Tohono O'odham

The Tohono O'odham are a Native American tribe formerly known as the Papago who reside primarily in the Sonoran Desert of the southwest United States and northwest Mexico. "Tohono O'odham" means "People of the Desert." The people rejected the name "Papago," which they were first labelled by conquistadores. A sovereign nation residing on a portion of its people's original Sonoran desert lands, the Tohono O'odham Nation is organized into 11 districts. The main reservation is located between Tucson and Ajo, Arizona, with its administrative center in the town of Sells. A few of the districts are not contiguous with the main reservation: The San Xavier District southwest of Tucson, the San Lucy District near the city of Gila Bend, and the Florence Village near the city of Florence.

The Tohono O'odham share linguistic and cultural roots with the closely-related Akimel O'odham (People of the River), whose lands lie just south of Phoenix, along the lower Gila River. Debates surround the origins of the O'odham. Claims that the O'odham moved north as recently as 300 years ago compete with claims that the Hohokam, who left the Casa Grande Ruins, are their ancestors.

The San Xavier District is the location of a major tourist attraction near Tucson, Mission San Xavier del Bac, the "White Dove of the Desert," founded in 1700 by the Jesuit missionary and explorer Eusebio Kino, with the current church building constructed by the Tohono O'odham and Franciscan priests from 1783 to 1797. It is one of many missions built in the southwest by the Spanish on their then-northern frontier.

The beauty of the mission often leads tourists to assume that the desert people embraced the Catholicism of the Spanish conquistadors. In fact, Tohono O'odham villages have resisted change for hundreds of years. Two major rebellions, in the 1660s and in 1750s, rivaled in scale the 1680 Pueblo Rebellion. The armed resistance prevented increased Spanish incursions on the lands of Pimería Alta. The Spanish retreated to what they called "Pimería Baja." As a result, much of the desert people's traditions remained largely intact for generations.

It was not until Anglo-Americans began moving into the Arizona territory that traditional ways were consistently under attack. Indian boarding schools, the cotton industry, and federal Indian policy worked hand-in-glove to promote the "progress" of assimilation into the American mainstream. The structure of the current tribal government, established in the 1930s, is a direct result of commercial, missionary, and federal collaboration. The goal was to make the Indians into "real" Americans, yet the boarding schools offered only so much training as was considered necessary to work as migrant workers or housekeepers. "Assimilation" was the official policy, but full participation was not the goal. Boarding school students were supposed to function within the United States' segregated society as economic laborers, not leaders.

Despite a hundered years of being told to and made to change, the Tohono O'odham have entered the 21st century with pride in their traditions and with their language still spoken. However, recent decades have brought increasing difficulties in maintaining O'odham traditions in the environment of American mass culture.

The Present

Now numbering over 25,000 enrolled members, the Tohono O'odham Nation gains most of its income from its three Desert Diamond casinos. This source of income is barely a decade old. It has paid for the tribe's first fire department, but the casinos cannot cover tribal members' numerous basic needs. Housing, emergency services, medical, and educational needs require expensive infrastructure, including transportation, personnel, education, and technology. The physical isolation of the Nation has always been a handicap to its economic development.

The Nation is governed by a Council and Chairperson, who are elected by eligible adult members of the Nation under a complex formula intended to insure that the rights of small O'odham communities are protected as well as the interests of the larger communities and families. The present Chairwoman is Vivian Juan-Saunders.

The proximity of the U.S.-Mexico border incurs further costs to the tribal government and breeds many social problems. Day and night, many Tohono O'odham have Border Patrol-band radio scanners tuned so that they may have early warning of upcoming smugglers, who are often heavily armed and desperate. In addition, smuggling has been a source of income for a small number within the Nation.^*^*

Many of the thousands of people crossing the Sonoran desert to work in U.S. agriculture or to smuggle controlled substances seek emergency assistance from the Tohono O'odham police when they become dehydrated or get stranded. On the ground, Border Patrol emergency rescue and tribal EMT coordinate and communicate. The tribe and the State of Arizona pay a large proportion of the bills for border-related law enforcement and emergency services. The governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, and Tohono O'odham government leaders have repeatedly requested that the Federal government repay the state and the tribe for the costs of border-related emergencies.

It is said that reimbursement could significantly help tribal members.

Since the 1960s, adult-onset diabetes has become commonplace among tribal members. Half to three-quarters of all adults are diagnosed with the disease, and about a third of the tribe's adults require regular medical treatment. Federal medical programs have failed to prevent or minimize the devastating effects of the disease.

Rather than await the "quick fix" diabetes cure, which medical authorities have promised to develop for 30 years, tribal members have turned to traditional foods and traditional games for inexpensive, effective, management of the disease.

Other situations common to indigenous groups worldwide contribute to a higher-than-normal incidence of alcohol and chemical substance abuse, with accompanying family and community distress. The estimated average lifespan of a male O'odham child born in 2001 was 52 years.

The cultural resources of the Tohono O'odham are endangered -- particularly the language -- but are stronger than those of many other Native American nations in the United States.

Over the past fifteen years, a cultural revitalization of traditional basket weaving, the native language, desert foods, and traditional games, have gained momentum. Elder Danny Lopez and the nonprofit organization TOCA (Tohono O'odham Community Action) have been at the forefront of these movements. Each February, the Sells Rodeo and Parade is held in the capital of the Nation. The rodeo has been an annual event for 80 years.

In the visual arts, Michael Chiago and the late Leonard Chana have gained widespread recognition for their paintings and drawings of traditional O'odham activities and scenes. Chiago has exhibited at the Heard Museum and has contributed cover art to Arizona Highways magazine and University of Arizona Press books; Chana illustrated books by Tucson writer Byrd Baylor and created murals for Tohono O'odham Nation buildings.

At the National Museum for the American Indian (NMAI), the Tohono O'odham were represented in the founding exhibition. Mr. Lopez blessed the exhibit. In 2004, the Heard Museum awarded Danny Lopez its first heritage award, recognizing his lifelong work sustaining the desert people's way of life.

Divided by the Border

Most of the 25,000 Tohono O'odham today live in southern Arizona, but there is also a population of several thousand in northern Sonora, Mexico. Unlike Native American tribes along the U.S.-Canada border, the Tohono O'odham were not given dual citizenship when a border was drawn across their lands in 1853 by the Gadsden Purchase. Even so, members of the nation moved freely across the current international boundary for decades -- with the blessing of the U.S. government -- to work, participate in religious ceremonies, keep medical appointments in Sells, and visit relatives. (Even today, many tribal members make an annual pilgrimage to Magdalena, Sonora, during St. Francis festivities.) But since the mid-1980s, stricter border enforcement has restricted this movement, and tribal members born in Mexico or who have insufficient documentation to prove U.S. birth or residency, have found themselves trapped in a remote corner of Mexico, with no access to the tribal centers only tens of miles away. Since 2001, bills have repeatedly been introduced in Congress to solve the "one people-two country" problem by granting U.S. citizenship to all enrolled members of the Tohono O'odham, but have so far been unsuccessful. ^* Reasons that have been advanced in opposition to granting U.S. citizenship to all enrolled members of the Nation include the fact that births on the reservation have been for a large part informally recorded and the records are capable of easy falsification.

Kitt Peak

The Tohono O'odham Nation is also the location of the Quinlan/Baboquivari Mountains, which include Kitt Peak and the Kitt Peak National Observatory, and Telescopes and Baboquivari Peak. The observatory sites are under lease from the Tohono O'odham Nation at the amount of a quarter dollar per acre yearly, which was approved by the Council in the 1950's. In 2005, the Tohono O'odham Nation brought suit against the National Science Foundation to stop further construction of gamma ray detectors in the Gardens of the Sacred Tohono O'odham Spirit I'itoi, which are just below the summit.

References

Desert Indian Woman by Frances Manuel and Deborah Neff (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2001)
"Weaving the Dream," by Terrol Dew Johnson and Tristan Reader (in Hold Everything! Masterworks of Basketry and Pottery from the Heard Museum, Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2001)

External links

Native American tribes in Arizona | Native American tribes

Pàpago | Tohono O'Odham | パパゴ

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Tohono O'odham

The Present

Divided by the Border

Kitt Peak

References

See also

External links