David H. DeJong. Stealing the Gila: The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. 272 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-2798-4.

Reviewed by Denise Holladay Damico (St. Francis University)
Published on H-Water (March, 2012)
Commissioned by John Broich (Case Western Reserve University)

From Bounty to Scarcity: Water Deprivation and the Pima of Central Arizona

Stealing the Gila, as its title suggests, documents the ways in which non-Native individuals and groups, together with local, state, and federal government offices and policies, usurped the waters of the Gila River in central Arizona. David H. DeJong traces the ways in which the Pima (called in their own language the “Akimel O’odham,” or “river people”) adapted to Spanish and, later, American incursions by developing a thriving agriculturally based economy, selling wheat and other products to traders and travelers. By the late nineteenth century, however, more and more non-Natives settled in southern Arizona; these newcomers, aided by American policy and policymakers, took more and more water. Eventually, the Pima became impoverished; some scraped a living through subsistence farming and others had to leave the reservation to find work. The book concludes in the late 1920s, with the Pima continually demanding, but not receiving, adequate assistance from the federal government in recovering their water rights.

DeJong makes the case that the Pima were poised to effectively operate and compete in the market economy of the nineteenth-century United States. They used the waters of the Gila for subsistence agriculture, growing corn, melons, beans, and squash, prior to the Spanish arrival in modern-day Arizona. The Spanish introduced winter wheat, which required more water to grow than corn, but which the Pima traded for cloth, metal goods, and other items, successfully entering into the market economy, a process that was aided by the ways in which the Pima and Spanish allied together against the Apache. The U.S.-Mexico War (1846-48) brought U.S. government to Pima territories, and the California gold rush saw forty thousand gold seekers travel through Pima lands. DeJong draws on various memoirs of the forty-niners to portray the Pima as savvy participants in the market economy, using their reputation as “Good Samaritans of the desert” to trade in both goods and agricultural products with these travelers (p. 23).

The year 1855 saw the Pima villages brought under U.S. administration and a new head chief, Antonio Azul (son of the former chief, Antonio Culo Azul). Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Azul and other Pima continually expressed their concerns about the protection of their land and water rights to U.S. government representatives. Congress voted to recognize the Pima Reservation under an amendment to the 1859 Indian Appropriation Act; as was so often the case, the survey of the reservation was controversial, as various interests used money and political clout to keep as much land and water rights out of the reservation as possible.

During the Civil War, both Confederate and Union forces in the Southwest (at different times) relied on trade with the Pima for grain. Gold was also discovered in western Arizona at this time, bringing new non-Native communities to the area; Apache groups escalated their raids on the Pima and on these new communities. The Pima, together with the Maricopa, worked with the U.S. Army to fight the Tonto and Pinal Apaches. By the end of the Civil War, according to DeJong, the Pima’s grain trade thrived. However, “the Pima’s success initiated the beginning of their downfall” as more and more miners came to Arizona and, eventually, began farming--competing with the Pima for the very water that had helped them successfully grow grain for the market (pp. 68-69). By 1868, more grain was being produced by non-Native people than by the Pima.

Though the Pima insisted that the U.S. government fulfill its obligation to protect their water rights throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century, this did not occur. In 1869, some Pima “openly resisted the settlers who encroached on their ancestral land above the reservation,” and others left the reservation, claiming well-watered “fields of Mexican settlers” nearby (p. 72). Drought in the early 1870s exacerbated these issues, and led the Pima to pressure local U.S. officials for an extension of their reservation. During the Hayes administration, the U.S. government expanded the reservation to include four additional miles of the Salt River.

The period 1870 to 1910 saw a tremendous increase in the non-Native population of Arizona, including many who encroached on Pima land and “refuse[d] the Indians the use of water” (p. 91). In 1886, the Florence Canal, constructed by a private company, diverted almost all of the Gila River’s flow upstream from the Pima Reservation. By the 1880s, the Pima, who once had participated in the market economy by selling grain to Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers and travelers, relied on grain imported to their reservation, mostly by the U.S. Indian agent. The national press began covering the story, the result of efforts by the National Irrigation Association, which advocated for federal subsidies for reclamation. The Pima survived by selling mesquite, ultimately almost destroying a sixty-five-mile mesquite bosque (forest). Pima leaders petitioned the U.S. government; Chief Antonio Azul, along with twelve other leaders, wrote “We have had very poor or no crops for the past three years ... because we have no water.... Many of our people have not enough to eat and to wear and don’t know what to do for a living.” Another spokesperson noted that some “of the older Indians who were once self-supporting are now drawing rations” (pp. 107-108). By 1904, the Pima were “dependent on federal assistance.” The drought and upstream diversions had “deepened the river’s channel, rendering the Pima irrigation system obsolete and unusable” (pp. 108-109).

In 1902, Congress passed the National Reclamation Act; DeJong notes that “in a microcosm, powerful economic and speculative forces in the Salt River valley were pitted against the survival of local Indian tribes.” Though lobbyists had previously used the plight of the Pima to advocate for the passage of the act, now others lobbied for its use in favor of commercial interests, including proposals to use the Salt River waters to construct power plants. The project would also pump groundwater from underneath the Pima Reservation for the Indians to use; however, non-Indian farmers would get more water than the Pima. In 1911, Antonito Azul wrote “An Appeal for Justice” to the “People of the United States,” noting that the political machinations of Phoenix developers “decided upon ... the Salt River Valley instead of the Gila River Valley” for the first reclamation project, and appealing to Congress and the American people to “come to our aid” (pp. 121-122). As DeJong notes, “the government continued to assume that beneficial use of the water by non-Indians had preempted Pima rights” (p. 127). Allotments were finally made from 1914 to 1920, but “the allotment act was manipulated, in light of the National Reclamation Act initiating a race to put all arable land under irrigation, by speculators, who then asserted rights to the water from the Salt River valley” (p. 131). Instead of farming the land themselves, Pima had to lease their land to other, non-Native farmers. Many Pima were forced into wage labor, often working on lands that had belonged to their ancestors.

In 1916, a congressional decree “prioritized Pima water rights for 35,000 acres of land” (p. 154). Four years later, “politically involved and enfranchised” non-Native farmers in the valley aligned with the Pima to pressure Congress for the Florence-Casa Grande Project, which was intended to protect Pima water rights but which actually benefited the non-Native farmers. Here DeJong takes Congress to task for failing to effectively safeguard Pima water rights. The book’s conclusion continues along these same lines, making the case that “by failing to protect Pima water and involvement in the national economy, the United States undermined its own policy of pastoralizing the Indians and missed the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to the policies defined by Congress” (p. 178). Instead, federal policies encouraged “the seizure, development, and exploitation of resources (i.e., water) to favor the aggressive non-Indian few” (p. 174).

The general outlines of this story will be familiar to most readers of H-Water. The book draws on extensive archival research, and, presumably, DeJong’s experience and knowledge as project manager of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project. It should be useful to those interested in the details of how, precisely, federal policymakers and others stripped the Pima of their water rights. DeJong might have further fleshed out the significance of this story by providing additional context, such as information on the Gila River and the Pima in more recent decades, or by relating his research to broader trends involving the interlocking Anglo-American conquests of peoples and nature in the West at the time. For example, he might have connected the nonarable nature of the Pima’s allotments and their subsequent transition to wage labor to similar events for other Native tribes and even Hispanos in the Southwest, such as that documented by Sarah Deutsch in No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (1987). Another way to broaden the book, contextually, might have been to expand the discussion of the legal history of water and western Native tribes beyond the book’s introduction, explaining how the various laws and policies that DeJong documents in detail throughout the book fit into that history.

DeJong asserts that his work is novel in that his portrayal of the Pima as ready, willing, and able to work within western economies, and of their success at doing so throughout the period of Spanish and Mexican rule, and during the early decades after the U.S.-Mexico War and the Gadsden Purchase (1853), is contrary to “convenient scholarly assumptions” (p. 175). I am not certain that scholars, at least those of Native American history or Native American studies, continue to make those assumptions. Few historians of the American West will be surprised to hear that the answer to the title of his introduction, “A West of Jeffersonian Farmers?” was a resounding “no.” The Gila River, despite its place in the book’s subtitle, fades in and out of the narrative; further discussion of the cultural meanings of the river, and water generally, to the Pima might have provided an added dimension to the book.

Having read similar sources regarding Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, I am well aware of how difficult it can be to recapture Native voices. Some do appear here, particularly those of the Azuls. Further discussion of the ways in which these men in particular utilized the tools available to them, and shaped their message for their audiences of policymakers and the educated public in the East, would have been interesting. Whereas Native voices tend to disappear, many individual Anglo policymakers and officials are quoted throughout the book. DeJong might have explored the complex interaction of ideology and economics that informed those policymakers’ and officials’ reports a bit further. For example, chapter 8 features a lengthy discussion of a survey done in 1914 that “quantified Pima irrigated lands in an effort to protect their water" (p. 135). The chapter in many ways simply summarizes and replicates the original survey, without analyzing it.

However, DeJong’s practical expertise as leader of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project is undeniable. His research will surely help the Pima in ongoing water disputes. The book also provides a useful, specific account of how this Native group’s participation in the market economy diminished due to U.S. policy. His documentation of the Pima’s shift to subsistence and away from the market economy is detailed and convincing. This book will be useful to those interested in understanding how, exactly, Native peoples of the Southwest lost their water rights to the fusion of U.S. policy, policymakers, and capitalists.

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Citation: Denise Holladay Damico. Review of DeJong, David H., Stealing the Gila: The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921. H-Water, H-Net Reviews. March, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31292

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