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“THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES: PIMA AGRICULTURE, WATER USE AND WATER RIGHTS, 1848-1921”
In the nineteenth century, most Americans believed the resources of the West were endless and that the settlement of the land awaited the requisite harnessing of nature. While some, such as John Wesley Powell, acknowledged the limitations of the West, emigrants continued to settle the land. This activity was accomplished through the vehicle of federal law, which was premised on economic liberalism or the theory that minimal government intervention best served the “release of energy” within the nation. In reality, the settlement of the West and the concomitant American Indian displacement from the land and its resources depended on government intervention. Federal actions shaped social thought and action in dispossessing tribal nations of their land and resources and facilitated the settlement of the West.
The Sword of Damocles examines the efforts of the Pima Indians in Arizona to participate in the national economy between the years 1848 and 1921, a period of time that corresponds with the advent of U.S. economic impacts to the Pima (1848) and the beginnings of federal action regarding Pima water resources (1921). In the ate 1840s tens of thousands of emigrants traversed Pima country en route to California, stimulating the Pima agricultural economy and rousing a Pima desire for agricultural technology. Within thirty years, these same settlers appropriated for their own use the water resources upon which the Pima economy was based. This was facilitated via federal economic liberalism. Not until after 1921 did the federal government initiate legislation (San Carlos Irrigation Project Act) and litigation (United States vs. Gila Valley Irrigation District) on behalf of the Pima to protect their rights to water and their agricultural economy.
As an agricultural people, the Pima did not passively accept the policies and events impacting their economy. They proved adaptive, demonstrating their resourcefulness in important ways. In response to water deprivation and infringement of their water rights, the Pima necessarily scaled back the amount of land they cultivated. While prior to 1880 they increased their agricultural economy, in the years after they creatively discovered ways to keep land in production in spite of water shortages. As the economic crisis deepened, the once-wealthy Pima abandoned their least productive lands. In the midst of great deprivation, they relocated or abandoned villages and fields in an attempt to maintain their agricultural economy. To make the most of their diminishing water resources, they adapted by growing small grain crops even when such crops no longer proved to be economically viable in Arizona.
Because the Pima had prior and paramount rights to the water and were wrongfully deprived of their rights to the use of water, their water rights struggle and the destruction of their agricultural economy raised a metaphorical Damoclean sword over the heads of the state and local entities making use of the water. Without infringement of their rights to water, the Pima might well have equaled and perhaps even surpassed the local agricultural economy.
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