What it means
The Gila River Indian Community is a sovereign tribal nation on the south side of the Valley, where the Gila River runs below Phoenix, Chandler and the Ahwatukee foothills. It is home to the same two peoples as Scottsdale’s eastern neighbor: the Akimel O’otham, the River People the Spanish called Pima, and the Pee Posh, the Maricopa, who came up the Gila from the Colorado River country and settled beside them as allies. (Gila River spells the names O’otham and Pee Posh; Salt River writes O’odham and Piipaash. Both are the peoples’ own words.)
In Scottsdale conversation the name comes up three ways. “Gila River” is the casino sign on the Loop 202 and the Interstate 10. “Wild Horse Pass” is the resort and entertainment district the Community built there, with the Sheraton, golf and the stagecoaches of Rawhide, which left Scottsdale Road in 2005 and reopened on Community land. And “the Community,” said without a qualifier, almost never means Gila River at all. In Scottsdale that word belongs to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community across Pima Road, a separate nation with its own government. Keeping the two straight is the first thing to learn.
Where you’ll meet it
Driving south on the 202 or the I-10 toward Tucson, when the city stops and the fields and casinos begin. On a trip to Rawhide or a Sheraton Grand pool day. On the Arizona news whenever Colorado River water is cut, because the Community holds one of the largest water entitlements in the state. And in any history of the Valley’s canals, since the Huhugam who dug them are the O’otham’s own ancestors.
Where the word came from
The name is three names stacked up. Gila is the river’s Spanish-era name, and where the Spanish got it is argued over and not settled; the O’otham have their own words for the river and did not need the Spanish one. Indian Community is the federal term that came with the reservation’s modern government, organized in 1939, and the Community uses it of itself.
The reservation itself is older than Arizona Territory. Congress set it aside in 1859, the Community’s history notes, “in acknowledgement of their friendship and alliance with the United States”: the O’otham had fed and protected the 60,000 or so travelers who crossed their country during the California gold rush, and in 1862 they were still shipping more than a million pounds of wheat. That prosperity ended within a generation. From the 1870s newcomers upstream, around Florence and Safford, diverted the Gila, and the fields went dry. The Community’s own account describes 1880 to 1920 as a time of famine and starvation, the same forty-year catastrophe the Salt River Community remembers from the other river. Coolidge Dam, finished in the 1930s, restored some irrigation; the water rights took another seventy years.
The modern map arrived in the 1990s and 2000s. Gaming under the state compacts paid for Wild Horse Pass, a 2,400-acre development west of Interstate 10 and south of Ahwatukee, with a casino, the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort, a golf club, Firebird raceway and, from 2005, Rawhide. The Community took title to the Scottsdale attraction on February 16, 2005, closed it on Scottsdale Road that Halloween and rebuilt its false-front street in the desert near Chandler, where it still runs.
What it is not
It is not the Salt River Community, and it is not “the Pima reservation” in any singular sense; there are two Akimel O’odham nations in the Valley and a third O’odham nation, the Tohono O’odham, to the south. Nor is “Gila River” a part of Chandler or Phoenix because the mailing addresses say so. Everything on the reservation sits under the Community’s laws.
The fine print
The number that matters is 653,500. On December 10, 2004, Congress passed the Arizona Water Settlements Act, and with it the Community’s water rights settlement: a budget of 653,500 acre-feet a year from the Central Arizona Project, the Gila and Salt rivers and groundwater, resolving claims the Community and the United States had filed to more than a million acre-feet. Roughly half of the budget is CAP water, which makes the Community one of the biggest single holders of Colorado River supply in Arizona and a central player in every shortage negotiation since the 2022 Tier 1 cuts. The Community’s newspaper calls the water “a sacred resource unlawfully taken over a century ago,” and the modern farms along the Gila are what it bought back. The Arizona water law guide explains where that water sits in the state’s priority system.
The government is a Community Council elected from seven districts, with a governor and lieutenant governor elected at large; Sacaton is the seat. The Community runs its own police and courts, a telecom company, an electric utility, schools, clinics and the Huhugam Heritage Center, the south-side counterpart of Salt River’s Huhugam Ki Museum.
Sources differ on the exact size of the Council, so no number is given here. The parallel with Scottsdale’s neighbor is the point: two nations, one pair of peoples, two rivers, one shared history of water taken and, after a century, partly returned.