June 26, 2024

Unraveling a complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering, Damming the Gila continues the story of the Gila River Indian Community’s struggle for the restoration of its water rights.

We recently had a chance to interview author David H. DeJong about the book, asking about the origin of the project, the lessons we should learn from this history, and what’s next in DeJong’s water chronicles.

What first sparked your interest in the story of the Gila River and the San Carlos Irrigation Project?

I was 16 years old when I first traveled through what was once the “breadbasket” of the Gila River Indian Community. Being from an agricultural background, I was struck by how many acres of land were lying fallow. It was apparent to me that many thousands of acres had once been irrigated but were now lying abandoned. I resolved then that I would seek to answer why so much land on the reservation had gone out of production. I later learned the San Carlos Irrigation Project was intended to restore the agricultural economy of the Community, but as with so many federal promises, it failed to do so. I have now spent over 40 years researching and learning the why of this failure.

This is the third volume in your chronicle of the history of water rights on the Gila River Indian Reservation, spanning nearly 100 years. Did you always plan for this series to have three parts?

Damming the Gila follows Stealing the Gila (2009) and Diverting the Gila (2021). It will be followed by Fighting for the Gila and Restoring the Gila. I always envisioned a two-volume history that would cover the history of Akimel O’otham agriculture through the 1940s. Once I joined the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project in 2001, I realized there was much more to the story than two volumes could contain. After the Gila River series is completed in 2030, I plan to shift my focus to the Pee Posh (Maricopa) and the story of their struggle to secure rights to Salt River water.  I also have several federal-Indian policy books in the works.

Damming the Gila shifts focus toward the Coolidge Dam and its failed promise to benefit the Gila River Indian Community. Was it politics, lack of foresight, or something else entirely that made this project flop?

Coolidge Dam and the San Carlos Irrigation Project (SCIP) were hailed in the 1920s and early 1930s as “the savior of the Pima.” Coolidge Dam was the central component of the SCIP as it regulated flows and stored water for future needs. It was also first and foremost for the “benefit of the Pima Indians of the Gila River Indian Reservation.” Ever the master politician, Carl Hayden sold Congress on the SCIP based on the legal and moral claims of the Akimel O’otham, but he then employed a distributive policy to spread the benefits of the irrigation project to include non-Indian growers. These non-tribal growers were politically well-heeled and, as voting constituents, had the ear of Hayden who was not beholden to the Akimel O’otham since they could neither vote prior to 1924, nor exercised much political authority. In the end, it was politics and continued upstream diversions and groundwater pumping that deprived the Community of the benefits of the SCIP.

What lessons should policymakers be taking from this chapter of the Gila River’s history as water becomes an increasingly limited resource in Arizona and the Southwest?

While they had been extraordinary growers prior to upstream diversions, the Akimel O’otham were completely marginalized from the discussions related to the SCIP and the Gila Decree. Pinal County and Arizona political leaders largely ignored the voice of the Akimel O’otham, with the result that there was never any buy-in for the project by the Community since they believed the project and decree deprived them of their rights. Add to this the reality that Akimel O’otham lacked the financial resources to put their water to use—individual tribal growers were assigned uneconomical 10-acre allotments at Gila River and the land could not be mortgaged, combined with the continued theft of their water by Upper Valley growers—left Community growers in a difficult position. The lesson is that policy makers must include a seat at the table of decision making for tribal nations when making decisions that affect all Arizonans.

What are you working on now?

I am currently working on the fourth volume of the Gila River series: Fighting for the Gila. This volume will cover the Community’s legal battles beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s Indian Claims Commission, the U.S. Court of Claims, and the enforcement of the Gila Decree in federal district court. It will then transition to the Arizona Gila River general stream adjudication. All of these legal engagements culminated in the Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004. The battle against unlawful diversions and water uses, however, continues today as the Community seeks to enforce the decree and provisions of the water settlement act.

David H. DeJong holds MA and PhD degrees in American Indian policy studies from the University of Arizona. He has published seven books, including Stealing the Gila, as well as dozens of articles about federal Indian policy. DeJong is director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, a construction project funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and designed to deliver water—from the Central Arizona Project, the Gila River, and other sources—to the Gila River Indian Reservation.

April 29, 2024

Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras—pre-human, Indigenous, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015)—Stephen J. Pyne’s newest work Five Suns offers a comprehensive fire history of Mexico. Today, the author answers five questions about this work.

What do the five suns of the title stand for?
Every 52 years the Aztecs celebrated the ceremony of the New Fire to ensure that a new sun would arrive to replace the extinction of the old. All fires everywhere would be extinguished, and at midnight a new fire would be kindled on a sacrificial victim atop the Cerro de Estrella, then distributed throughout the countryside. In Aztec history, five New Fires had birthed five new suns. I use the ceremony to organize the five eras of Mexican fire history, each of which had a characteristic fire that diffused throughout the land.

Almost everywhere in Mexico fire is possible, and most everywhere inevitable. What makes Mexico so combustible?
Mexico has plenty to burn—the annual cycle of wet and dry seasons guarantees that stuff can grow and then be readied to combust. It has ample ignition—lightning is abundant, and humans use fire deliberately and accidentally with hardly a pause. All this makes fire a constant in most of the country, though the regimes of burning change with land use, the ebb and flow of climate, the coming and going of species and peoples, and the reorganizations of the countryside. Over the last century, Mexico has used its vast reservoirs of oil to convert a significant fraction of that burning into the combustion of fossil fuels, with both national and global consequences.

Why do you write that Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world?
Since colonial times, officials distrusted and condemned burning, even though most Mexican agriculture, which was the basis for the bulk of Mexican societies, required fire at some point, and though the authorities were mostly incapable of ending the fires they loathed and criminalized. In the 1980s, links developed to the United States fire community that helped to revolutionize Mexico’s capacity to manage fire, to study it scientifically, and to upgrade policies to embrace a more ecological and holistic conception of fire’s management. By 2020 Mexico’s capabilities ranked it among the ten most robust nations on the planet for engaging with fire.

What makes Mexico’s approach to fire management so unique?
Mexico’s history is not unique. Its colonial experience was pretty much typical throughout the European imperium. By the 1970s, however, led by the U.S. and Australia, a vision of fire exclusion—which was a bad idea and never successfully implemented for long—was replaced by a conception of integrated fire management, which sought to move fire protection beyond emergency responses and to promote fire’s active management, not least through the use of deliberate burning. Mexico’s long heritage of fire and the persistence of traditional uses, once they were recognized as potentially good practices, has given it a strength that countries without that kind of inheritance lack. Instead of dragging Mexico backwards, much of its traditional fire lore could help it leap into the future.

What are you working on now?
Pyrocene Park, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2023, narrated a fire history of Yosemite National Park, which can be imagined as a story of good fire lost and partially restored. I wanted a complementary book that would look at the problems with bad fire, that is, trying to manage damaging fires with very little environmental or social space to maneuver. The Tonto National Forest—two of whose signature peaks I can see outside my window—offers a marvelous study in the complexity of contemporary fire programs. I’m using the 2021 Telegraph fire as an organizing device.
***

Stephen J. Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire, with major surveys for America, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth. From that career, Pyne has developed the notion of a Pyrocene, a human-driven fire age.

October 19, 2023

In the new book Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán, authors David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez provide an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The authors have been traveling to the area for two decades. Today, David Yetman answers a few questions about their newest collaboration:

What inspired you to collaborate on this work?

Alberto and I gained familiarity with Sonora via different routes, he as a Sonoran-born Cambridge-trained ecologist, I as a wandering desert rat trained in philosohy. We met at a field research school in Alamos, Sonora, sponsored by Tucson Audubon Society in, I believe, 1993 and immediately discovered our shared interests. We also realized rather quickly that our areas of interest complemented each other. Two years later we initiated a study of buffelgrass ecology in the small town of Tecoripa in eastern Sonora. During meeting key members of the community, we learned that representatives of the Mexican department of land reform were in the town discussing with townspeople the prospect of converting their cooperatively owned lands to private. We at once realized this was a historic moment in Sonora and spent the next year following the privatization procedures and interviewing the landowners involved. We published an article with our findings in 1997. In 2003 Alberto joined me in filming an episode of The Desert Speaks in the valleys called Cuicatlán in northern Oaxaca and Tehuacán in adjacent southern Puebla. We realized then that we had been pulled into a region with uncanny resemblance to the Sonoran Desert. We also realized that we enjoyed working together. Some twenty trips to that area later, we have published the book.

The plants in the region are so varied and so unusual that Mexico has designated it as a biosphere reserve, and UNESCO has followed, designating it a World Heritage Site. Why is the area so singular?

The valley’s peculiar location as connected desert valleys among several mountain ranges in the tropics has given rise to a bewildering variety of ecological zones or habitats, notably a desert environment where lusher vegetation would be expected. Those unusual conditions and a climate more or less stable for millions of years have combined to produce an astonishing array of desert plants, especially columnar cacti, many of which occur nowhere else. The high degree of endemism within the valleys means that it is the place to study these species and the evolutionary processes that promotes widespread speciation. At the same time, the region has seen the evolution of peoples of many different ethnicities. We long ago that discovered that they have stories to relate that complement the high diversity of the valleys.

The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán also have a long human history. What are a few of the ways that visitors to the area today can see the continuity of human experience?

The archaeological sites within the valleys have not received the attention they merit, so visitors often must discover their location and history on their own. Alberto and I have presented four of these and their developmental history in a way that will assist visitors in locating and visiting these sites. One such site is Purrón Dam, which was the largest dam in the Americas two thousand years ago, but today not even located on maps. Another is the astonishing site of Cerro Quiotepec, located in an extraordinarily scenic hilltop far above where the two valleys converge and form a profound canyon. It is a highly developed site that was occupied for six hundred years before the Zapotec builders abandoned it in about 300 CE. At the same time the valleys’ varied resources have brought together at least eight different indigenous groups. They have established the human history of the valleys, with connections throughout Mesoamerica. Many towns in the valleys retain their indigenous identity.

What is your next project?

We have repeatedly discussed the importance of returning to Tecoripa after nearly thirty years to see what changes have occurred in the town’s social and economic structure because of the move from cooperatively owned to privately-owned land. We also have many places of ecological and social significance that we would like to visit, study, and describe. We have separate careers, but we remain close friends with a tacit agreement that soon we must find another area to visit, study, discuss, and describe. Sonora has a wealth of ecological and cultural surprises, all within a day’s drive of Tucson, less yet from Hermosillo, where Alberto lives. It is only a matter of time.

***
David Yetman is distinguished outreach faculty and a research social scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, where he has worked since 1992. His research specialties include the peoples and ecology of northwest Mexico and the southwestern United States. Yetman has a PhD in philosophy and is author of numerous books and articles, including Sonora: An Intimate Geography, Natural Landmarks of Arizona, and The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History. Yetman is the former host of the PBS series The Desert Speaks and current host and co-producer of the PBS travel/adventure series, In the Americas with David Yetman.

Alberto Búrquez works as a researcher at the Instituto de Ecología, Department of Ecology of Biodiversity, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is a co-author (with David Yetman) of The Saguaro Cactus.