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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Water deal allows Gila tribe to renew tradition of farming
  • Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:51:44 -0700

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0119gilafarm19.html

Water deal allows Gila tribe to renew tradition of farming
Judy Nichols The Arizona Republic
Jan. 19, 2005 12:00 AM

Thousands of years ago, Native Americans were growing corn, beans and
squash along the banks of the Gila and Salt rivers, thick with cottonwoods
and creosote, bears and beavers.

Then White settlers came and took the water, building dams upstream,
leaving sandy, dry expanses in place of the rivers.

This year, with approval of the Arizona Water Settlement Act, the most
far-reaching Indian water settlement in U.S. history, the 20,000-member
Gila River Indian Community will have enough water to make its riverbanks
lush again with crops.

It will mean more tribal members once again carving a livelihood from the
land.

"It's not full circle," said Enrique Salmon, a Tarahumara Indian who is a
national expert on biodiversity with the Christensen Fund in California.
"There's no way to go back to what was going on before. But it's
three-quarter circle.

"At least there's farming going on. They are connecting to the landscape in
a way they haven't in 100 years."

Gila River Farms, the community's agricultural entity, plans to nearly
double the 16,000 acres it tills, putting as many acres into production
each year as it can. The tribes of Arizona, including the Pima and Maricopa
on the Gila River Reservation, are unusual in the United States,
controlling large reservations with tillable land. Gila River has more than
372,000 acres about 30 miles south of Phoenix.

"There's 146,000 acres of agricultural land out here that could be put to
use," said Robert Stone, the farm's general manager.

Cotton harvest

In December, the last of the season's 4,600 acres of cotton was harvested.
As four-row pickers rumbled up and down the rows, their spindles yanked
bolls of fluffy short-staple cotton from the stalks.

"Next year, I'm going to get some six-row pickers," said Stone, a member of
the Pima tribe.

The bigger harvesters will mean more acres of cotton rather than fewer
workers.

With the expansion, the farm hopes to hire more people.

"One of our goals is employment for tribal members," Stone said.

The farm employs 125 full-time workers, with 85 percent being tribal
members, and adds more during harvest and planting.

Stone started in 1968 when he was 13 years old, spraying weeds in the
cotton fields of the Gila River Indian Community. He moved on to driving a
hopper filled with fertilizer, and when he graduated from high school, he
earned degrees in agriculture technology, worked at other farms and
eventually took over the farm.

He is bringing in the latest technology, with cotton pickers testing
global-positioning systems that help them navigate fields more precisely.

The farm also uses laser-leveling to create flat fields.

With a dead-level field, one person can open an irrigation gate on one
corner and flood the entire area. No more siphon tubes and constant
vigilance to make sure both high and low spots get enough water.

It means about half as much water and less manpower.

The first canals

The Hohokams, ancestors of the Pima and Maricopa tribes, learned to harness
the rivers, building extensive irrigation canals that stretched for miles.
Some were as much as 20 feet deep and 80 feet wide and were dug with stone
tools. The earth was carried out in baskets. There were no horses to help.

The longest recorded canal stretched 20 miles from Pueblo Grande in what is
now east Phoenix to Glendale.

Many of the canals now in use in the Valley follow the same paths.

The Hohokam fields stretched in all directions, covering thousands of acres
and producing enough food for tens of thousands.

They used their bountiful harvest to trade.

"They had an incredible trade network," Salmon said. "All the way to
California, Baja California, the Sea of Cortes and into Chihuahua, Mexico."

They traded for macaw feathers, pottery, seashells for jewelry, things they
didn't have in the desert.

They developed a large community of several hundred people, with ceremonial
political buildings, even ball courts, and individual dwellings scattered
across the valleys.

"If you could have done a flyover, you would have seen specks of light from
fire pits all throughout the Gila River valley," Salmon said.

Exporting crops

This year's cotton is taken to the tribe's gin, run by Reuel Villanueva.

"We're ginning 20 bales an hour," said Villanueva, punching an array of
buttons on the gin's control panel.

The cotton is blown through dryers, cleaners and the gin stand, where seeds
are removed. The snowy fiber is compacted into 500-pound bales.

The tribe contracts with CalCot Ltd., to sell its cotton, most of it going
overseas to China for textile production.

Across the farm, pickers hoisted ladders among crowded citrus trees, heavy
with Orlando tangelos, a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit. They
clip off the fruit, fill 50-pound bags and dump it into large wooden crates
bound for Queen Creek's Empire Fruit Co.

Accomplished farmers

Native Americans were adept farmers long before Christopher Columbus came
to the New World.

They grew corn, beans, squash and tobacco. They cultivated cotton in the
Southwest and wild rice in the Great Lakes area. They were plant breeders
and developed strains, such as corn that matured in only 60 days for short
growing seasons near what is now the Canadian border.

The Hohokams harvested different varieties of corn, tepary beans, similar
to pintos, as well as pumpkinlike squashes and wild edible greens, such as
pigweed and amaranth. They grew Pima cotton. And gourds for bowls and
rattles.

They hunted and fished in the river.

Through archaeological evidence of corncobs, corn pollen and fire pits,
experts date cultivation to as early as A.D. 200 in some places.

"Some in Mexico has been dated to 6,000 years ago," Salmon said.

When artwork became more elaborate, there were drawings of corn on pottery
and in kiva paintings and petroglyphs.

Citrus and olives

The tribe currently has 1,000 acres in citrus, including navel, Valencia
and Arizona sweet oranges, Rio and ruby red grapefruit, and lemons and
tangerines.

Past the barns filled with 500 tons of hay harvested this summer, the
alfalfa planted in September is up, and workers are putting in 2,200 acres
of durum wheat, most of which will be shipped to Italy for pasta.

The farm hopes to store some for local sale.

And they have olives, onions, watermelon and barley.

Historians believe a change in weather patterns and drought with a few
years of heavy rains that silted up the canals drove the Hohokams back to a
seminomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Salmon said.

In the 1500s, when Spanish explorers arrived, they found Hohokam ruins and
thriving villages of the Hohokam descendants, the Pimas.

The Pimas farmed on the banks and in the river's flood plains in an
unbroken historical line until the dams came.

"After the larger dams were built, Roosevelt and the others, the waters
weren't flowing at all," Salmon said. "There was no seasonal flooding.

"When people can't depend on their source of food, it drives the economic
system off-balance. Social, gender, family roles, political power shifts.
It throws the whole system into chaos."

Stone said men who couldn't farm chopped firewood to sell to feed their
families.

Fighting for water

The tribes have been fighting for the water ever since, at one point suing
for nearly the entire annual flow of the Gila, almost 2 million acre-feet.
An acre-foot of water is the amount that would cover an acre to the depth
of 1 foot, or 325,851 gallons. It would meet the needs of a family of five
for a year.

Coolidge Dam, built in 1929, was supposed to give the tribe enough water to
cultivate 50,000 acres, but the project was never completed and it serves
only about 15,000 acres.

The recent settlement guarantees 653,500 acre-feet of water each year and
$400 million to help upgrade the farm's irrigation system.

"It introduces a source of money into the community, keeps people making
money in the community, provides an opportunity for personal growth, hope
for young people," Salmon said. "They don't have to move to Phoenix. They
can work here. And there are all the support services that come with
agriculture.

"And it offers a sense of community. The community doesn't get dispersed.
There is a sense of pride. It's all very important for a community that for
a number of decades didn't have any of that."











  • [Livingontheland] Water deal allows Gila tribe to renew tradition of farming, Tradingpost, 01/19/2005

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