When Ira Hayes was discharged from the Marine Corps in December 1945 and returned to the Gila River reservation, the United States was entering a period that history has often described as a time of prosperity and optimism — the post-war boom, the expanding middle class, the housing developments and the baby boom and the television sets and the sense that the country had won the most important war in its history and had earned the right to celebrate.

That version of 1945 and 1946 and the years immediately following was not the version available to Ira Hayes or to the Akimel O’odham community he returned to.

The reservation economy in 1945 was constrained in ways that the reservation’s location in the Sonoran Desert made unusually visible.

Without adequate water, the land that had once supported a thriving agricultural civilization could support only limited farming.

The federal government’s management of the reservation was still conducted through a model that provided minimal resources and maximum control — the Bureau of Indian Affairs made decisions affecting reservation life that the community had limited ability to challenge.