The O'odham-Pee Posh Documentary History Project

July 2005

The O’odham and Pee Posh (a.k.a. Maricopa) peoples of southern Arizona and northern Sonora are the focus of the newest documentary history project undertaken by Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW), a program of Arizona State Museum’s Office of Ethnohistorical Research (OER). Project co-directors Dale Brenneman, Diana Hadley, and Hartman Lomawaima lead a multidisciplinary team of UA graduate students in Spanish, linguistics, and anthropology. Also assisting in this endeavor is Matthew Lewis, a student intern from the Tohono O’odham Nation’s developing museum. With funding provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) the team has already made a preliminary selection of documents, using DRSW’s extensive microfilm collection of Spanish colonial documents and taking full advantage of Bunny Fontana’s “Annotated Bibliography of the Tohono O’odham (Papago) Indians.”

The O’odham–Pee Posh Documentary History Project invites the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Ak-Chin Indian Community, the Gila River Indian Community, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community to collaborate in the editing process while protecting sensitive information. Through their respective cultural resource offices, tribal representatives and consultants are being asked to identify the research goals of their communities, help select the documents to be translated, contribute to the annotation of the documents, and write commentaries on the documents themselves. In this way, the insights and oral traditions of O’odham and Pee Posh elders and scholars will enrich interpretations of the documents and contribute to our understanding of historical encounters between Europeans and Native Americans in general, and of Spanish–O’odham–Pee Posh interaction specifically. And the resulting volume will make the Spanish and Mexican documentary record much more accessible—and relevant—to the O’odham and Pee Posh communities.

NHPRC funding was cut 50% this year yet OER support is continued - a tribute to the value of the research! With past NHPRC funding OER has compiled a documentary history of the Hopi during the Spanish and Mexican periods (1540–1848). That research endeavor, which also employed primary archival materials from OER’s collection as well as much collaboration with tribal and cultural experts, is in its final stages of completion. Such collaboration between historians, anthropologists, and members of a Native group is a new direction in the preparation of documentary editions. The Hopi Tribe plans to incorporate the information into Hopi language programs and into the curriculum for junior and senior high school history classes. It is hoped that the O’odham documentary project will be similarly relevant.