The Tohono O'odham and the Desert People's Way

In the Tohono O'odham language, tohono means desert, and o'odham means people. The Desert People. It is not a metaphor. They have lived in the Sonoran Desert, in what is now southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, for at least four thousand years. Possibly much longer.

Their traditional territory straddled what is now the U.S.-Mexico border long before that border existed. When the Gadsden Purchase of eighteen fifty-three drew a line through the middle of their homeland, the Tohono O'odham became a divided people by law but not in practice. Families still crossed that line to visit relatives, tend shrines, participate in ceremonies. The modern border, with its walls and sensors and enforcement corridors, has made that traditional movement increasingly difficult and, in some places, impossible.

The Tohono O'odham Nation today covers about two point eight million acres in southern Arizona, making it the second-largest reservation in the United States. More than thirty thousand members are enrolled. The capital is Sells, about sixty miles west of Tucson.

Their relationship with the saguaro cactus is ancient and ceremonial. Every summer, when the giant saguaro fruits ripen in late June and early July, Tohono O'odham families harvest the fruit using traditional poles made of dried saguaro ribs. The syrup fermented from that fruit is used in a rain ceremony called the Vikita, in which the community drinks the wine collectively, mimicking the saturation of the desert soil, inviting the summer monsoon rains to follow.

It is an act of ecology practiced as religion. And most summers, the rains do come.