American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Akimel O’odham, or “River People” (Pima), have lived in the middle Gila River Valley for centuries, irrigating and cultivating the same land as their Huhugam ancestors did for millennia. This history of agriculture is part of the social, economic, and cultural fabric of the Pima, who benefited from a sufficient and fertile land, a steady and reliable supply of water, and favorable physiographic conditions to produce an abundance of food and fiber crops. These conditions continued until upstream diversions from the Gila River by settlers in the latter 1860s. The Pima economy depended on the waters of the Gila River and its tributaries. Following the himdag, or the cultural ways, of the Huhugam, the Pima exercised sovereignty over their land, enabling them to remain economically and politically independent for generations. They were, as sixty-five-year-old Pima elder George Pablo noted in 1914, “a self-supporting people” who raised crops “in abundance.” This independence changed to dependence in the 1860s, when federal land policies encouraged and fueled settlement in the Gila River Valley. Emigrants then diverted the limited water supplies from the river upstream of the Pima villages, leaving the Indians, in the words of one Pima elder, “high and dry.” The Huhugam built the earliest canals along the Gila River. Many of the historic canals constructed by the Pima followed these prehistoric alignments and irrigated lands in the historic breadbasket of the Pima villages. The Pima cultivated these lands since before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, with the period between the late 1700s and the 1860s representing the pinnacle of Pima agriculture before upstream water deprivation destroyed their agricultural economy (see fig. 1).