Life For Indians Changed As White Men Moved In
by Diane Enos
“And they will do it,
they will kill the staying earth.
But you must not help them,
you will just be feeling fine,
and you will see it,
you will see it.”
Thus Elder Brother, culture hero of the Pima Indians, prophesied the destruction of the world in his farewell speech. It might be said that this prophecy has already come to pass.
The world of the indigenous peoples, the Pima and the Maricopa, has in some sense been destroyed in the last hundred years. From all sociological, political and spiritual perspectives that world has unequivocally been altered forever, as the people were forever to adapt to changes wrought by the intrusion of the white man in the Salt River Valley.
Archaeological evidence such as village sites and ancient irrigation systems indicate that the area along the Salt and Gila rivers has been inhabited by humans since at least 300 B.C. Modern-day Pimas, anthropologists say, may be descended from those ancient farmers, the “huhu-kam” which means “those who are gone”.
In villages along the Gila River, the Pima and Maricopa grew crops of corn, several types of beans, tobacco and squash, as well as cotton that was woven into cloth. The two tribes had allied themselves against others such as the Apache and Quechan after the 18th century when the Maricopa sought and received asylum with the Pimas.
White military expeditions passing through Pima land found hospitable and industrious villagers who traded wheat, syrup, melons, corn and other surplus crops for needles, buttons, beads, clothes and thread. Lt. Col. Phillip St. George Cooke with the “Mormon Batallion” remarked in his journal on “eating watermelon on Christmas,” which the Pimas offered from their storage piles. Another chronicler noted fields “as far as the eye can see” of irrigated, productive land along the Gila River. In 1876, the Pimas sold a surplus of 2 million pounds of wheat.
But by 1871 the Gila was drying up. White settlers upstream around Florence were diverting all of the water, leaving the fields of the Pimas and Maricopas to wither and dry up. Also at this time a drought was beginning.
Stories are told in the Salt River community of this time, when men would run the 30 or so miles up from the Gila, tend their fields and run back at evening. Soon, whole families relocated to the lush edges of the Salt River, where they cleared fields, refilled ancient ditches and began tilling the soil around their new settlements. By 1878, Indian Agent J.H. Stout counted 600 to 700 people living at Salt River.
White settlers were displeased. The Pima and Maricopas “were denounced for this by the committee of the Maricopa Grand Jury and are termed renegades and savage intruders,” according to a letter written by Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, for whom Fort McDowell is named. Agent Stout also noted that the “number of whites who want farms of the lands occupied by the Indians has increased to 16,” and that they had held a meeting demanding that the Indians be forced back to the Gila.
But Stout, along with others, petitioned the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to add Salt River to the then-existing reservation, citing the Indians’ buffering effect against the Apaches, as well as their right to farm the land. Pima and Maricopa had served commendably as scouts for the army.
On January 10, 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes enlarged the reservation to include the “Salt River on the west, the San Carlos Reservation on the east.” Less than six months later, that executive order was revoked and the current Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation (which is now east of Scottsdale) was established, roughly the size it is today.
The people maintained a village system of agriculture, where family homes were located relatively close together for protection from raiding Apaches. They maintained an economic and political system based on mutual help in the production of crops.
Although she was born about 1907, “Nanny” Howard’s recollection of community life reflects a continuum of that period. She recalls how families used to help each other at planting. “They’d all go – the women to cook and feed everybody And when it came time to harvest the wheat, some families had Papagos come stay and help for some of the crop because they didn’t have any fields down there.”
Harvesting the wheat involved the use of horses to trample the stalks, after which women would winnow out the chaff with large woven baskets, according to Howard. “People really helped each other then, not like now,” she said.
The governing body was that of a council of “chiefs” and a hereditary “head chief.” Decisions were arrived at by consensus, with discussion continuing until everyone agreed. According to Josiah King, now deceased, “the system was more democratic than making decisions by a majority vote, but had the disadvantage of being slow when there were strong opposing opinions.”
King had noted that during the early 20th century “strong differences of opinion” created two political factions, the Progressives and the Conservatives. “Meetings in the large council house often ending in fights between the Progressives and Conservatives,” he said. “The Progressives were known as Montezuma’s Gang after Dr. Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapai who campaigned for Indian rights and urged Indians to become educated, learn from the white man and adopt what was beneficial. The Conservatives favored keeping the Pima way, and at one point the Conservatives tried to kill Chief Hiv Qua.”
When Chief Hiv Qua died in 1933, he was about 80 years old. Upon his death, Jose King became the last Pima chief, but according to his son Josiah, by that time the system had broken down.
“The chief’s power had been taken away by the government and many people no longer believed in the chief but followed the Indian agent,” said Josiah King.
By 1940, the tribe had elected by popular vote its first president and adopted a constitution and bylaws under the provisions of the federal Indian Reorganization Act, a system in effect today.
Also, at the beginning of this century, the enactment of two major legislative actions involving land and water, central to the Pima and Maricopa, were to unilaterally transform that way of life.
The Dawes Act of 1887, applied at Salt River about 1910 had allowed for the division of land into individual “allotments” of 10 acres below the Arizona Canal, and 20 acres of secondary land above the canal, which had no rights to irrigation water from the canal.
The well-meaning intent of the Dawes Act was to create “family farms,” but instead the “resulting land use and settlement pattern led to the destruction of village structure and cooperative modes of farming which had enabled villagers to pool their labor and resources,” wrote Billman Hayes, Sr., a former chairman of the tribal Land Board several years ago.
White homesteaders in the Salt River Valley had notice the ancient Huhu-kam canals. Reclearing and use of these canals proved to be profitable. By 1888, they had cultivated 100,000 acres and began to seek more water.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Irrigation Act, which paved the way for the construction of dams on the Salt and Verde Rivers and the subsequent diversion of water below the Granite Reef Dam into canals. The Salt River began to dry up.
Though a child at the time, Florence Howard, now near 80, remembers that the “people were kind of scared” when the river stopped. Like other elders she saw the river’s green edges of reeds, willow, cottonwood and mesquite slowly shrivel and fade.
The songs of the people began to fade also, says Howard. She spoke of when the all-night circle dances would bring “lots of people, and my father would sing with them ‘to make the people dance’ and celebrate.” Major celebrations such as the “burning of the witch” to mark the historic killing of a child-stealing sorceress, later merged with the Mormon Pioneer Days or various saint’s days as the Pima and Maricopa embraced Christianity.
“Vashi soovak,” or the place where a sweet-smelling grass grew abundantly and now is Scottsdale, was mostly chaparral with a few farms about 73 years ago. “Nanny” Howard was a child then, and she remembers that Mr. (Verner) Vanderhoof farmed near Indian School and Pima Roads.
“The Indians would go and work for him, harvesting in wagons,” she recalls, “and he would grow a special kind of pumpkin that he knew the Indians liked, the kind that you could cut into strips and dry. He was good to us, when he was through getting what they needed from the fields, he’d let the Indians take what was left.”
Then, education of reservation children was required by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Boarding schools like the Phoenix Indian School were the rule of the day since the early 1900’s.
Leo Schurz recalls that the military structure of the school required uniforms, drilling and the learning of a trade. He says, “we grew our own vegetables, baked bread for the whole school, raised stock and were trained to be able to get a job doing those things.” As part of the training, children were strictly forbidden to speak their tribal languages.
Like most Salt River seniors, Naomi Enos is fluent in her native language. She can recite family kin-ships and anecdotes about earlier tribal members. People like her have seen in their lifetime a total restructuring of the old economy from agricultural self-sufficiency to the mainstream American economy. “We grew everything that we ate,” she said. “There was no welfare then, people didn’t have a choice, you had to work.” When they could no longer grow enough to be self-sustaining, she said people sold wood and women took jobs as domestic help in white homes.
Acculturation through education also brought about a change from the diet of desert and cultivated indigenous crops. Florence Howard laments the loss of such foods as “hunum” or cholla buds, berries and mesquite pods. She says of the past, “they didn’t get sick then, it’s because of the food they ate, no sugar.”
Today, although Pima and Maricopa shoppers favor [the local supermarket] to the field and desert, there are still some gardens of corn, beans and squash seen at Salt River. The old, non-hybrid seeds, like the languages, have survived to some extent and may represent as a symbol those tangible parts of culture persisting in a modern, technological world.
Even so, the water to sprout those seeds and irrigate miles of arable land of the Salt River Reservation remains at issue. A historic water settlement now under negotiation, could resolve several suits bought by the tribe against the government, Valley cities including Scottsdale, the Salt River Project and others. The suits were filed to assert court-determined water rights of the Pima and Maricopa based on prior or first use.
* Quote from ritual oratory collected by George Herzog from Gila River Piman in the 1920s. Piman Texts (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Library, Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguists), ms. 269.