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7 Native Water The San Xavier Reach Martínez Hill: June, 113 River Miles Nine months later on a June morning of what meteorologists are saying will be a record-hot, 108-degree day, I return to Pima Mine Road and the river. Joining me is Danita Rios, a twenty-six-year-old Tohono O’odham woman assigned by the San Xavier District Council to “monitor” me. Two weeks ago, I met with the six-member council to argue my case for hiking across the reservation. It wasn’t an easy sell. The men and women grilled me on my purpose, questioning my intentions.“Why exactly do you want to hike through our lands?” A month earlier I had written a letter to Austin Nunez, chairman of the San Xavier District of the Tohono O’odham Nation, asking for permission to hike along the Santa Cruz River across tribal lands to the mission. I expected a permit, some signed form like the one I received from Pima County to hike across Canoa Ranch. Instead, Austin Nunez wrote back saying I needed to make a request to the district council and that he had asked that I be placed on the agenda for the next meeting. “If they agree,”he wrote,“they will require you to hire a monitor (guide) who must be with you at all times during your hike through our lands.” At Tuesday’s meeting, I came up first on the agenda. Speaking in a microphone to the members, I answered their questions about my project and agreed to hire a tribe monitor, share a draft of my writing with the council, and send a copy of the book after its publication. The council voted 5 to 1 to grant my request. With Danita close behind me, I slip through a barbed-wire fence and begin walking across the San Xavier District, home to about eighteen 162 chapter seven hundred people living on seventy-two thousand acres in the eastern portion of the Delaware-size, three-million-acre nation. On my right, the Santa Cruz River cuts a sheer-walled trench forty feet into the loamy desert soil. Nearly eight miles distant, the volcanic mound of Martínez Hill rises above mesquite trees and cholla cacti. Our destination lies four hours away. Happy New Year, I think about wishing Danita when I notice fruit on the saguaro cacti splitting open and falling to the ground like discarded pairs of wax lips. The June ripening begins Hasan Bakmasad, the “saguaro moon,” and the start of the O’odham New Year. It is the time of the cactus fruit harvest with its wine feast, a ceremony holy to the people. It involves songs and stories and dancing, along with the fermentation, drinking, and regurgitation of saguaro fruit syrup. The ceremony is a gift from I’itoi, the O’odham Elder Brother and Creator, who taught the people that the wine becomes a medium through which to pray for rain. The sacred intoxication and regurgitation represent “throwing up the clouds,” and it is said that the saturation of the people with saguaro-fruit wine is like the desert becoming saturated with water, that during the driest and hottest and leanest time of the year, this is how the people summon the summer thunderstorms. I’m certainly praying for an early Jukiabig Masad, or “rainy moon.” At seven o’clock, it’s already ninety degrees under a hard, azurite sky. The desert here, probably some of the most inhospitable on my journey, is baked ground, scored by decades of runoff erosion into deep, steepsided gullies that we must continually backtrack around, moving farther and farther from the river. Creosote bushes look like spindly-legged tarantulas dying on their backs. Even their shadows wither in the sun. This is not the river valley of the past. According to Texas A&M geosciences professor Michael R. Waters, prior to about eight thousand years ago, this part of the Santa Cruz River was a shallow, braided stream, broken into separate reaches and organic-rich marshes, or cienagas, which deposited sediments over a broad floodplain. Then, and for the next twenty-five hundred years, the river’s character changed and it began eroding its banks and carrying away its sediments, significantly widening and downcutting the valley bottomland. Between 5,500 and 2,550 years ago, the Santa Cruz again went through a period of depositing sediments and saw the reemergence of its cienagas. Although there have been times...

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