Akimel Oʼodham
The Akimel Oʼodham or Akimel Oʼotham are an Indigenous people of the Americas living in the United States in central and southern Arizona and Northwestern Mexico in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. The majority population of the two current bands of the Akimel Oʼodham in the United States is based in two reservations: the Keli Akimel Oʼotham on the Gila River Indian Community and the Onʼk Akimel Oʼodham on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.
The Akimel Oʼodham are closely related to the Ak-Chin Oʼodham, now forming the Ak-Chin Indian Community. They are also related to the Sobaipuri, whose descendants reside on the San Xavier Indian Reservation or Wa꞉k, and in the Salt River Indian Community. Together with the related Tohono Oʼodham and the Hia C-ed Oʼodham, the Akimel Oʼodham form the Upper Oʼodham.
Name
Oʼotham and Oʼodham are the Oʼodham terms for "river people".They were formerly known as Pima, which may have come from the phrase pi ʼañi mac or pi mac, meaning "I don't know," which they used repeatedly in their initial meetings with Spanish colonists. The Spanish referred to them as the Pima. English-speaking traders, explorers, and settlers adopted this term.
The Akimel Oʼodham called themselves Othama until the first account of interaction with non-Native Americans was recorded.
History prior to 1688
Spanish missionaries recorded Pima villages known as Kina, Equituni, and Uturituc. Anglo Americans later corrupted the miscommunication into Pimos, which was adapted to Pima river people. The Akimel Oʼodham people today call their villages:- District #1: Uʼs kehk
- District #2: Hashan Kehk
- District #3: Gu꞉U Ki
- District #4: Santan
- District #5: Vah Ki
- District #6: Komatke
- District #7: Maricopa Colony
The Akimel Oʼodham had lived along the Gila, Salt, Yaqui, and Sonora rivers in ranchería-style villages. The villages were set up as a loose group of houses with familial groups sharing a central ramada and kitchen area. Brush "Olas Ki:ki" were built around this central area. The Oʼodham are matrilocal, with daughters and their husbands living with and near the daughter's mother. Familial groups tended to consist of extended families. The Akimel Oʼodham also lived seasonally in temporary field houses in order to tend their crops.
The Oʼodham language, variously called Oʼodham ñeʼokĭ, Oʼodham ñiʼokĭ or Oʼotham ñiok, is spoken by all Oʼodham groups. There are certain dialectal differences, but they are mutually intelligible and all Oʼodham groups can understand one another. Lexicographical differences have arisen among the different groups, especially in reference to newer technologies and innovations.
The ancient economy of the Akimel Oʼodham was primarily subsistence, based on farming, hunting and gathering. They also conducted extensive trading. The prehistoric peoples built an extensive irrigation system to compensate for arid conditions. It remains in use today. Over time the communities built and altered canal systems according to their changing needs.
The Akimel Oʼodham were experts in the area of textiles and produced intricate baskets as well as woven cloth. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, their primary military rivals were the Apache and Yavapai, who raided their villages at times due to competition for resources. The latter tribes were more nomadic, depending primarily on hunting and gathering, and would raid the more settled groups who cultivated foods. They established some friendly relations with the Apache.
History after 1694
Initially, the Akimel Oʼodham experienced little intensive colonial contact. Early encounters were limited to parties traveling through the territory or community members visiting settlements to the south. The Hispanic era of the Historic period began with the first visit by Father Kino to their villages in 1694. The Pima Revolt, also known as the Oʼodham Uprising or the Pima Outbreak, was a revolt of Akimel Oʼodham people in 1751 against colonial forces in Spanish Arizona and one of the major northern frontier conflicts in early New Spain.Contact was infrequent with the Mexicans during their rule of southern Arizona between 1821 and 1853. The Akimel Oʼodham were affected by introduced European elements, such as infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, new crops, livestock, and use of metal tools and trade goods.
Euroamerican contacts with the Akimel Oʼodham in the middle Gila Valley increased after 1846 as a result of the Mexican–American War. The Akimel Oʼodham traded and gave aid to the expeditions of Stephen Watts Kearny and Philip St. George Cooke on their way to California. After Mexico's defeat, it ceded the territory of what is now Arizona to the United States, with the exception of the land south of the Gila River. Soon thereafter the California Gold Rush began, drawing Americans to travel to California through the Mexican territory between Mesilla and the Colorado River crossings near Yuma, on what became known as the Southern Emigrant Trail. Travelers used the villages of the Akimel Oʼodham as oases to recover from the crossing of unfamiliar deserts. They also bought new supplies and livestock to support the journey across the remaining deserts to the west.
The American era, began in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase, when the US acquired southern Arizona. New markets were developed, initially to supply immigrants heading for California. Grain was needed for horses of the Butterfield Overland Mail and for the military during the American Civil War. As a result, the Akimel Oʼodham experienced a period of prosperity. The Gila River Indian Community was established in 1859. The 1860 census records the Akimel Oʼodham villages as Agua Raiz, Arenal, Casa Blanca, Cachanillo, Cerrito, Cerro Chiquito, El Llano, and Hormiguero.
After the American Civil War, numerous Euroamerican migrants came to settle upstream locations along the Gila, as well as along the lower Salt River. Due to their encroachment and competition for scarce resources, interaction between Native American groups and the Euro-American settlers became increasingly tense. The U.S. government adopted a policy of pacification and confinement of Native Americans to reservations. Uncertainty and variable crop yields led to major settlement reorganizations. The establishment of agency headquarters, churches and schools, and trading posts at Vahki and Gu U ki during the 1870s and 1880s led to the growth of these towns as administrative and commercial centers, at the expense of others.
By 1898 agriculture had nearly ceased within the GRIC. Although some Akimel Oʼodham drew rations, their principal means of livelihood was woodcutting. The first allotments of land within Gila River were established in 1914, in an attempt to break up communal land. Each individual was assigned a parcel of irrigable land located within districts irrigated by the Santan, Agency, Blackwater, and Casa Blanca projects on the eastern half of the reservation. In 1917, the allotment size was doubled to include a primary lot of irrigable land and a secondary, usually non-contiguous tract of grazing land.
The most ambitious effort to rectify the economic plight of the Akimel Oʼodham was the San Carlos Project Act of 1924, which authorized the construction of a water storage dam on the Gila River. It provided for the irrigation of of Indian and of non-Indian land. For a variety of reasons, the San Carlos Project failed to revitalize the Oʼodham farming economy. In effect the project halted the Gila river waters, and the Akimel Oʼodham no longer had a source of water for farming. This began the famine years. Many Oʼodham have believed these wrong and misguided government policies were an attempt of mass genocide.
Over the decades, the U.S. government promoted assimilation, forcing changes on to the Akimel Oʼodham in nearly every aspect of their lives. Since World War II, however, the Akimel Oʼodham have experienced a resurgence of interest in tribal sovereignty and economic development. The community has regained its self-government and are recognized as a tribe. In addition, they have developed several profitable enterprises in fields such as agriculture and telecommunications, and built several gaming casinos to generate revenues. They have begun to construct a water delivery system across the reservation in order to revive their farming economy.
Akimel Oʼodham and the Salt River
The Akimel Oʼodham have lived on the banks of the Gila and Salt Rivers since long before European contact.Their way of life was and is centered on the river, which is holy. The term Him-dag should be clarified, as it does not have a direct translation into the English language, and is not limited to reverence of the river. It encompasses a great deal because Oʼodham him-dag intertwines religion, morals, values, philosophy, and general world view which are all interconnected. Their worldview and religious beliefs focus on the natural world.
The Gila and Salt Rivers are currently dry, due to the upstream dams that block the flow and the diversion of water by non-native farmers. This has been a cause of great upset among all of the Oʼodham. The upstream diversion in combination with periods of drought, led to lengthy periods of famine that were a devastating change from the documented prosperity the people had experienced until non-native settlers engaged in more aggressive farming in areas that were traditionally used by the Akimel Oʼodham and Apache in Eastern Arizona. This abuse of water rights was the impetus for a nearly century long legal battle between the Gila River Indian Community and the United States government, which was settled in favor of the Akimel Oʼodham and signed into law by George W. Bush in December 2005. As a side note, at times during the monsoon season the Salt River runs, albeit at low levels. In the weeks after December 29, 2004, when an unexpected winter rainstorm flooded areas much further upstream, water was released through dams on the river at rates higher than at any time since the filling of Tempe Town Lake in 1998, and was a cause for minor celebration in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. The diversion of the water and the introduction of non-native diet is said to have been the leading contributing factor in the high rate of diabetes among the Akimel Oʼodham tribe. The Pima Indians Diabetes Database was conducted on 768 women from the tribe and has been used to train machine learning algorithms on accuracy in predicting diabetes in individuals.