The Akimel O'odham: The River People Who Fed the Territory

In the eighteen fifties, the people most responsible for keeping United States Army posts supplied with grain in the Arizona Territory were not the Army's own contractors. They were the Akimel O'odham.

The Akimel O'odham, whose name translates as the River People and who were known to Anglo settlers as the Pima, had been farming the Gila River valley for generations using a canal system descended from the Hohokam's engineering. By the time American military presence arrived in the Southwest in the mid-eighteen hundreds, the O'odham communities along the Gila were the most productive agricultural operation in the territory, supplying the flour, grain, and livestock that fed both Army posts and the waves of California-bound travelers moving through the region after eighteen forty-eight.

They received no permanent treaty protections for the water their agricultural economy depended on.

In the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies, Anglo settlers moving into the upper Gila River valley began constructing their own irrigation diversions upstream. The water that had sustained O'odham fields for centuries was redirected. By the eighteen eighties, the Akimel O'odham agricultural economy had effectively collapsed. Where communities had grown surpluses that fed a territory, families now faced subsistence conditions. The federal government, which had been glad to purchase their grain, did not intervene to protect their water rights.

The consequences were generational. A community that had been self-sufficient for centuries was forced into dependence on federal rations. Land that the O'odham had farmed went uncultivated because there was no water left to farm it.

The Gila River Indian Community today is a federally recognized tribal nation with its own government, and decades of legal effort have partially restored the O'odham's water rights in the form of the Arizona Water Settlements Act of two thousand four. The account of what was taken, and when, is documented at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and in the O'odham community's own historical accounts.