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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess Tom Sheridan Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin. By Jennifer Bess. (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2021. Pp. 464. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Detailed and meticulously documented, Jennifer Bess's Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing tells the story of one of the most remarkable sagas in the history of Native North America. The Akimel O'odham have farmed the floodplains of the Salt River and Gila River in central Arizona for [End Page 508] thousands of years. Their ancestors, the Huhugam, constructed the largest irrigation system in pre-Columbian North America, cultivating about 100,000 acres along hundreds of miles of earthen canals. When Spaniards first encountered them in the late 1600s, the Huhugam had dispersed, leaving their platform-mound communities in response to flooding, internal strife, and perhaps even Old World epidemic diseases. But their descendants continued to raise corn, beans, squash, and cotton along the rivers. With their surpluses, the Akimel O'odham (River People) fed the Tohono O'odham, or Desert People, who came to trade and labor in their fields. And when other Piman-speaking peoples to the south were missionized and conquered by the Spaniards, they remained independent, adopting what they wanted from the Europeans, like winter wheat, but keeping them at bay. When U.S. troops and thousands of gold-seekers on the way to California passed through their territory beginning in the 1840s, the Akimel O'odham became the first agricultural entrepreneurs in Arizona history, expanding production to barter and sell to the newcomers. They considered themselves allies of the Anglo Americans, even forming volunteer militia to fight Apaches and Yavapais after federal troops withdrew during the Civil War. Expecting reciprocity, the O'odham saw non-Native settlers divert their irrigation water instead. The Forty Years of Famine from 1871 to 1910) turned the once-verdant Gila into "dry, parched earth" (102). The great strength of Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing is its emphasis on Akimel O'odham resistance and resilience in the face of these ongoing betrayals. Bess employs O'odham creation stories to argue that the O'odham recognized and accepted cycles of expansion and contraction, developing an ideology that embraced change. The O'odham himdag (way of life) emphasized doing, world building, especially the cultivation of the land. During their darkest hours, the O'odham kept pressuring United States authorities to restore their land and water so they could sustain themselves as they had done since time immemorial. In contrast to their non-Native allies, who portrayed them as victims, the O'odham presented themselves as partners and allies who only wanted to sustain themselves as they had in the past. They did not resist agricultural modernization. On the contrary, they contested their marginalization while non-Indigenous farmers modernized around them. The paradox between the progressive ideology of the O'odham and their economic marginalization continued as the hot, dry climate of Arizona attracted government plant breeders experimenting with varieties of Egyptian long-staple cotton. Even though an experimental station was established at Sacaton on the Gila River reservation, inequities in water distribution and technical assistance exacerbated rather than alleviated O'odham poverty. Like the Green Revolution two generations later, advantages [End Page 509] accrued to those with the resources to maximize production. As one Indian agent lamented, "I found nearly all are willing to raise cotton if the water matter could be adjusted" (138). For much of the twentieth century, however, the "water matter" was never resolved. Between 1910 and 1920, the average size of non-Native farms quadrupled from 135 to 581 acres because of the long-staple cotton boom during World War I, while O'odham farms barely climbed from 7 to 12.3 acres. Dawes Act allotments and the lack of water prevented the O'odham from capitalizing on the transformation of Arizona agriculture. Bess recounts their ongoing dispossession, but she also examines their tenacity to recover their land and water and their right to make decisions...