What it means
Papago is a word you cannot avoid at Scottsdale’s southern edge. The red buttes across McDowell Road are the Papago Buttes. The 1,496 acres around them, with the zoo, the botanical garden and Hole-in-the-Rock, are Papago Park. The strip center at McDowell and Scottsdale Road is Papago Plaza, the golf course is Papago, a city park in south Scottsdale is Papago Rotary, and the stretch of Interstate 10 through central Phoenix is the Papago Freeway. Locals say all of these without thinking, with the stress on the first syllable, and most could not tell you what the word means.
It means a people, by a name they no longer use. “Papago” is the Spanish-era outside name for the desert O’odham of southern Arizona, who in 1986 formally became the Tohono O’odham. The buttes carry their old name because of a federal filing in 1879 and a national monument in 1914, not because the Tohono O’odham ever lived here; the people whose land this was are the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash of the Community across the canal. The Papago Park guide covers the park; this page covers the word, which is the more complicated thing.
Where you’ll meet it
On every sign in the park and on the freeway; at Papago Plaza and Papago Rotary Park in south Scottsdale; in the Tohono O’odham entry, where the name’s retirement is the story; and in the 1940s chapter, where the park was a prisoner-of-war camp.
Where the word came from
Spanish colonists in the 1600s and 1700s met two groups of O’odham, the river farmers along the Gila and Salt and the desert dwellers to the south, and called them by names picked up from neighbors. The river people became “Pima,” a misunderstanding of an O’odham phrase. The desert people became “Papago,” which scholars trace to a Piman phrase usually rendered “bean people” or “bean eaters,” for the tepary beans they grew in the washes. Neither group used the words for themselves. The O’odham called themselves O’odham, “the people,” with modifiers: Akimel, river; Tohono, desert.
The name reached these buttes by administrative accident. In 1879 the federal government set aside land here as a reservation for the Maricopa and Pima, the Piipaash and Akimel O’odham, part of the shuffle that ended with the Salt River reservation to the north. The buttes themselves got the “Papago” label from the surveyors and settlers of the era, who used it loosely for Piman people in general, and when President Wilson proclaimed a national monument here in 1914 it was Papago Saguaro National Monument. The monument lasted sixteen years. Congress abolished it on April 7, 1930 as unsuitable for national status and divided the land among the state, Tempe and the Water Users’ Association that became SRP. Through the Depression the state built a bass hatchery; through the war the buttes hosted Camp Papago Park, the prisoner-of-war camp whose December 1944 tunnel escape is the most famous thing that ever happened here. Phoenix bought the state’s share on February 25, 1959 and the zoo opened on the hatchery grounds in 1962. Every one of those institutions kept the word.
The people did not. In 1986 the nation until then federally recognized as the Papago Tribe adopted a new constitution and its own name, Tohono O’odham Nation, “desert people,” to distinguish itself from the Akimel O’odham, the river people, and to retire a name that had been given to it. The parks, plazas and freeway did not follow.
What it is not
Papago is not Tohono O’odham land and never was; the nation’s reservation is 60 miles south around Sells, the second largest in the country. It is not Pima, the other outside name, which attached to Pima Road and the county seat of Tucson. And Papago Park is not in Scottsdale, though the Huhugam Ki Museum across the canal is where the actual history of this ground is told.
The fine print
The etymology is the consensus of ethnographers, repeated in reference works, but the exact O’odham phrase behind “Papago” is reconstructed rather than recorded, and the Tohono O’odham Nation itself describes the old name simply as one given by others. The 1986 date is firm: the new constitution and name were adopted that year. The 1879 reservation is in the park’s own history; the executive order’s text and the reservation’s brief life are in federal records we did not open.
The place names have shown no sign of moving. Phoenix and Tempe have not proposed renaming the park, the plaza’s owners have not renamed the plaza, and the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Papago Freeway signs are unchanged, which puts the word in the same position as “Squaw Peak” was before 2003 and “Pima” is today: an outside name that has outlived its use for people and settled onto the land. Whether that bothers anyone depends on whom you ask. The Tohono O’odham have been more concerned with their border than with a Phoenix park; the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, whose ancestors’ land this is, carries “Pima” in its own legal name and has not pressed the point.
What the record does not hold is any O’odham name for the buttes themselves. The Hohokam calendar inside Hole-in-the-Rock proves a thousand years of use; the word the users had for the place is lost, and “Papago,” a Spanish mishearing of a neighbor’s description, is what the maps say instead.