The River People – Susan Feathers

From 1990 to 2008 I called Arizona home.

I had accepted a teaching position at Crane Junior High School in Yuma, Arizona. In turn, this would be an education for me beyond my wildest imagination. My degree in special education for students with hearing loss was a rarity. The administration decided that I could teach any kind of learning disability as well. It was a rich if not chaotic teaching experience for me and my brilliant classroom aide, a Yuma local.

The Lay of the Land

The city had gained the name “the Crossing” when people traversed the Colorado River at Yuma into southern California during the Gold Rush. It was my first encounter with the river which is channeled to water America’s vegetables and grains in the Imperial Valley of California. Its precious water also flowed along quiet canals among date farms and citrus groves throughout the city of Yuma. My school was surrounded by broccoli fields and orange groves. The whole environment was blooming with diversity.

In many ways I felt at home in Yuma which is a sprawling western town with a mashup of cultures and languages. It is a major location for Marine, Naval and Army facilities. I thrived in the milieu and while there, I discovered the history and cultures of the region from my students and their families. They represented the Cocopah and Quechan tribal communities, migrant-farmer and military families, and locals whose families had lived in the region for generations. They grew cotton, dates, fruit and vegetables.

Most of my students spoke Spanish fluently but could not do so at the public school which observed a strict English-only rule. For some of my students, sign language solved the language gap, but for others it burned in their soul with indignation. The area’s history of settler dominance repressed Mexican and Indigenous cultures. Colorado River tribes were numerous up and down the river between Parker, Arizona near Lake Mead and down into Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. Their cultures had lived along the wild river for at least 20,000 years. They farmed in the rich silt left after the spring floods receded, leaving rich silt for planting. The ancient Lower Colorado River has been likened to a Nile culture. Curious about the river’s history and ecology, I spent my time exploring historical sites and learning from elders and regional scholars.

When I first encountered the Colorado, it was unrecognizable to me as it was sprayed at high velocity from circulating sprinklers across the Imperial Valley on the California side of “the crossing”. Precious water evaporated in the dry hot atmosphere before falling to the ground. Row upon row of lettuce, broccoli, and cabbages lapped up what water fell to the ground. As far as the eye could see, this preposterous apparition filled my windshield as I drove through the Imperial Valley at sea level.

My first sight of this phenomenon occurred as I descended from the Continental Divide atop the Laguna Mountains (6500 feet above sea level to below sea level at the base of the mountain and the vast plain of the Imperial Valley. I was driving my son’s El Camino, a great San Diego beach buggy but treacherous in a place as hot as the valley. By the time I pulled into a watering hole near Yuma, I was growing faint. My education in Yuma would include heat stress and heat stroke prevention and how to equip a car for travel through the desert.

In its natural state, the Colorado River began as melt water that ran down through the Rockies, gathering size and speed, carving deep canyons in the red sandstone of northern Arizona. The river ran red where it dropped suddenly down toward the Sonoran Desert, flooding its banks in the spring as it flowed down into Mexico and emptied into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Where it slowed and spread from its banks, a delta region of marshlands formed that were places of high biodiversity. Plenty of fish and game abound. Indigenous fishers and hunters found a wide margin of mesquite tree forests on the banks of the river, as did French fur trappers and Spanish explorers. During the Gold Rush, however, these trees were cut down to burn in the steamboat business that developed to ferry gold hunters back and forth over the river which was a mile wide near Yuma. Loss of this tiny tree forest meant fewer deer and loss of a foodshed. The mesquite trees release bushels of nutritious bean pods seasonally. Later, scientists discovered the pods, when ground and made into flour, provide natural immunity to diabetes by regulating blood sugar. Mesquite bread is still made and sold regionally. It is naturally sweet and easily digested. (I made pancakes from it). Legends record that people walked across the river on the backs of large fish.

The Lower Colorado River was once a thriving place of wildlife and river cultures. In our Anthropocene era, the river is most recognizable at its highest elevations where it continues to cut the stone of Colorado and Northern Arizona and carry it tumbling south. Lake Mead collects the lion’s share of water, but starting at Parker, Arizona, water is pumped 700 ft into the air where it falls into an open canal system (Central Arizona Project or CAP) and travels by gravity toward Phoenix, then shimmies through and on to Tucson and drips into Mexico. The rest goes to Nevada and California. All these artificial truncations are due to something called The Law of the River. In short, this is the pact formed originally in 1922 between states on how to parcel out water to each.

Over decades and extensions of the canal system to accommodate burgeoning populations and infrastructure, the river no longer reaches the Gulf of California. It peters out above the marshy delta region and slowly dries up. Recent efforts by federal, state and tribal nations have managed to restore enough river flow to fill key areas of the marshland again. However, a regional 100-year drought is drying the land, while increasing temperatures from climate change have robbed the Rockies of its snowpack and thirsty alpine soil soaks up more river water reducing flow from the source.

At this writing, Hoover dam and Glen Canyon dam and their respective reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at historically low levels. Hoover dam was built in the first decade of the 20^th century on faulty predictions of average flow. Calculations were made during an unusually high snowpack in the Rockies. This did not become apparent for many decades. Conservation of water did not start in earnest until about 25 years ago. Development pressures continued until, at present, 40 million people rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, farming and ranching, electrical generation and industrial uses parceled out among the seven western states in the Colorado River Compact. A prolonged drought, increasing temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns threaten this broad area of the United States.

Water is the limiting factor in a desert. My students and I gained insights about overharvesting a natural resource—the river in their backyards.

To be continued …

Copyrighted by Susan L. Feathers, Author

1998 Tempe, Arizona

Vicky Greenway finished her last lap with a sprint to the finish. She pulled herself onto the pool’s edge like a sleek otter flows onto an embankment. Basking in the hot Arizona sun, she pulled off her swim cap, releasing her long ebony hair to tumble down her back. Vicky studied the other swimmers in numerous lanes across the university’s Olympic-size pool. Her mind rambled over the morning’s surprise meeting with her director at the Center for Southwest Studies where she served as an Education Liaison.

“How would you like to blow this joint for a very unusual assignment?” her director asked with a wry grin.

“Oh, Lord,” Vicky intoned, wondering what thing she was being offered that no one else wanted to do.

Vicky was the junior employee at her workplace—the “go to girl” her male colleagues had tagged her, which Vicky translated to “the fall girl”.

“No, I really mean it,” her boss emphasized. “This will take you to the Lower Colorado River valley near Yuma to work with a small tribe—the River People.”

Vicky stared into her director’s quizzical face. She was concentrating on Yuma.

“Isn’t Yuma where we send hardcore prisoners to roast in their jail cells?” She recalled that Geronimo had been entombed there as punishment for outwitting the U.S. Cavalry.

“That was then. Now it is a huge sprawling Southwest city.” He emphasized Southwest as if to remind his employee this was official business. Gerald Abrams watched the thunderclouds roiling across Vicky’s beautiful face, the sparks of lightning glistening in her brown, almond-shaped eyes. He’d once had a huge crush on her until she’d made it perfectly clear that affairs with married men were not in her repertoire of relationships.

“Sounds like I am being banished to a god-forsaken dusty town to do something no one else wants to tackle. Could I be wrong?” Her sharp wit ignited over her desk. Gerald knew then that she would take the assignment because Vicky Greenway loved a challenge. She’d said it herself: her best assignments possessed cognitive dissonance. That penchant for unruly situations resulted from years of teaching middle school students.

“Okay, let’s review this ‘opportunity’ as you put it,” Vicky said, sitting straight up in her leather office chair and leaning on the glass-topped desk. “There is no river in Yuma now, and I’ve never heard of the River People. So why is our center suddenly interested in them?”

Gerald crossed his legs, wrinkling his pressed Dockers and showcasing the worn edges of his running shoes. Dress at the center was casual, a reason Vicky liked working there. She was an athlete, a runner, swimmer, and lately a rock climber. In her late 30’s she was the picture of health in her running pants, tight yoga top, and flip-flops. She delighted the all-male staff, most of whom were pushing 50.

“That’s the crux of the matter, Vicky,” Gerald said. “The changes in that imperiled river are mirrored in changes the River People are experiencing.” He paused with furrowed brow and a pensive stare at the floor. “There is barely a drop of Colorado River water flowing past or through their reservation for people known as the River People. Their history reaches back at least 1,000 years when that river was wildly carving a path to the sea. It’s an extraordinary transformation that includes the destruction of habitats as well as lives.

Victoria Greenway was getting over her initial skepticism. Maybe this was really an important assignment, one where she might learn something new while helping in ways yet unidentified. But still, that did not answer her initial query: Why me?

“This kind of relationship building takes someone who can tolerate ambiguity, and who is patient beyond what males are capable of.”

Greenway laughed out loud. “What a copout!” she said.

The two were silent, Vicky staring at Gerald, and he looking back but not directly. “There have been a small number of university professors and researchers who have gone to the tribe to make oral history recordings, to conduct environmental impact studies, etc., but they’ve all come home like defeated troops. The River People are wary, as expected, but it goes beyond that. The River People are known as the only tribe among the Colorado River Nations who resisted attempts by the government to herd them like sheep onto one reservation, as if all nations were the same.”

Vicky liked that. Her government had wreaked unforgiveable violence on Native Americans.

Gerald continued, “With disrupted ways of life, the level of poverty is high, and now diabetes and alcoholism are rampant.”

Another silence. Vicky was confused. “But that is the work of social workers and medical specialists,” she said. “What exactly do you want me to do down there?”

Vicky was beginning to back away from the assignment, sensing that her director really had no plan.

“Well, I’ve been in touch with the EPA official based at the reservation. He described many issues in habitat restoration for which we both discussed the need to engage the members of the tribe to help manage it.”

In the ensuing silence, Vicky heard the conqueror voice again. The “help manage it” bristled inside her. Shouldn’t they be asking the River People what they needed?

“Let me get this straight,” Vicky said. She stood up to rearrange her seat cushion.

Gerald could see storm clouds gathering over Vicky’s brow. Before she could launch a counter to his idea, he asserted, “Vicky, we need to go there to ask the tribal council permission to talk with the elders, to explore whether they might participate in the efforts of the EPA biologist, and maybe even bring along the youth to learn about caring for the habitat.”

Now the nature of the assignment became clear. Vicky was shocked Gerald would even consider such a plan.

“Okay, again, let me get this straight. We destroy their habitat by damming the river, running them off their tribal lands, lands on which their people have lived and thrived for a thousand years, and now you want me to go there to ask them to help clean up the mess we made?”

Greenway’s cheeks flushed with red as her outrage grew. “Oh, and, gee I forgot, we ask them to do it when they are very sick and depressed about what has been done to them? Are you kidding?” Now Vicky was yelling, while standing behind her desk with her hands on her hips.

“Well, no! Hell, no!”

That was how Vicky took the assignment to accomplish the impossible, the improbable. It was just the kind of work Gerald knew she could not turn down. A military brat who had learned to land on her feet anywhere and get along with everyone, and a woman with a big heart and superb skills in project development. The director of the Center for Southwest Studies had found his emissary in Miss Victoria Greenway.