The Gila River Indian Community sits in the Sonoran Desert of south-central Arizona, southeast of Phoenix.

In the 1920s and 1930s, when Ira Hayes was growing up there, it was a place that had survived enormous historical disruption and was still living with the consequences.

The Akimel O’odham — the River People — had been farming the Gila River valley for centuries.

Their sophisticated irrigation systems turned desert land into productive fields.

They grew cotton, wheat, and corn.

In the mid-nineteenth century, they had been notable enough allies to American settlers and military forces moving through the Southwest that government reports praised them as peaceful, industrious, and hospitable.

When the California gold rush sent thousands of migrants along the southern route through Arizona, Akimel O’odham farmers sold food to travelers who might otherwise have starved in the desert.

In return, over the following decades, the water that sustained their civilization was systematically diverted upstream by Anglo-American settlers.

By the late nineteenth century, the Gila River had been reduced to a trickle.

Fields that had fed thousands went dry.

The agricultural economy that had made the Akimel O’odham largely self-sufficient collapsed within a generation.

The federal government did not restore the water.

What it did, in the early twentieth century, was establish a reservation, suppress traditional governance, and send children to boarding schools designed to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultures.

The Gila River Indian Community that Ira Hayes grew up in was a community that had been stripped of the resource base that had defined it, subjected to federal policies of forced assimilation, and left to adapt to poverty and dependency in the middle of the desert.