It was political.

The country that celebrated him as a hero had not and would not address the fundamental injustices that structured life in his community.

What The Water Finally Meant

Here is a detail that matters and that rarely appears in the simplified version of Ira Hayes’s story.

The water that had been diverted from the Gila River — the water that the Akimel O’odham had been farming with for centuries, the water whose absence had collapsed the agricultural economy of Hayes’s community before he was born — was finally, partially, restored through federal action decades after his death.

The Central Arizona Project, which began delivering Colorado River water to the Gila River Indian Community in the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent legal settlements that confirmed substantial water rights for the Akimel O’odham, represented the beginning of something the community had sought for a century.