Acequia’s Impact on Native Americans (Robby Buck)

 Acequia’s Impact on Native Americans

Suppose you wander over yonder, to the desert plains of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. You may come across members of the Navajo or Pueblo nations and other First Nations people who live there. You’re first thought might be. Why are people living in a desert? There's no water here. Well, that's where the ingenuity of the Native Americans comes in. Acequias, mother ditch, is a technique of irrigation developed in multiple parts of the world. In North America, Acequia were invented and first used by the Pueblo people as a way to transfer water from their cisterns or the nearby Colorado River to their farms. Thus allowing for an arid landscape to become a lush, highly productive agricultural zone rich with food. Some of the crops grown by the local tribes of this region were the three sister crops and medical herbs. The tribes would also hunt wild game of the area, such as elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and rabbits. One of the sites inhabited by the Pueblo people was Chaco Canyon, which was a citadel for the Southwest. At this site, there were pine beams that were hauled from over 50 miles away and sandstone bricks that were quarried to construct this city. It was the single largest structure on the North American continent in the 1800s. There were facilities for observing the stars, taking measurements from astronomical charts, as well as a sort of facility that allowed for knowledge on when to plant different crops based on the stars' alignment. However, this wondrous structure fell to the horrors of climate change when a 50-year drought left the site abandoned. These droughts are common in the southwest and plain civilizations and happen every 100 - 1000 years.

When the Spanish arrived, they left the acequia system in place due to its similarity to a similar system brought over to Espania by the Moores from North Africa. This system allowed Spain to turn its arid landscape into the colonial naval power of yesteryear. To get back onto track, Spain used the Acequia systems of Native Americans to fertilize the plains and cultivate near the missions set up along the coastline. 

Currently, modern civilizations have laid cement on the bottom layer of some of these acequias, preventing aquifers from being replenished by this vital water. In combination with more and more aquifers beginning to dry up, lowering the water table has sent the southwest into a frenzy, as food scarcity is becoming more of a potential threat for the region. In Oklahoma, the Ogallala aquifer situated under the Plains has reached a low enough point that many of the local ponds and lakes of the region have disappeared, while the aquifer is not able to replenish the vast amounts of water being drained. A similar situation is happening in Saudi Arabia with its aquifer that is being used for irrigation.

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