What it means
Talking Stick is the name the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community gives to almost everything it has built along the Loop 101: a golf club, a casino resort, a spring-training ballpark, a shopping center and the road that connects them. In everyday Scottsdale speech the word has narrowed to the tallest of those, the 15-story Talking Stick Resort tower that stands alone on the eastern horizon, and widened to the whole strip around it. “Meet me at Talking Stick” means the casino. “The Talking Stick district” means the casino plus Salt River Fields, Topgolf, the aquarium and the Pavilions.
What the word points to, by the Community’s account, is an object: the calendar stick, a notched rod on which Akimel O’odham keepers recorded the years. That is the part most visitors never hear, and the part worth knowing. Our resort guide covers the hotel; the neighborhood guide covers the district. This entry is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
On the freeway signs for Talking Stick Way, which is Indian Bend Road east of the 101. In March at Salt River Fields. On concert posters, since the resort books headliners.
Where the word came from
The name began with golf. In 1998 the Community opened Talking Stick Golf Club on its land near Indian Bend Road, with two courses by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw named O’odham and Piipaash for the two peoples that make up the Community, the Akimel O’odham, whom outsiders called Pima, and the Xalychidom Piipaash, called Maricopa. The club’s own history gives the name two meanings. One is pan-Indian and familiar: “a traditional Native symbol of respect and dialogue, used in tribal council meetings to ensure each voice is heard.” The other is specific to this place: “a contemporary representation of the traditional calendar stick, used by the Pima and Maricopa, to record significant events and milestones for the Community.”
The calendar stick is real and documented. As O’odham Action News described it in 2023, a stick was 35 to 55 inches long, cut from willow, pine or saguaro rib, and notched once for each year of the O’odham calendar, which ran from July to June. Between the notches the keeper added dots, figures and colors standing for the year’s events, a flood, a harvest, a death, and memorized the history they encoded. Keepers were men, and a stick passed down the male line; one with no heir was destroyed and buried with its keeper. The best-known surviving example, kept by Mehidaj and Benjamin Thompson of Casa Blanca, records 1842 to 1892 and is held by the Smithsonian. The resort’s logo is a stylized version of such a stick.
The brand spread as the Community built. Casino Arizona opened at McKellips and the 101 in 1998, and a second Casino Arizona opened in a temporary structure at Indian Bend in 1999. When the Community replaced that tent with a permanent hotel-casino, it chose the golf club’s name: Talking Stick Resort opened on April 15, 2010, 15 stories and 200.5 feet tall, 496 rooms, designed by FFKR Architects. Salt River Fields at Talking Stick followed in 2011, the 1989 Scottsdale Pavilions became the Pavilions at Talking Stick in the 2010s, and the Community began calling the whole frontage the Talking Stick Entertainment District.
What it is not
A talking stick in the general sense, the object passed around a circle so that one person speaks at a time, is a custom associated with many Native nations and widely borrowed by non-Native groups. The Community invokes that meaning too, but the calendar stick is the O’odham one. And none of it is in Scottsdale.
The fine print
The numbers behind the tower: Wikipedia puts the gaming floor at 98,000 square feet with more than 850 slot machines, 54 table games and a 49-table poker room; the Community’s own page lists ten restaurants and lounges, three pools, a spa and indoor and outdoor concert venues, and describes the property as part of “SRPMIC Enterprises.” The 2002 passage of Proposition 202, which legalized Las Vegas-style table games in Arizona tribal casinos, is the reason a tent at Indian Bend could become a 496-room tower eight years later.
The brand went downtown in 2014, when the resort bought naming rights to the Suns’ arena, renamed Talking Stick Resort Arena in 2015. That tells you how the Community thinks about the word: not as a place name but as a mark that travels.
Two things the record does not settle. First, the Community has not published who chose the name in 1998 or whether the calendar stick meaning was there from the start or added as the brand grew; the golf club’s history presents both meanings side by side without a date. Second, the Akimel O’odham term for the calendar stick itself does not appear in the sources we could open, and the English phrase “talking stick” is not a translation of it. The name is the Community’s own, chosen for an audience that includes Scottsdale, and it works as a door into a tradition most of that audience has never heard of. That is more than most casino names manage.