March 15, 2008--Tribe defeated a dam and won back its water (High Country News)
Unlike the Pima Indians of the Gila River Indian Community, the Yavapai were not traditionally farmers. Instead, they migrated up and down the Verde River, hunting, fishing and gathering. But in 1903, the government settled them on Fort McDowell, a former U.S. Army installation used to subdue hostile bands of Apaches and tame the Arizona territory. Irrigated farms had sprung up along the river to supply the fort — which eventually led to the settlement of a quiet outpost named "Phoenix" — and for a few decades after the Yavapai took over the Army’s farms, they grew a modest couple hundred acres of wheat and alfalfa. Today, however, Phoenix is no longer a quiet backwater, and the Fort McDowell Reservation stands as an example of tribes’ rising power over — and innovative use of — the West’s precious water.
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