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▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ chapter 5 the indian new deal and the politics of the tribe In 1902 Peter Blaine was born to a Tohono O’odham mother and a mestizo father (part O’odham) in South Tucson. In the early years of his life, his mother, like many other urban O’odham women, supported her family by cleaning houses. When Blaine was six his mother died, and he moved into the home of his aunt Josefa and her husband, a Yaqui. He grew up speaking both Yaqui and Spanish, only later becoming fluent in the O’odham language his mother had spoken. In his memoir he recalled the neighborhood he was born in thus: “In the scattered houses, not only were there Papagos, but also Yaqui and Mexican families. The Spanish word barrio was used to describe those houses south of 17th Street. No whites lived there, just a mixture of Mexicans and Indians.” From an early age, his environment and his identity were clearly multicultural, as illustrated by his trilingualism , his interethnic family, and his intimate ties to the diverse peoples of Tucson and southern Arizona.1 Eventually, Blaine moved from the multiethnic barrios of Tucson to the relatively homogeneous Tohono O’odham reservation at San Xavier. There he came to see himself unequivocally as Papago rather than Yaqui or Mexican . Still, this was a localized identity, and his sense of himself as a member of a tribe was tenuous. Blaine retained close ties to Tucson while he moved from job to job around southern Arizona. In the latter half of the 1920s he served as the “delegate . . . for the Mexican people” on the Tucson Trades Council—a position he obtained through his involvement with the construction workers’ union. Only during the 1930s, when he began to work with the Indian branch of the Forest Service, a centerpiece of the Indian New Deal, did Blaine’s conception of belonging to a larger tribal community solidify.2 128 border citizens This brief account of Blaine’s life demonstrates how the development of a tribal identity was not simply the product of biology, language, kinship, or cultural tradition but also of engagement with the multiethnic regional community, the political economy, and the nation-state. For the Yaqui- and Spanish-speaking child of a mixed marriage there was no guarantee that he would identify unequivocally as Tohono O’odham. In the mid-1930s, though, while working under the Forest Service’s Indian branch, Blaine was propelled into a position of leadership among the Tohono O’odham because of his trilingualism and experience with the union. As he explained in an oral history, “The people didn’t know nothing about organizing a government . There was only the chief’s organization in each village. There were no elections. What the chief said was law. The people had accepted this way of village government for who knows how long.” Blaine began to direct the organizing skills that he obtained as a unionized worker and Forest Service employee toward the creation of a new tribal government.3 The Indian New Deal was designed, in part, to encourage tribal cohesion —in many cases among peoples who had never conceived of themselves politically as tribes. Under the direction of Commissioner John Collier , the Bureau of Indian Affairs relaxed its policy of forced assimilation, ended and even reversed the allotment process, reformed its education program, and encouraged economic development on the reservations. It also created a process whereby Indians would vote within one year to reorganize politically and then write constitutions, elect tribal councils, and form tribal governments. Most of these reforms were passed by Congress as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in June 1934.4 The implementation of the IRA was often far more complicated than Collier had hoped and was contradictory in its outcomes. In Arizona the economic programs of the Indian New Deal, which were intended to make tribes more self-sufficient and reservation economies more viable, tended instead to make growing numbers of Indians dependent upon wage labor. The reforms also often presumed a level of homogeneity among indigenous groups that had never existed. According to one historian, the IRA “ignored Indian socio-historical realities,” and “formalized a political unity superimposed on cultural and political diversity within single reservations.”5 It also often ignored intimate ties, such as Peter Blaine’s, that transcended both ethnic boundaries and those of the reservation. In Arizona’s borderlands the Indian New Deal included an extra level of complexity. Because the international...

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