On Dec. 10, 2019, former tribal leaders, school children and high-ranking federal officials gathered in a Phoenix Sheraton hotel to celebrate Water Rights Day, and the 15th anniversary of the Arizona Water Settlements Act. As reported by the Gila River Indian News, Kristina Morago, public involvement specialist for the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project said, “It’s a full-circle moment for me, because sitting on [Community] Council at the time, we talked about what will happen when the Community gets its water?”
The Act was truly full circle for a part of the United States where indigenous settlers innovated irrigation and agricultural techniques, only to have their access to water taken from them. The past 17 years have represented efforts to restore long-standing traditions. Signed into law in 2004 by President Bush, the Arizona Water Settlements Act created the Gila River Indian Community Water Rights Settlement. The Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, the largest purely Native American water reclamation project, followed. The Act funded operations and maintenance to bring water from the Central Arizona Project (CAP) to the tribes of Arizona. This irrigation project promised to transform not just the agricultural capacity of the southwest, designing and constructing a water delivery system that will irrigate 146,000 acres. The project will also restore economic power to the Community that has taken responsibility for the project.
The project came with some controversy. A 2004 article in the High Country News described the settlement as “dripping with irony,” noting concerns about how non-tribal farmers might return to using groundwater to irrigate their crops, and questioning how the limitations imposed upon the tribes to monetize excess capacity might have long-term consequences. According to Daniel Kraker, the article’s writer, “The price of Indian water may seem exorbitant now, but a few years down the line, it may look dirt-cheap when increased demand drives open-market prices sky-high.”
The Original Canals of the Hohokam People
“Agriculture has been the core of the social and cultural fabric for millennia,” says David DeJong, project director for the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Projection. Although dry, the Phoenix area offered a largely flat flood plain, with a long growing season and soil conducive for growing. Among the early agricultural settlers were the Hohokam people. By hand, the Hohokam dug canals that brought water from multiple rivers into a landscape that might otherwise be desert. From roughly 450 B.C. to 1450 A.D., their technological advances in agriculture settled an area that is essentially modern-day Arizona.
Kyle Woodson, director of the Cultural Resource Management Program for the Gila River Indian Community, reports archeologists discovered in the American Southwest evidence of the “largest canal irrigation systems in pre-Hispanic North and South America north of Peru. The prehistoric Hohokam built extensive canal systems in the Phoenix Basin between about A.D. 450 and 1450 that are even more extensive than those built by the high Mexican cultures.” Some of the original systems date to 1,500 B.C. Woodson and other archeologists have no doubt that the irrigation in the area was developed independently and was not taught or passed along by the Mesoamericans or the Mayans. “Undoubtedly, the local folks invented that technology on their own.”
Though there were few aqueducts, there were canals reinforced with rock, adobe or plaster. These investments in infrastructure indicated a transition from purely migratory peoples to “irrigation as a centerpiece of culture,” Woodson says, with permanent homes, introducing a “host of social, political and economic challenges — ‘How do you share resources?’” Ties to the settlements resulted in managing and maintaining the land, and cultivating and harvesting crops, all of which directly led to the first village life.
“The Pima were an extraordinary agricultural people,” DeJong says. More than 15,000 acres were farmed under their watch. They would forage for food, but also produce food for all of what is now Arizona. That economy deteriorated with the intrusion of European settlers, which only became worse during and after the American Civil War, as the Union Army dominated the area for its war-time effort. The years between 1890 and 1920 brought severe droughts, water shortage and food deprivation.
The early 20th century saw promises from the United States government to invest and restore irrigation projects on Indian lands. Many of these efforts were derailed by silt that damaged existing canals, flooding, and federal underfunding. For example, the 1924 Coolidge Dam promised to restore the needed water for agriculture, only to have that water diverted to other interests. Decades of litigation followed, much of it concentrated on establishing state or federal jurisdiction or acknowledging tribal authority to represent themselves in court. The historic legal agreement in 2004 finally gave the Gila River Indian Community, composed of the Pimas and the Maricopas, control over significant water resources.
Today, those tribes are working toward a renaissance of agriculture, driven by miles of new canals constructed in an innovative model of self-governance. The 27th annual funding agreement has since been ratified, making the community a model of self-governance. “The Gila River Indian Community was desirous to do the construction work on the CAP delivery system itself,” DeJong says.
As many as 11 Arizona-based tribes have signed contracts with the CAP to deliver water. “Dozens of tribal nations have wanted to replicate what we’ve done,” DeJong says. For the last 11 years, he explains that 92 cents of every dollar has gone into design and construction, with less than 4.5% of revenues going to administration. “We’re doing a heck of a job,” DeJong says, pointing to 159 miles of canal work completed to date, with work funded by the Bureau of Reclamation.
A Cultural Strength
According to the Gila River Indian Community’s website, the project will create “regulating reservoirs that we can also use as recreational sites. The new irrigation system will be fully automated and operated and managed by a state-of-the-art computerized control center that will both conserve our precious water and at the same time maximize our agricultural production.”
One of the largest crops is alfalfa, a water intensive but lucrative cash crop, that can yield for three to five years before replanting, and also enjoys a relatively stable market. Tribal farmers will also bring in traditional crops, including tepary beans and corn. Restoration of water will return wetlands, and native plants including willow, cattails, devil’s claw and arrow weed.
There are about 70 tribal growers working the land at the Gila River, using anywhere between 10 to 4,000 acres, with another 12,000 acres under lease to the tribal corporate farm, and another 10,000 acres leased to outside non-tribal agribusiness operators. The Community projects that fill development will bring an increase of 5,000 jobs, not just in agriculture, aquaculture and ranching, but offshoot jobs like farm equipment dealerships, welding shops, restaurants, and financial firms.
The local tribal population of 22,000 members is expected to grow over the next 10 years, along with the canal work. New homes, subdivisions and even a new village have emerged in the wake of the new canals. According to the Gila River Indian Community News, former tribal governor Richard Narcia, who recalled the 2004 vote enacting the Water Settlement, urged the community to continue to protect the water because it continues to provide cultural strength for the people.
