The Tohono O'odham rejected a nickname meaning bean eaters for desert people
For centuries outsiders called them Papago, a Spanish rendering of a neighbour's word meaning eating tepary beans. Since the 1980s the tribe has insisted on its own name, Tohono O'odham, the desert people. Their music suits the land: rasps and upturned baskets whose sound the desert floor seems to swallow.
The Tohono O'odham live mainly in southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, across the Sonoran Desert. Their federally recognised nation governs a large reservation spanning parts of Pima, Pinal and Maricopa counties and reaching over the border. Historically their lands stretched across most of the desert, a country of broad plains ringed by tall mountains where water was always scarce, and probably scarcer after ranching and well drilling reduced stream flows.
Survival meant moving with the water. Families kept summer homes on alluvial plains, steering summer rains onto their fields, and winter villages in the mountains, where water was steadier and men could hunt game. Most streams were too unreliable for permanent canals. Society was intensely communal: hunters shared their catch with the whole village, those helped in hard times were expected to repay when they could, and loyalty ran to the village more than to the wider people.
Their music and dance are deliberately unshowy. There are no grand pow-wows or elaborate regalia; dancers wear muted white clay and skip and shuffle barefoot on dry earth, while singers are accompanied by hardwood rasps and drums made from overturned baskets, instruments without much resonance.
History with outsiders was fraught. Mission San Xavier del Bac near Tucson, founded by the Jesuit Eusebio Kino in 1700 and nicknamed the White Dove of the Desert, was built by O'odham hands, yet villages resisted Spanish Catholicism for generations; rebellions in the 1660s and 1750s rivalled the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in scale. Relations with the Apache, possibly friendly before the late 17th century, turned into long enmity. Scholars still debate origins: some argue the O'odham moved north only about 300 years ago, others that they descend from the Hohokam who built Casa Grande.
Source: Tohono Oʼodham
