What it means
The Akimel O’odham and the Piipaash are the two peoples of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the sovereign nation that begins where Scottsdale ends, at Pima Road and the Loop 101. The Community’s official name still carries the older outside labels, Pima and Maricopa. Its own publications use the peoples’ names: Onk Akimel O’odham, the Salt River People, and Xalychidom Piipaash, the Upriver People.
In Scottsdale you hear all four words, often in the same sentence. A road sign says Pima. A ballpark program thanks the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. A museum label at the Huhugam Ki says O’odham and Piipaash. The newer names are not a fashion; they are the older names, the ones the peoples used before anyone wrote them down in Spanish.
The Community as a government, its land, courts and economy, is covered in the site’s Community guide, and the acronym on the signs has its own page at SRPMIC. This page is about the peoples’ names.
Where you’ll meet it
On Community signage and publications, at the Huhugam Ki Museum on Osborn Road, in land acknowledgments at Scottsdale Community College and public events, and in place names across the Valley, from Pima Road to the city of Maricopa.
Where the word came from
O’odham means “the people” in the O’odham language, and Akimel means river, so Akimel O’odham are the River People of the Gila and Salt, as distinct from their relatives the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People to the south. The O’odham use the word huhugam for their ancestors, the people archaeologists call Hohokam and whose canals still shape the Valley. Pima is the colonial name. Historians widely trace it to Spanish explorers who asked who the people were and recorded the answer, an O’odham phrase meaning something like “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand,” often rendered pi ‘añi mac, as the name.
Piipaash means “the people” in the Piipaash language. The Xalychidom Piipaash trace their origin to Mat Kxwely, near present-day Parker on the Colorado River. After leaving that homeland they lived for a time in northern Sonora, joined relatives on the Gila River by about 1830, and in the 1870s followed their leader Malay upriver to the Lehi area on the Salt. Their word for those who came before is Piipaa Nykor. On Maricopa, the Community is plain: it is the common name applied to them, “not something we called ourselves prior to European arrival.”
What it is not
The two are not one people with two names. They speak unrelated languages from different families, came to the Valley by different roads and keep distinct traditions; their alliance is a matter of history, not ancestry. Nor is Akimel O’odham a synonym for Tohono O’odham. And the Community is not “the Pima reservation.”
The fine print
The languages tell the story most clearly. O’odham Ñiokĭ belongs to the Tepiman branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, which stretches from the Phoenix area to Durango in Mexico. Piipaash Chuukwer is a Yuman language, and the Community describes the modern Piipaash as an amalgamation of closely related, allied Yuman groups. Both are among the most endangered Native languages in the country. By the Community’s count fewer than three percent of its members are fluent in O’odham, and fewer than ten are fluent first-language Piipaash speakers. Both have revitalization programs.
Spelling varies between the two nations that share these peoples. The Salt River Community writes Akimel O’odham and Piipaash. The Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix writes Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh, reflecting its own orthography. Both are correct in their place.
The reservation dates to 1879. An executive order of January 10 set aside roughly 680,000 acres along the Salt; a second order on June 14 cut it to about 46,627 acres, the core of today’s Community, and both peoples were included. Leaders such as Alfretta Antone, who pushed for the museum, and Ivan Makil, president through the Loop 101 years, belong to the modern chapter.
Where the record is thin, it is worth saying so: the O’odham phrase behind “Pima” is an interpretation, not a documented exchange, and the Community’s own history does not explain where “Maricopa” came from.