Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing

Reviewed by: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess David H. DeJong (bio) Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess University Press of Colorado, 2021 jennifer bess adopts an Akimel O’otham–centric view of what is a tragic time in the Gila River Indian Community’s water history.1 The Pima (Akimel O’otham) were extraordinary growers until late nineteenth-century diversions deprived them of water. Bess begins with the Pima’s story of their relationship to their land in the Gila River basin. She uses this to describe how Pima core values resonated throughout their history and how their agricultural economy shaped and was shaped by trials and opportunities. In Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing, Bess demonstrates Pima resiliency and agency are nested in their conception of a worldview shaped by their sacred “homelands and the fundamental values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation” (17). This makes for refreshing reading. The narrative begins not through the heuristic of Euro-American interactions but through the lens of Pima story as informed by their Huhugam ancestors. The story is neither interpreted through the lens of the historian nor through that of the anthropologist but rather through a place-based framework that analyzes a transformative era in Pima history. This peoplehood matrix enables Bess to view Pima agency despite the theft of their water. In seven chapters and with an ever-present Akimel O’otham voice and examples of adaptation and cocreation, Bess illustrates that the Pima not only survived and adapted to the exploitation of their natural and human resources but they also engaged in “cultural continuity and economic transformation” (13). The fulcrum upon which their survival depended was their “geographic stability in this desert oasis” (13). Notwithstanding years of starvation, “dramatic change did not overwhelm” the Akimel O’otham because they remained rooted in their himdag, which not only served as a noun reflecting a way of life but also as a verb demonstrating their ability to walk through life (125). Chapter 1 sets the stage through the concept of how the Pima created a worldview shaped by a shared history, culture, story, and place. This himdag was rooted in security and prosperity and acted as an agent of strength and resiliency in an agricultural-based place where all was sacred (30). Chapter 2 [End Page 97] introduces adaptations introduced by Spanish technologies. Economic expansion and enhanced material culture resulted as the Pima interpreted what was compatible with their himdag. Chapter 3 continues the adaptation with the arrival of the United States and new technologies and markets that fueled the golden age of Pima agriculture (1850–1875). The heart of the story begins in chapter 4 with the collapse of the Pima economy as a result of upstream diversions from brush dams that began in earnest in the early 1870s and devastated Pima crops by the late 1880s. While “the red-winged blackbirds [once] would sing” along the river, the lifeblood of the Pima now became “an empty bed full of sand” (93). The economic and environmental transformation of the Pima homeland was further influenced by federal policy bent on undermining traditional ways and knowledge and merging the people into the economic fringes of the expanding local market economy. The final chapters focus on how federal policy appropriated the human and economic resources of the Pima, including the Bureau of Plant Industry’s Sacaton experimental station and seed farm where researchers developed a new strain of Egyptian (Pima) cotton. This both enhanced resiliency and further marginalized tribal growers. Lacking water, the Pima were largely excluded from the local economic bonanza, becoming a source of cheap labor. Bess then hastens through the post-WWI development of the San Carlos Irrigation Project, although she fails to describe the integral role the Akimel O’otham played in securing passage of the bill. While Bess tells an important story, she roots her analysis in a theoretical humanist framework that at times detracts from the story. However, she puts the Akimel O’otham

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