What it means
Two words for one people, and only one of them theirs. Tohono O’odham means “desert people” and is the name of the nation that holds the dry country between Tucson and the Mexican border. Papago is what the Spanish called them, what the United States called them for a century, and what the Valley still calls a park, a freeway, a Scottsdale shopping center and an old inn. In Scottsdale you will hear Papago every day as a place name and Tohono O’odham only when someone is being careful. This page is for being careful.
The connection to Scottsdale is kinship. The O’odham are one language family in two landscapes: the Akimel O’odham, river people, who farmed the Gila and Salt and whose descendants live in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the city’s eastern line, and the Tohono O’odham, desert people, who farmed the summer rains in the country to the south. Both regard the Huhugam as ancestors. The Huhugam Ki Museum on Osborn Road is the nearest place to hear that history told by O’odham people.
Where you’ll meet it
On Papago Park and the Papago Freeway signs for Interstate 10. At Papago Plaza on Scottsdale and McDowell roads. In the Arizona Indian Festival each February, where the Nation’s dancers and basket makers appear under their own name.
Where the word came from
Papago is colonial Spanish. Ofelia Zepeda, the O’odham linguist and University of Arizona professor, traces it to the Spanish period, when colonists rendered an O’odham phrase meaning bean eaters or bean people, after the tepary beans that fed the desert villages, as “Papago.” Spanish and then Mexican and American officials used it for the desert O’odham to distinguish them from the “Pima” of the rivers, another outside name. Neither people called themselves either thing. In their own language they are O’odham, the people, and the two branches are Tohono, desert, and Akimel, river.
The reservation history runs through an 1874 executive order at San Xavier, the 1916 creation of the main reservation at Sells, and a first constitution in 1937 under the federal Indian Reorganization Act, written in the government’s vocabulary as the Papago Tribe of Arizona. In January 1986 the enrolled members of the three reservations ratified a new constitution. It built a three-branch government with an elected chairperson, a legislative council and eleven districts, and it changed the name: the Tohono O’odham Nation. The Nation’s seal carries both dates, 1937 and 1986, eleven stars for the districts, Baboquivari Peak, home of I’itoi, and three cactuses the O’odham harvest.
The Valley’s Papago names are older than the renaming and have a separate root. In 1879 the federal government set aside land at the red buttes east of Phoenix as a reservation for Pima and Maricopa people, and the Papago name attached to the buttes and stayed. Congress made them Papago Saguaro National Monument in 1914, abolished the monument on April 7, 1930, and the land passed to the state, the Army and, from 1959, the City of Phoenix.
What it is not
Tohono O’odham is not a synonym for Pima. The Pima, properly the Akimel O’odham, are river farmers of the Gila and Salt; the Tohono O’odham are their desert cousins. And “Papago” is not the Nation’s former name in the sense of a name it chose and dropped. It was never theirs.
The fine print
The Nation’s land base is the second largest in the country: more than 2.8 million acres in four sections, the main reservation around Sells plus the San Xavier, Gila Bend and Florence Village districts, with about 37,000 enrolled members, most of whom live off the reservation. Its southern boundary is 62 miles of the international border, and roughly 2,000 members live in Mexico, which is why the Nation has fought border-wall construction that would wall its own people apart. Its economy runs on four casinos, copper leases, farming and more basketry than any other tribe in the United States.
The Papago question in the Valley is a question about place names, and the Nation has answered it with silence more than protest. KJZZ’s 2022 survey of the word found that the Tohono O’odham have long rejected it for themselves and do not treat it as interchangeable with their name, while some O’odham scholars consider Papago Park and the Papago Inn acceptable as historical labels. Phoenix has not renamed the park, and this site uses the names on the signs: Papago Park, Camp Papago, where 25 German prisoners tunneled out on December 23, 1944, and Papago Plaza. The Nation’s own usage is the rule for people.
One more layer is worth knowing. The Huhugam ruins and canals under Phoenix are claimed as ancestral by both O’odham branches, and the Nation’s eleven districts carry names, Gu Achi, Pisinemo, Sif Oidak, that most Arizonans never try to pronounce. Try anyway. Tohono O’odham is roughly toe-HO-no AW-tham, and getting it right is the point of the entry.