Before Arizona was a state, the Akimel O'odham were its farmers. Along the Gila River they grew tepary beans, corn, wheat, and squash on irrigation canals so old and so effective that when settlers and gold-seekers came through hungry, the O'odham fed them. They were a prosperous people who lived by the river that carried their name, the river people.
Then the river was taken. Beginning in the 1870s, Anglo settlers upstream diverted the Gila and pulled the water off before it reached O'odham fields. What followed is remembered as the years of famine. A farming people who had fed newcomers were pushed into hunger and government rations, and the processed diet that replaced their own crops set off generations of diet-related disease. Their water was not restored until a landmark water-rights settlement in 2004, more than a century later.
Ramona Farms grows in the middle of that history. On the Gila River Indian Community in Sacaton, Ramona Button and her family raise the foods their people nearly lost: tepary beans, which the O'odham call bavi; sixty-day Pima corn; wheat and cornmeal stone-ground from heritage grain. Ramona started with her own family's seed. The farm now ships those crops across the country.
"Pima people represent the dawning of Arizona agriculture, and their practices were adopted by the settlers who arrived later."
Terry Button, Ramona Farms
That sentence holds the whole point. The people whose water was stolen are the same people who taught the region how to farm its desert, and they are still doing it. This is what food sovereignty looks like in practice. Not a museum crop behind glass, but a working farm selling a living food system back into the world on its own terms.
Fall is the season to eat from it, and the season that most needs the correction it offers. The Thanksgiving story most of us were handed exists to make the taking of this land feel like a shared meal. An honest harvest table starts somewhere else: by buying the actual harvest, bavi and Pima corn and heritage flour, from the O'odham family still growing it, and cooking it.
Storefront: store.ramonafarms.com
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