Diverting the Gila

David DeJong’s Diverting the Gila focuses on the corruption of the Indian Service, political actors, and the federal government in Arizona during the early twentieth century. It reiterates how the federal government actively encouraged American Indian displacement and non-Indian settlement. The book explores the litigation and legislation of reserved water rights that affected residents of the Pima Indian Reservation and in the Florence and Casa-Grande valleys. The book is dense in its coverage of water theft using canals and dams, water reclamation projects, and reserved water rights. DeJong demonstrates that indeed “the real wealth of the West was water” (p. 7). Chapter 1 sets the stage of how the homelands of the Pima and the Maricopa, in the Gila River Valley in what is now the state of Arizona, were inundated by settlers and the beginning of the battle for water. Chapters 2 and 3 highlight the creation of the Casa-Grande Valley Canal Company (CGVCC) funded by speculators and farmers who coveted the water in the region and how the federal government’s incorporation of the 1903 Reclamation Act, with others to follow, carved up the Pima Reservation by allotment. Chapter 4 addresses the core of the book, as it examines the litigation and legislation, which included the Florence-Casa Grande Bill. This bill “reserve[d] all waters of the Gila River and all property rights” by the United States for its “Indian wards” (p. 118). Chapter 5 presents the beginning of the political machinations in the early twentieth century that still exist today—especially, how these politicians used every obscure statute and loophole to object and negate Native American reserved water rights. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 culminate with the building of the Florence-Casa Grande Canal, funded by private land owners and the federal government. These water measures were supposed to divert water for agricultural purposes, however in the case for tribal lands, there remained a shortage of water with no limits on the upstream water diversions. The epilogue addresses a 2002 settlement that prohibited the non-Indian community from claiming water from the Gila River System.

Allotment · Archaeology · Battle · Business · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Government (linguistics) · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Reservation · Settlement (finance) · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Finance · History · Law