Stealing the Gila

Stealing the Gila
Author :
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Total Pages : 268
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0816527989
ISBN-13 : 9780816527984
Rating : 4/5 (984 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Stealing the Gila by : David H. DeJong

Download or read book Stealing the Gila written by David H. DeJong and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


Stealing the Gila Related Books

Stealing the Gila
Language: en
Pages: 268
Authors: David H. DeJong
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009-09-15 - Publisher: University of Arizona Press

GET EBOOK

By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, th
Gila
Language: en
Pages: 240
Authors: Gregory McNamee
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-10-15 - Publisher: UNM Press

GET EBOOK

For sixty million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico
Diverting the Gila
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: David H. DeJong
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2023-09-19 - Publisher: University of Arizona Press

GET EBOOK

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans assumed the land and water resources of the West were endless. Water was as vital to newcomers t
Peoples of the Middle Gila
Language: en
Pages: 343
Authors: John P. Wilson
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-11 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK

This second edition in the Gila River Indian Community Anthropological Research Papers series by John P. Wilson provides a narrative history of the Akimel O'Odh
Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
Categories: Juvenile Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 1990-03 - Publisher: Turtleback Books

GET EBOOK

A New York City boy's preconceived ideas of life in the West make him very apprehensive about the family's move there