The pima-maricopa irrigation project: nation-building through irrigation infrastructure
The new Casa Blanca Canal siphon under the Little Gila River in 2017.
T
he Pima people (also known as the Akimel O’otham, or “river people”) have lived in the Gila River Valley of south-central Arizona for thousands of years. In the latter 18th century, they were joined by the Maricopa (also known as the Pee Posh, meaning “the people”) and confederated together. While they had separate cultures and languages, the two tribes agreed to ally and to share the same land. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the settlement of Arizona by nontribal people and the upstream diversion of the waters of the Gila River deprived the Pima-Maricopa people of their water supplies, leading to hunger and the loss of their independent self-government. Over the course of the 20th century, these wrongs have slowly begun to be righted. The use of a federal law called Indian Self-Governance in the 1990s allowed the Pima-Maricopa people of the Gila River Indian Community to assume control of the rehabilitation and construction of the federal irrigation infrastructure on the reservation via a tribal program known as the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project (P-MIP). In this interview, David DeJong, the director of P-MIP, speaks with Irrigation Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about the Gila River Indian Community’s history and its strides forward in capacity-building and self-governance.
David DeJong: By background, I am a political historian of American Indian law and policy. My PhD dissertation at the University of Arizona focused on Indian water rights,
6 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Kris Polly: Please give us an overview of P-MIP and its history. David DeJong: The project originated in the early 1990s, as the community was negotiating a comprehensive water settlement, but agriculture in this community goes back thousands of years. By the mid-19th century, the PimaMaricopa people were farming in excess of 15,000 acres. As nontribal settlement in the area expanded during the latter 1860s and 1870s, the Gila River was diverted upstream, reducing water downstream and creating difficult conditions on the reservation. By the turn of the 20th century, the people were literally starving. Newspapers around the country reported on the deprivation and there was a concerted effort as early as the late 1890s to do something to restore the water. But the wheels of justice turn slowly, and nowhere did the wheels turn more slowly than at Gila River. In 1925, the community finally was able to sue in the federal courts. The Gila Decree, which was issued in 1935, recognized a community entitlement of 210,000 acre-feet of water off the Gila River, but upstream growers were able to keep the water that they were then using, which the community always felt belonged to it. In 1935, the federal
PHOTO COURTESY OF P-MIP.
Kris Polly: Tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
specifically those of the Gila River Indian Community. I have researched and written on the history of irrigation and agriculture here in the community for about 35 years. In 2000, I had the good fortune to be hired as project coordinator for P-MIP. In May 2006, when P-MIP’s director retired, I was asked to fill the position and have been in it every since.
