Stealing the Gila
Stealing the Gila

Author: David H. DeJong

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2016-09-15

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0816535582

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By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors. This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights. Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.

The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West
The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West

Author: Michael L. Tate

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2001-10-01

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 9780806133867

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A reassessment of the military's role in developing the Western territories moves beyond combat stories and stereotypes to focus on more non-martial accomplishments such as exploration, gathering scientific data, and building towns.

At the Desert's Green Edge
At the Desert's Green Edge

Author: Amadeo M. Rea

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2016-06

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 0816534292

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Winner of the Society for Economic Botany's Klinger Book Award, this is the first complete ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima, presented from the perspective of the Pimas themselves.

Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans
Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans

Author: Amadeo M. Rea

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2016-12-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0816536821

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Knowledge held about animals by Pima-speaking Native Americans of Arizona and northwest Mexico is intimately entwined with their way of life—a way that is fading from memory as beavers and wolves vanish also from the Southwest. Ethnobiologist Amadeo Rea has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Northern Pimans and here shares what these people know about mammals and how mammals affect their lives. Rea describes the relationship of the River Pima, Tohono O'odham (Papago), Pima Bajo, and Mountain Pima to the furred creatures of their environment: how they are named and classified, hunted, prepared for consumption, and incorporated into myth. He also identifies associations between mammals and Piman notions of illness by establishing correlations between the geographical distribution of mammals and ideas regarding which animals do or do not cause staying sickness. This information reveals how historical and ecological factors can directly influence the belief systems of a people. At the heart of the book are detailed species accounts that relate Piman knowledge of the bats, rabbits, rodents, carnivores, and hoofed mammals in their world, encompassing creatures ranging from deer mouse to mule deer, cottontail to cougar. Rea has been careful to emphasize folk knowledge in these accounts by letting the Pimans tell their own stories about mammals, as related in transcribed conversations. This wide-reaching study encompasses an area from the Rio Yaqui to the Gila River and the Gulf of California to the Sierra Madre Occidental and incorporates knowledge that goes back three centuries. Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans preserves that knowledge for scholars and Pimans alike and invites all interested readers to see natural history through another people's eyes.