The Tohono O'odham Nation is the collective government body of the Tohono O'odham people in the United States. The Tohono Oʼodham Nation governs four separate sections of land with a combined area of more than , approximately the size of Connecticut and the second-largest Indigenous land holding in the United States. These lands are in the Sonoran Desert of south central Arizona and border the Mexico–United States border for . The Nation is organized into 11 local districts and has a tripartite system of government. Sells is the Nation's largest community and functions as its capital. The Nation has about 37,000 enrolled members, most of whom live off of the reservations.
History In 1874, President of the United States Ulysses S. Grant signed an executive order creating the San Xavier Indian Reservation, surrounding the 18th-century Mission San Xavier del Bac. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed an executive order creating the Gila Bend Indian Reservation as additional lands for the Tohono O'odham people. In 1916, a third reservation was created by executive order with Indian Oasis (now Sells, Arizona) as its headquarters. In 1937, The Tohono O'odham Nation, then called the Papagos Tribe of Arizona, adopted its first constitution.
In 1960, the Army Corps of Engineers completed construction of the Painted Rock Dam on the Gila River. Flood waters impounded by the dam periodically inundated approximately of the Gila Bend Indian Reservation. The area the tribe lost contained a farm and several communities. Residents were relocated to a parcel of land named San Lucy Village, near Gila Bend, Arizona. In January 1986, the enrolled members of the three reservations adopted a new tribal constitution that changed the tribe name from Papago Tribe of Arizona to the Tohono O'odham Nation and adopted a three-branch form of government. Also in 1986, the federal government and the Nation approved a settlement whereby the Nation agreed to give up its legal claims in exchange for $30,000,000 and the right to add replacement land to its reservation.
In 2009, the tribe announced that it had purchased approximately near Glendale, Arizona. The city of Glendale and the Gila River Indian Community opposed attempts to develop the land though court challenges and supporting a measure passed by the Arizona House of Representatives that would allow the city of Glendale to incorporate land the tribe owned, making it ineligible for inclusion within the reservation. , after a change of heart, the City of Glendale has been negotiating with the Nation over its proposed West Valley casino. The McCain-Franks bill was designed to prohibit the Glendale project and in the process would have changed federal law by unilaterally repealing critical parts of the Gila Bend Indian Reservation Lands Replacement Act, which was passed to settle a dispute over federal flooding of tribal reservation lands.
In 2009, the Nation acquired of land near Why, Arizona, with the intention of eventually creating a new district of the Tohono O'odham Nation for the Hia C-eḍ O'odham. On October 30, 2012, a new tribal law created the Hia-Ced District as the new 12th district of the Tohono O'odham Nation. On April 25, 2015, the Hia-Ced District was dissolved by referendum vote, returning the Nation to its original 11 districts.
People
Most Tohono O'odham people live in the United States. A small number are across the international border in northwestern Mexico. The Tohono Oʼodham Nation speaks a common language, O'odham, which is the 10th most-spoken indigenous language in the United States. While the people are nominally Catholic, the Nation's schools teach native language and culture.
The Nation has about 34,000 enrolled members. Most of its members live off the reservations. The main reservation, Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, has a resident population of about 11,000. The San Xavier Indian Reservation has a resident population of 1,200. The Gila Bend Indian Reservation has a population of about 1,700, and Florence Village has a population of about 195. The remaining roughly 14,600 members live off the reservations.
Geography The lands of the Nation are in the Sonoran Desert in south central Arizona, in areas of a series of parallel mountains and valleys. The vegetation is consistent with other parts of the Sonoran Desert. Saguaro cactus, Cholla, prickly pear, palo verde, velvet mesquite, whitethorn acacia, desert ironwood, and willow are the dominant vegetation in the landscape. The landscape is interspersed with plains and mountains. These include the Quinlan and Baboquivari Mountains, which include Kitt Peak, the Kitt Peak National Observatory and telescopes, and Baboquivari Peak.
Sells, Arizona, is the Nation's largest community and functions as the capital. The Tohono O'odham Nation occupies four separate pieces of land for a combined area of , making it the second-largest Native American land holding in the U.S. The lands include the main reservation, the Gila Bend Reservation, San Xavier Reservation, and Florence Village. Of the four lands bases, the largest is the main reservation at more than . The San Xavier reservation is the second-largest, at , just south of Tucson. The Gila Bend Indian Reservation is and Florence Village . With the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, the territory of the Tohono O'odham was split between the U.S. and Mexico. Consequently, the Nation is directly exposed to the Mexico–United States border for . There is no reservation for the Tohono O'odham people in Mexico, so the Nation's southern border is the Mexico–United States border.
Border issues Pre-contact to 1900 Before colonization, the O'odham migrated along a north–south axis in a "two village" system, rotating between summer and winter settlements. These migrations formed the foundation of their subsistence economies and enabled religious pilgrimages. This pattern continued throughout Apache, Spanish, and American expansion, but shifted with the re-drawing of boundaries that followed the Mexican–American War. Unlike aboriginal groups along the U.S.–Canada border, the Tohono O'odham were not offered dual citizenship when the U.S. drew a border across their lands in 1853 by the Gadsden Purchase. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did not specify the rights of the O'odham to cross the international border.Amnesty International, In Hostile Terrain, 29,32. The population was split between Mexico and the U.S., but after the treaty the U.S. government guaranteed that O'odham freedom of movement would be protected. For decades, members of the nation continued to move freely across the international border. Throughout this time, tribal members traveled and migrated to work, participate in religious ceremonies, keep medical appointments in Sells, and visit relatives. The O'odham were deliberate in attending their religious festivals, and left their employers for two to four weeks to travel to Magdalena, Sonora. O'odham labor was so valued that employers began to drive their O'odham employees to the festivals rather than lose 4–8 days of labor while tribal members traveled by wagon. The end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th saw a decline in the subsistence economies of the O'odham, and after the Bureau of Indian Affairs drilled wells for them, their need to migrate declined. Despite these changes, the O'odham continued to move through the region with their families, working as hired hands on farms, mines, and ranches where work appeared.
1900–2000 The pre-contact legacy and economic lifestyles of the O'odham gave them a "transnational identity", but Indigenous conflicts on the Mexico–United States barrier arose. Land theft and forced assimilation decreased the numbers of southern O'odham and alienated them from their northern counterparts. By 1910, it was estimated that only 1,000 O'odham remained in Mexico. The disparities in wealth between the two sides also led to cultural shifts. The traditional practice of lending between O'odham decreased as many Arizona O'odham felt that those on the Mexican side would not be able to pay loans back. During WWI concerns were raised about the proximity of the O'odham to the border, but the U.S. government ignored requests for additional military presence, and trans-border smuggling thrived in the 1910s and 1920s. This included liquor, food, and guns. The War Department attempted to halt this, but the reporting system on such a wide area of land was slow and ineffective. The O'odham were accused of participating in the Yaquis' international weapons smuggling. As Mexicans were deported during the Great Depression, the Mexican government gave them O'odham tribal lands. Notions of isolation were further intensified during WWII as the U.S.–Mexico border was militarized to protect against potential invasions via the Sea of Cortez, and tribal lands in Sonora were privatized to increase government production.
In 1977, the Los Angeles Times reported that Mexican O'odham were taking advantage of medical facilities and welfare checks on the Arizona side of the border. An increase in militarization occurred again in the 1980s and 1990s, further inhibiting tribal members from traveling back and forth and slowing migration. The Mexican government made gestures to improve the condition of the O'odham in Mexico by opening the office of the National Indian Institute, but the office struggled with inadequate resources and institutionalized corruption. In the 1980s, O'odham in Sonora responded to decades of land theft and bureaucratic failure by staging an occupation at the "weak and underfunded" National Indian Institute offices. The tribal constitution ratified in 1986 reads: "All members of the Tohono O'odham Nation shall be given equal opportunity to participate in the economic resources and activities of the Tohono O'odham Nation."Tohono O'odham Nation. Constitution of The Tohono O'odham Nation. 1986. Many tribal members felt these promises were not guaranteed. At the end of the decade, O'odham on the Mexican side of the border wrote an "open letter" to O'odham on the American side. In it they wrote: "our human rights and aboriginal rights have slowly been violated or disappeared in Mexico." This articulated the concerns of many O'odham about the growing international divide and population loss in Sonora. In its 1990 census, the Mexican government recorded no O'odham living in Sonora.
2000–present