Winner of the Society for Economic Botany’s Klinger Book Award

The Akimel O'odham, or Pima Indians, of the northern Sonoran Desert continue to make their home along Arizona's Gila River despite the alarming degradation of their habitat that has occurred over the past century. The oldest living Pimas can recall a lush riparian ecosystem and still recite more than two hundred names for plants in their environment, but they are the last generation who grew up subsisting on cultivated native crops or wild-foraged plants. Ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea has written the first complete ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima and has done so from the perspective of the Pimas themselves.

At the Desert's Green Edge weaves the Pima view of the plants found in their environment with memories of their own history and culture, creating a monumental testament to their traditions and way of life. Rea first discusses the Piman people, environment, and language, then proceeds to share their botanical knowledge in entries for 240 plants that systematically cover information on economic botany, folk taxonomy, and linguistics. The entries are organized according to Pima life-form categories such as plants growing in water, eaten greens, and planted fruit trees. All are anecdotal, conveying the author's long personal involvement with the Pimas, whether teaching in their schools or learning from them in conversations and interviews.

At the Desert's Green Edge is an archive of otherwise unavailable plant lore that will become a benchmark for botanists and anthropologists. Enhanced by more than one hundred brush paintings of plants, it is written to be equally useful to nonspecialists so that the Pimas themselves can turn to it as a resource regarding their former lifeways. More than an encyclopedia of facts, it is the Pimas' own story, a witness to a changing way of life in the Sonoran Desert.

Southworth’s interviews fell into obscurity until recently, when they were rediscovered by David DeJong. The interviews cover decades of Pima history and reveal the nexus between upstream diversions and Pima economy, agriculture, water use, and water rights. In Forced to Abandon Our Fields, DeJong provides the historical context for these interviews; transcripts of the interviews provide first-hand descriptions of both the once-successful Pima agricultural economy and its decline by the early twentieth century. These interviews suggest that it was not the triumph of Western civilization that displaced the Pima agricultural economy but the application of a philosophy of economic liberalism that prevented the Pima from building on their previous successes.

 

The Spanish missions founded by Padre Eusebio Kino in Sonora, Mexico, during the 1690s and early 1700s are historical as well as architectural marvels. Once self-supporting villages with central churches, the missions stand today as monuments to perseverance in the face of a hostile New World.

These "Kino Missions" were surveyed in 1935 by the National Park Service to prepare for the restoration of the mission at Tumacacori, Arizona, then a National Historic Monument. That report, which was never published, provided insights into the missions' history and architecture that remain of lasting relevance. Perhaps more important, it documented these structures in photographs and drawings—the latter including floor plans and sketches of architectural detail—that today are of historic as well as aesthetic interest.

This volume reproduces that 1935 report in its entirety, focusing on sixteen missions and including two maps, 52 drawings, and 76 photographs. With a new introduction and appendixes that place the original study in context, The Missions of Northern Sonora is an invaluable reference for scholars and mission visitors alike.

Like many rivers of the arid Southwest, the Gila is for much of its length a dry bed except after seasonal rains. Yet a mere century ago it hosted a thriving biological community, and two centuries ago American Indians fished from its banks.

It is no mystery how the desert swallowed up the Gila. Beaver trapping, overgrazing, and woodcutting first ruined natural watersheds, then damming confined the last drops of its surface flow. Historical sources and archaeological data inform us of the Gila's past, but its bird life further testifies to the changes.

Amadeo Rea traces the decline of bird life on the Middle Gila in a book that addresses the broader issue of habitat deterioration. Bird lovers will find it a storehouse of data on avian migration patterns and on ornithological classification based on skeletal structure. Anthropologists can draw on its Piman ethnoclassification of birds, which links the Gila River tribe with various other Uto-Aztecan peoples of Mexico's west coast.

But for all concerned with protecting our environment, Once a River offers evidence of change that might be apprehended elsewhere. It is a case history of a loss that perhaps need never have occurred.

"In simple, unaffected prose, Mrs. Shaw constructs a moving saga of Native Americans caught between their tribal past and a Europeanized present. . . . Some of the most interesting passages deal with the wrenching realities of Indian life on the reservation in the years around the turn of the century, when the Indian male as a warrior found himself bereft of his very reason for being and forced to endeavor to become a farmer."—Journal of Arizona History

"A most interesting book. . . . [Shaw's] account of how the Pima Indians lived, their family structure, how they reared their children, courtship and marriage, how they treated their elders, their religious practices before the coming of a Christian missionary in 1870, and their accommodation with death are related in language that can be easily understood by the layman and, yet, provide information which can be used by the sociologist and anthropologist."—Journal of the West

"The current trend in books written by American Indians is to idealize the Indian past while condemning white culture. This volume is a notable exception because its author is old enough to remember the past and because she has been successful in adapting those elements of white culture which she found useful without sacrificing this essential heritage. . . . The style is simple and straightforward, that of a good storyteller which reaches all adult levels."—Choice

"Simple and charming reminiscences of the old Pima ways at the turn of the century when they still prevailed and of the changes which recent decades have brought about in the lives of the desert people."—Books of the Southwest

"Throughout [Shaw's] account a special kind of humor, sensitivity, and pride is revealed when discussing her peoples and her own personal experiences."—The Masterkey
 

By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors.

This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights.

Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.