More than a century ago, the Gila River was lush and full of life. And the people who farmed around it, the Akimel O’odham people, were thriving. But settlers moved in, laws changed and they lost the water on the river — and their livelihoods with it.
But today, life is being brought back to parts of the river — and David DeJong, director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, was a part of making that happen.
DeJong wrote a new book titled, “Damming the Gila.” It’s the third in a five-part series he’s writing documenting the history of the Gila River and the people who farmed it. DeJong joined The Show to talk about how he says it’s been his life’s work.
Full conversation
DAVID DEJONG: The river literally was the lifeblood of not only the agricultural economy but really the cultural, political and spiritual economy, if you will, of the Gila River Valley. It was the river that allowed a very lush environment.
It’s hard to imagine today because we see such a desolate part of the river. But the river itself once was a flowing river, a perennial stream lined with cottonwood trees and willow trees on that first bench or first terrace of the river, and then further away mesquite trees and lush agricultural lands.
LAUREN GILGER: And these were kind of affluent communities who were farming along the river for a very long time, right?
DEJONG: That is correct. There were numerous villages here in the Middle Gila Valley that were spread from roughly Florence, Arizona, all the way down to the Gila Bend area. That is all traditional lands of the Akimel O’odham. And they farmed and had villages all along that stretch of the river.
GILGER: Wow. And then it kind of went sideways, right? They became impoverished because of the fate of that river, because of settlers, because of diversion of that water right?
DEJONG: Yes. Starting in the, in the early 1860s — in particular, right after the Civil War came to a close — a fairly large group of settlers began to arrive upstream of the community, then began to take water off the river.
And those initial diversions, while they weren’t great, they did have an impact. That was compounded in 1872, when diversions in the upper Gila River Valley — in eastern Arizona in the Safford Valley — began to take large quantities of water. Such that by the late 1870s, the community began to feel shortages, a reduction in acreage in cultivation or irrigation.
And certainly by the mid to late 1880s, the community was starting to feel the pangs of hunger, and that was all compounded with a very serious and severe 12-year drought. They are known as the years of famine, where quite literally there were almost no crops grown because there was lack of water. And this is a time where we see mass starvation among the people.
GILGER: My goodness. So I mean, this is this vast history of this river, and you have since then been documenting the centuries-long battle of these people to get their water back, to regain that. And we’ll talk more about where that stands today in a moment.
But let me ask you first about what got you interested in this because this is three of five books you’re writing here. This is something you’ve dedicated your life to, in a lot of ways.
DEJONG: Well, my interest goes back almost 50 years. I was growing up in Mesa and my brothers lived in the town of Maricopa, which was an agricultural community at that point. And as I used to drive from Mesa down to Maricopa, it became very apparent to me that there were huge areas of land that had once been farmed here in the Gila River Indian Community, but they weren’t being farmed anymore.
And coming from an agricultural background, my interest was piqued. And I kind of made it my life’s goal. I wanted to know what happened and what could I do to help correct it?
And so I began — literally, it’s 41 years ago last month that I began my first research on the events surrounding the Gila River and how it impacted the Akimel O'odham and Piipaash people. And it all centered around upstream diversions and periods of drought and famine that caused great hardship among a people who were an extraordinary agricultural people.
And I believe based on my 41 years of research that had the Akimel O'odham not been deprived of their water resources, they would have developed an agricultural economy on par with anybody else in the territory of Arizona — later state of Arizona — simply because they were already extraordinary agriculturalists.
And when the river dried up or when the river diminished significantly, it had a tremendous impact.
GILGER: So let’s talk then before I let you go about what’s happening today. You also work with the Gila River Indian community through the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project. And you have managed to start restoring the river, right? Bringing water back to this community. Tell us how you did this.
DEJONG: Well, I can’t say that I did it. It really was the community as a whole and literally more than 120 years of advocacy and legal action, generation upon generation upon generation,
Tribal elected leaders upon successive generations who never lost sight of the fact that the Gila River — keli akimel, old man river in the O’odham language — was their namesake river and it was the river upon which they depended, not just for economics but for political, cultural and spiritual power as well.
In some cases, we rehabilitated the old San Carlos Irrigation Project canals, which largely were earthen-lined with heavy water losses. So we lined all of those canals. We’re about 90% complete now, and four years from now in late 2028 we anticipate the entire project will be completed.
So literally, for me, this will have been the culmination of not only a lifetime of research, but I’ve been with the community 25 years, 19 years as director of the project. So what I’ve written about is something I live with every day.
While I wasn’t around to experience the effects of the theft of the Gila, for instance, I am around to see that original irrigation project and how we are today restoring that. We have one site, we call it MAR 5, where we have about a 50-acre site of the natural canopy — cottonwood, willow, mesquite — and all of the native plants that have now come back.
In fact, two years ago December the latest bird count, there are over 280 bird species that now call that facility home. So we are quite literally bringing the river back in multiple locations.
