A’AGA: Something to be Told or Talked About

June 12, 2026

Submitted by

Bill Allen

Imagine life without ce:mait! Pilkan/wheat came to our jeved/land with the Spaniards. It could be planted in the winter and quickly became a “traditional” O’otham food crop. Pilkan became an O'otham necessity and for others. Bluebird flour.  (I don’t know if cabbage is an O’otham necessity, but maybe there were some “Cabbage Patch Kids” back then, read on.)

Less than 100 years after the introduction of pilkan, Juan Bautista de Anza came to our akimel in 1774 and saw, “fields of wheat… so large that, standing in the middle of them, one cannot see the ends.” After all, Se'ehe/Elder Brother told O'otham to lay out ditches, fields by working together. Such community labor taught O'otham to get along.

O'otham found themselves in an ideal location for trading and would soon enter the monetary realm. Scholars of today (props to David H. DeJong) who highlight our farming background.

Around the 1860s, O'odham supplied roughly 1 million pounds of grain for the U.S. But that “hay day” got cancelled because when non-O’otham settlements upstream were diverted water, our akimel began to disappear. The community experienced “Forty years of Famine.” Near the turn of the century a five-year drought reduced our river to one of sand. It seemed like O'otham were looking at “the end of the trail.” 

What options existed for tribal leadership? Take up arms against the American settlements surrounding us, dig out a treaty, move to an area with more water? With the help of Reverend Charles Cook, the Indian Rights Association, and others from 1899 to 1912, O'otham sent 20 petitions to the Indian Office, Interior Department and the White House objecting to the loss of water. O'otham in the Sonoran region had been writing treaties and petitions long before the Americans arrived. (In 1716, a petition was given to the Spanish objecting to their livestock damaging O’otham fields and wanted compensation.)   

History records that when the first non-Indians appeared and began using our akimel as a pathway west, we helped them. (The Gila River Reservation was created in 1859.) A combined O'odham and Piipaash fighting force helped the American military before and following the Civil War. O'otham and Piipaash helped make southern Arizona safe for westward expansion. As settlers and settlements began to appear, Antonio Azul and 13 headmen realized the world was changing and wanted O'otham to become active participants in this changing world. Leadership went to talk and listen to the villages for advice. It was a democratic ideal of cooperation and consensus. After all, our creation stories tell about overcoming and making the best of a situation.

A 1900 petition sent to government officials asked, “We want all those things that you think that is good,” i.e. shovels, plows, and farming equipment. Harry Azul, the grandson of Antonio Azul, helped translate between the speakers and writers, bridging the gap between schooled and non-schooled elders. At the bottom of this particular petition, it was written, “Some of our people are not at home … They are gone away to find something to eat.” O’otham felt the time had come for the US to pay a debt. We helped you, now you help us. Acim ac m-vemt, apim ap ‘o ‘e vemt.   

In 1905, the US Indian Office decided to help O'otham become once again self-sufficient, as we had been before our river was taken. The plan was to allot 5 acres of land to O'otham head of households and sell the remaining 175,00 acres. The US Indian Office did not realize the kui/mesquite groves, away from established villages were necessary. Mesquite provided pasture for livestock, it provided food, kept home fires burning, and were essential in building homes, ramadas, and corrals. Tools/weapons were also made from kui.

Antonio Azul and village headmen challenged this plan. They did not want our land to be sold and the money to fund an electrical plant to power drilling water wells. Especially disturbing was the idea that 5 acres would be enough for a family to survive. 

Azul wrote:

“If our surplus land is sold and only five acres a family reserved for us, what will our future generations do?... You are educating them [children] to do more and to know more than we do. Can they do it on the five acres?

If our surplus land is sold and five acres allotted to us as we understand, where will our cattle graze, in our cabbage patch…?”

The O’otham petition was heard, their voices respected. The land sale plan was scrapped.

A 1906 letter sent to government officials stated, “We are not paupers…we are workers and farmers. Our forefathers have farmed and made their living on this reservation before any white man settled in America.”

These letters show the character of Akimel and Piipaash people. Anger or force is not necessarily the best option, look for options. (We were given an "opportunity" to move to Indian Territory once but we refused.) Did the leaders of yesteryear make the right choices? Yes, we are AKIMEL o’otham without a running akimel, but our fields are still cultivated, our sky is still blue and clear, as are the recollections of most of our elders. A century later, I’m thankful for the leadership of our ancestor headmen.

Information was taken from “The Right to More than a Cabbage Patch: Akimel O’odham Sacred Stories and the Form and Content of Petitions to the Federal Government, 1899–1912.” Jennifer Bess, Ethnohistory, vol. 63, no. 1, 2016, pp. 119–142.