Review: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin, by Jennifer Bess

Abstract

In Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing, Jennifer Bess offers a political economic history of the Akimel O’odham agrarian economy, from prehistory to the 1930s Indian Reorganization Act era, emphasizing adaptive irrigation and agricultural invention. Impressively researched, integrating archival data with oral knowledge, Blackbirds narrates a careful agricultural history of Indigenous social and ecological strategies of “survivance,” offering a counterpoint to what scholar Eve Tuck has called the “damage-centered research” that often prevails in research on Indigenous Peoples.1Theoretically, Bess makes three important moves. First, Bess follows work by Stephen Gudeman and other political anthropologists who emphasize a practice theory approach to economy—as something cultures “do” rather than as a “structure” of culture itself. This shift enables a liveliness and agency for Akimel O’odham innovation in “tribal capitalism” (Duane Champagne, quoted in Bess), especially during the nineteenth-century migration of settlers through Akimel O’odham territory to the California Gold Rush as well as in other periods in the Sonoran Desert, in which the Akimel O’odham engage wider markets of exchange as a mode of asserting what Bess presents as a distinct sense of ancestral “peoplehood.” Second, Bess sidesteps the allure of heavy-handed framings of settler colonialism to engage, instead, practices of persistence, creativity, and contemporary enactments of the Akimel O’odham epistemology of himdag, which anchors Akimel O’odham self-determination. While not disavowing the violence of settlement and war, Bess’s decision to work from another angle than settler colonial theory enables a text that is alive with Akimel O’odham perspectives and the “world building techniques” of agricultural economy, underscoring the contemporaneity and ingenuity of Akimel O’odham peoples in their multiple and complex encounters with first, the Spanish colonists who called them “Pima,” and later, the Anglo-Americans who settled their homelands. Third, Bess centers Akimel O’odham storytelling as central, critical historical method and ontologically, as dynamic, relational, place-based narrations of collective identities and not as “static relics” of the past (p. 230). By placing sacred stories and teachings from Akimel O’odham knowledge keepers and elders into equal standing and conversation with scholars, Bess generates a polyvocal text in which the expertise is distributed and weighted toward Akimel O’odham representations.Across seven chapters charting agrarian change in the context of colonial encounters, Blackbirds highlights Akimel O’odham resistance and adaptation during waves of conquest, examining the wider geopolitical, global context across periods of colonial encounter, and specific crops, especially wheat and later, cotton, and the farming implements these required. As such, Bess’s book offers not only an environmental history, but a history of agricultural technology in a wider context of Indigenous invention and global markets (for instance, for Pima Cotton). Throughout, the historical emphasis on Akimel O’odham resistance and leadership in the face of political, economic, and ecological crisis (Spanish conquest to the late nineteenth century’s forty-year famine) tells a story of the Akimel O’odham as early defenders of their territory and lifeways, as U.S. Federal Indian Policies and interagency “experimental stations” for the global expansion of Euro-American cotton markets created the conditions for water resource deprivation, labor extraction, and white settler encroachment into their River-desert homelands.As a cautionary note, the approach to theories of culture are antiquated in many places, drawing upon early mid-twentieth century anthropology (e.g. Edward Spicer and Hohokam “culture areas”), creating a tension with the book’s broader project of emphasizing Akimel O’odham world-building. Similarly, one wonders why Bess writes of Akimel O’odham “time-tested values” rather than knowledges, as such. Yet overall, the poetics of the text, which incorporates Akimel O’odham philosophy in songs, poetry, and diverse nomenclature makes this history of the Indigenous Southwest stand out as a project of Indigenous-centered humanities that will transform how we understand the environmental and economic history of one of the most urbanized areas of the Southwest, and the significant role of the Akimel O’odham, on their own terms, for U.S. history.