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In May 1973 a new collaboration between NASA, the Indian Health Service, and the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company promised to transform the way members of the Papago (now Tohono O'odham) Tribe of southern Arizona accessed modern medicine. Through a system of state-of-the-art microwave relays, slow-scan television links, and Mobile Health Units, the residents of the third-largest American Indian reservation began to access physicians remotely via telemedical encounters instead of traveling to distant hospitals. Examining the history of the STARPAHC (Space Technology Applied to Rural Papago Advanced Health Care) project from the perspective of NASA and its contractors, from the perspective of the Indian Health Service, and from the perspective of O'odham engineers and health professionals offers a new focus, emphasizing the American Indian reservation as a site of medical research and technological development in the late twentieth century, with specific attention to the promise of information technology to address health disparities and the role of American Indians as actors in the late twentieth-century history of science, technology, and medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the Tohono O'odham Indians maintained their autonomy during their dealings with the Sells Indian Agency of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA attempted to promote agricultural modernization and technology to Tohono O'odham living on reservation lands in Arizona. The Tohono O'odham resisted BIA procedures and services that did not offer them advantages. The tribe's conflict with BIA farmer Wilbert O. Hodgson is noted.

This article discusses the indigenous peoples of Sonora, Mexico, known as the Tohono O'otham. The author comments on the concept of cultural extinction as applied to this group, which relates to the dissolution of indigenous rituals and ethnic identity. The Mexican government policies regarding the Tohono O'otham people are also explored.

As a consequence of US border policies that funnel migrants through the harsh Sonoran Desert, migrants since the 1990s have been crossing and dying in large numbers on Tohono O'odham lands. This article examines the spiritual and political journey of Mike Wilson, a tribal member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, who puts water out for migrants against the wishes of his tribal council. Wilson's road to human rights activism was a winding one. In the 1980s, he was a member of the US Army Special Forces stationed in El Salvador; politically, he was, in his words, "to the right of Attila the Hun." How did a Green Beret become an outspoken human rights activist? This article argues that religion provided the material and cultural conditions of possibility for Wilson's conversions and was an important source of "friction" that both enabled and constrained his prophetic style of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the effects of drug trafficking on American Indian Reservations near the US-Mexico and US-Canada boundaries. Particular focus is given to the Saint Regis Mohawk and Tohono O'odham Nations. Details on violence related to drug and human trafficking and on attempts to address these issues through political reform and resource allocation are presented. Laws surrounding tribal entities and relations between tribal, federal, and state governments are also discussed.

The article discusses writer and activist Carlos Montezuma's advocacy for the Akimel and Tohono O'odham communities in Arizona . The author argues that this work demonstrates Montezuma's role in fighting against the U.S. Indian Bureau and in the development of progressivism in American Indian politics. Montezuma's relationship to his Yavapai heritage is also discussed. Other topics include the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation in Arizona and accounts of Montezuma's life by other Native Americans.

Purpose: To describe change in corneal astigmatism in infants and children of a Native American tribe with a high prevalence of astigmatism. Methods: Longitudinal measurements of corneal astigmatism were obtained in 960 Tohono O'odham children aged 6 months to <8 years. Change in corneal astigmatism (magnitude (clinical notation), J0, J45) across age in children with high astigmatism (≥2 diopter (D) corneal astigmatism) or low/no astigmatism (<2 D corneal astigmatism) at their baseline measurement was assessed. Results: Regression analyses indicated that early in development (6 months to <3 years), astigmatism magnitude decreased in the high astigmatism group (0.37 D/year) and remained stable in the low/no astigmatism group. In later development (3 to <8 years), astigmatism decreased in the high (0.11 D/year) and low/no astigmatism groups (0.03 D/year). In 52 children who had data at all three of the youngest ages (6 months to <1 year, 1 to <2 years, 2 to <3 years) astigmatism decreased after infancy in those with high astigmatism ( p = 0.021), and then remained stable from age 1-2 years, whereas astigmatism was stable from infancy through age 1 year and increased from age 1-2 years in the low/no astigmatism group ( p = 0.026). J0 results were similar, but results on J45 yielded no significant effects. Conclusions: The greatest change occurred in highly astigmatic infants and toddlers (0.37 D/year). By age 3 years, change was minimal and not clinically significant. Changes observed were due primarily to change in the J0 component of astigmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a typological contribution by describing a stress system that uses syllabic trochees while also displaying characteristics more typically associated with a quantity-sensitive language. The description comes from Tohono O'odham. The rhythm of this language is quantity-insensitive and trochaic, although the language also displays characteristics often associated with quantity-sensitivity (i.e., long vowels, gemination). Examined together, the facts illustrated here demonstrate the prosodic inconsistency of Tohono O'odham: that rhythm and prosodic morphology offer different perspectives on the role played by quantity, and that Tohono O'odham is the first language documented to split its rhythm and prosodic morphology along quantitative lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Mexican-U.S. border, comparing the borderlands of Arizona's Tohono O’odham reservation and Ambos Nogales, or the community of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. It focuses on the period since the mid-twentieth century, examining border walls and border complexes. The author explores questions of modernity and comments on economic exchange, border enforcement, and immigration. The Sonoran O’odham's relations with the Mexican government and with the O’odham in Arizona are also considered.

An important issue in the prehistory of the Early Formative period is cultural affiliation. It is crucial to understanding the origin and development of ceramic period cultures and the relationships between these and Archaic period peoples. In the past, Early Formative period cultures of southern Arizona were identified variously as Hohokam, Mogollon, and O'otam. Recent evidence has demonstrated an Early Formative period culture that was widespread across much of the southern Southwest and characterized uniformly by diagnostic horizon markers. The earliest horizon is marked by a strong Mogollon character in material traits. Our previous notions of cultural affiliation do not explain this cultural pattern well. Two alternative explanations for the phenomenon are the existence of a generalized, widely shared cultural pattern that gave rise to later groups recognized as Hohokam and Mogollon, and the coresidence of different groups on community and regional levels. These models and their implications for cultural development in the Southwest are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the contemporary and historical aspects of global and US discourses on food security through the current US food security law and policy. The author highlights the disproportionate increase in diseases of affluence such as obesity and type 2 diabetes among the Tohono O'odham people to further discuss the impacts of the food system. The author also highlights the agency of the Tohono O'odham who are seeking for approaches to deal with type 2 diabetes.

The purpose of this brief communication is to report the results of an analysis of maxillary premolar accessory ridges (MxPAR), a common but understudied accessory ridge that may occur both mesial and distal to the central ridge of the buccal cusp of upper premolars. We developed a new five-grade scoring plaque to better categorize MxPAR variation. Subsequently, we conducted a population analysis of MxPAR frequency in 749 dental casts of South African Indian, American Chinese, Alaskan Eskimo, Tohono O'odham (Papago), Akimel O'odham (Pima), Solomon Islander, South African Bantu, and both American and South African Whites. Northeast Asian and Asian-derived populations exhibited the highest MxPAR frequencies while Indo-Euro- pean samples (South African Indians, American and South African Whites) exhibited relatively low frequencies. The Solomon Islanders and South African Bantu samples exhibited intermediate frequencies. Our analysis indicates that statistically significant differences in MxPAR frequency exist between major geographic populations. As a result, the MxPAR plaque has now been added to the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology System, an important contribution as maxillary premolar traits are underrepresented in analyses of dental morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oral traditions and ceremonial practices of the O'Odham and Hopi people suggest the outlines of a reconstruction of events in the Southwest in late pre-history, and offer insight into the processes that influenced important changes during this period. For many decades anthropologists have attempted to identify ties between prehistoric and historic populations in the Southwest. In central and southern Arizona, the material culture and social and economic organization of the late prehistoric populations and those found by the Spanish in the 1500s differ markedly. As a consequence, archaeologists have disagreed about relationships between the prehistoric and historic people of the region. The O'Odham and Hopi oral traditions are consistent with other forms of evidence available to us, including archaeological and linguistic data, and provide insight into processes that might have influenced the profound changes in social and economic organization that are apparent at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variability and seasonality in archaeobotanical and archaeological remains from three adjacent ecosystems in the Papaguería of south-central Arizona are examined in relation to settlement-subsistence hypotheses. A three ecosystem model is developed which indicates that the Hohokam in the Papaguerla were able to maintain sedentary villages by utilizing, in different manners, three distinct ecosystems. It is suggested that the Hohokam in this desert region intermittently maintained agricultural field houses in the creosote plains, cacti gathering camps on mountain slopes, and permanent villages and fields on major wash flood plains. To some extent, sedentism in the Papaguería depended upon exploitation of non-flood plain ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the embrace of the Christian devil by the Tohono O'odham of Arizona. It recalls the incalculation of Catholicism among the Tohono O'odham by Jesuit missionaries beginning in 1687. It highlights the belief in the devil or demons as an interest aspect of O'odham Christianity. It observes that the O'odham devil way reflects Christian teachings and the O'odham's colonial-period predicament. The article points out that the question of whether the O'odham devil way complex is indigenous rather than Christian is of more than academic or historical significance.

The article presents an analysis on the impact of food change introduced by Spanish missionaries, to the traditional food consumption and dietary systems by Tohono O' odham or the desert people of Southern Arizona. It examines the process where foreign foods dramatically altered or change the system of food consumption and food procurement by Tohono O' odham. Spanish missionaries in O'odham lands introduced wheat, barley, chickpeas to the local food system in Arizona. Tohono O' odham adopted material goods, as political and economic system has been changed by foreign missionaries.

The article examines the Sobaípuri-O'odham Indian social and economic relations in Northwestern New Spain in seventeenth century. There was a high degree of borrowing and intermixing with various groups based on early ethnographies of the O'odhams and Tohono O'odhams. The warfare aptitude of Sobaípuris was attributed by a number of scholars to their spatial proximity to the Apache frontier. The economic relationship between O'odhams and mobile groups was solidified by intermarriage.

Focusing on the 2000 Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Health and Heritage, this paper considers possibilities for countering the temporal logic of economic globalization with a different understanding of time shaped by the politics of environmentalism and anti-colonial resistance. In 2000, a group of about twenty people, mainly Seri and Tohono O'odham Indians, took part in a 12-day, 230-mile walk from El Desemboque, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona. During the journey, organized in part to draw attention to the growing problem of diabetes in their communities, the walkers ate only food indigenous to the desert, while educating themselves about the complex intersections of desert ecology, human health and culture. This essay reads the Desert Walk as an intervention in a struggle for sovereignty over time – a means of ordering human experience which is currently defined, according to the prevailing currents of neoliberalism, by a tension between the narrative of history, along with its animating ideology of progress, and the non-linear temporality of post-industrial society that has been called, variously, ‘postmodern’, ‘chronoscopic’ and ‘Corporate’ time. The Desert Walk challenges this dominant temporal mode, I argue, not by transcending or resolving its contradictions but rather by self-consciously harnessing them in order to recognize how time is embedded in other practices and processes. Nourished by a particular culture and environment, the time of the Desert Walk is also crucially mobile and progressive, granting its participants a stake in the promotion of a habitable global future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1900 and 1930, federal reclamation, industrialization, and recruitment by the Bureau of Indian Affairs drove thousands of Tohono O'odham to take up wage work. The Tohono O'odham, however, challenged the blueprint drawn up by federal agencies for their "assimilation" by actively shaping their integration into the regional political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overall goal of the AANAC study is to improvedetection of astigmatism and prevention of amblyopia in populations with ahigh prevalence of astigmatism. To meet this goal, the study will evaluatefour methods of screening for astigmatism in preschool children and will assessboth the short-term and long-term benefits of early correction of astigmatismin improving acuity and preventing amblyopia. This paper presents an overviewof the design and methodology of the AANAC study. Subjects are members of the Tohono O'Odham Nation, a Native American tribewith a high prevalence of astigmatism. Preschool-age children who attend HeadStart are screened with four tools: the Marco Nidek KM-500 autokeratometer,the MTI photoscreener, the Nikon Retinomax K-Plus autorefractor, and the LeaSymbols acuity chart. Sensitivity and specificity for detection of significantastigmatism, as measured by a technique that uses both cycloplegic retinoscopyand cycloplegic autorefraction, is determined for each of the four screeningtools. Presence of amblyopia is evaluated by measurement of best-correctedrecognition acuity and acuity for orthogonal gratings. Spectacles are provided to all 3-year-old children with ≥2.00 diopters(D) of astigmatism and all 4- and 5-year-old children with ≥1.50 D of astigmatism.Persistence of amblyopia after glasses wearing is evaluated by follow-up measurementof best-corrected recognition acuity and acuity for orthogonal gratings, conducted2-5 months after glasses are prescribed. Long-term effectiveness of earlyscreening and glasses prescription is evaluated through measurement of recognitionacuity in two groups of first-grade children: one group who participated inthe Head Start program before the intensive vision screening program was initiated,and a second group who participated in the study's Head Start vision screeningprogram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides a detailed summary of the sequence of events that led to the compromise between the Arizona State Museum and the Tohono O'Odham Nation on analytical procedures and the decision to rebury the human remains and associated grave goods. Specific aspects of the agreement; Project history; Commentary on events; Controversy.

In the summer of 1995, only a blink away from the 21st century, several members of the Tohono O'odham Nation came together for a two-week training workshop for O'odham language teachers at the college and university level Within the short two-week period this group began to experiment with various alternatives for turning the tide of language loss among the Tohono O'odham community, including building on the rich oral tradition of the people and pilot projects using the latest computing equipment. This article considers these and other language-maintenance efforts in light of the current status of the Tohono O'odham language of Arizona. The goals of the article are to describe the present status of spoken and written Tohono O'odham and prevailing attitudes held by members of the O'odham Tribe about their language; to describe approaches being attempted to maintain the O'odham language; and to consider the current economic and political stance of the O'odham Nation relative to language survival Finally, the article considers the current role of the Tohono O'odham's lucrative gaming industry: will there be revenue available now for the tribe to help itself in turning the tide of language loss? Both realistic and hypothetical solutions to O'odham language maintenance and survival are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field research was designed to test the efficacy of television programming strategies based on task analysis and social learning theory for teaching a complex conceptual behavior, seriation, to Papago Indian children. Sesame Street has been effective in teaching associative learning skills, but has not met its objectives relating to more complex cognitive skills. In the present study the effectiveness of an alternative programming approach was assessed. Forty subjects aged three to five years were randomly assigned to two conditions. Experimental subjects viewed video tapes depicting seriation concepts; control subjects viewed placebo tapes. Highly significant differences between groups were revealed. The conclusion is drawn that sequentially arranged instruction can be effective in teaching a complex conceptual behavior to preschool children in culturally different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the psycholinguistic abilities of Papago Indian school children utilizing the 1968 edition of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. Data obtained were analyzed by a comparison of mean scaled scores using t tests for paired comparisons for the following groups: (a) ITPA normative and Papago, (b) first and third grade, and (c) segregated and integrated populations. A 3 way analysis of variance was also employed to evaluate interaction of children, grade, and school. Results indicated poorer performance of the Indians, especially on the auditory vocal tests, better performance of the Indians attending integrated schools, and the ineffective aspects of cumulative education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents court records, official telegrams, newspaper accounts and other documentary materials along with Papago and Mexican oral testimony regarding the April 14, 1898 attack by a group of Papago Indians on the Mexican mining village of El Plomo in Sonora, Mexico.

Presents an account of the ethnohistory of Papago Indians. Killing of Apaches; Purification of wounded Papago.

Examines the vocabulary and style in the Papago language of Papago Indians. Features of the Indian language; Comparison of the Papago language with other Indian languages; Details on the verb forms in the Papago language.

Illustrates the examples taken from the practical, social and religious life of some North American Indians. Use of understatement as a literary device employed by self-conscious artists; Literature of primitive people; Beliefs of Papago Indians about the source of medicine power.

The article focuses on how societies around the world perceive their handicaps and how they solve their problems. This cross-society assessment has been done so that the useful experiments and experiences could be used by the U.S. society to solve the handicaps' problems in education there. The societies whose perceptions toward handicaps have been analyzed include the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, the Jemez Indians of New Mexico and the Papago Indians of Arizona. The author says that the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert have some superstitions about handicaps. They think that a handicap has broken a taboo or he is the victim of black magic.

The article focuses on a study of the application of social learning principles in a field setting. Study subjects were 30 Papago native American children selected from a population of first grade children in the elementary schools of two reservation communities. Mothers of the subjects were assigned to one of three treatment groups, with the intervention training occurring at successive points in time for each subsample. Trainings were conducted through direct demonstration, role playing and corrective activities. The study showed the efficacy of parental applications of learning theory based procedures for intellectual socializatio. It also suggested that intellectual skills can be taught effectively to the children regardless of their level of acculturation or past academic achievement.

Daniel Lopez, a gentleman in his 50s, is a member of the Tohono O'odham Tribe (formerly called Papago) of southern Arizona. He is one of a handful of certified O'odham bilingual teachers teaching on the Tohono O'odham reservation in the public schools. He is also the cofounder and organizer of a local children's traditional dance group and is a cultural consultant to museums and schools. The comments here were recorded and edited by Zepeda from a presentation made in English during a spring 1992 seminar on "Poetics and Politics" at the University of Arizona. Though the comments were originally responses to student questions, they are revelatory of Lopez's experiences and concerns and those of others in his generation, and in this sense constitute a form of autobiographical narrative. For the purposes of presentation, the questions have been omitted, and Lopez's comments are organized around leading topics. The integrity of the author's voice is maintained as transcribed from the oral recording of his presentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]