp on their reservation.

In the eighteen fifties and sixties, the O'odham were the most productive agricultural community in the Arizona Territory, supplying grain and flour to Army posts and California-bound travelers. Then Anglo settlers upstream began diverting the Gila River water the O'odham's canal system depended on. By the eighteen eighties, the agricultural economy that had sustained the Gila River communities for generations had collapsed. The federal government observed this and did not intervene.

In July of nineteen forty-two, the War Relocation Authority opened the Gila River War Relocation Center on the Gila River Indian Community's reservation south of Chandler. Thirteen thousand three hundred and forty-eight Japanese Americans were incarcerated there over the next three and a half years. The O'odham people, whose own water had been taken by the federal government's inaction, now watched their neighbors confined on their land by the same federal government, under the same broad authority.

Tribal members were employed in constructing the facilities. Inside the camp, Japanese American residents organized schools, published newspapers, and established agricultural operations. A general strike in nineteen forty-two protested camp conditions. Many of the people confined were American citizens whose families had lived in California for two or three generations.

The Gila River War Relocation Center closed in November of nineteen forty-five. The land reverted to the Gila River Indian Community. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark. The O'odham history of the Gila River valley, including the systematic water theft that preceded the camp by sixty years, is documented at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where the complexity of federal power in this desert is laid out across one continuous institutional record.