Two Names, One People

Thomas Andrew Green

When the boy I used to be was growing up in rural eastern Arkansas, his parents tasked him with few responsibilities, and he spent many of his days running up and down the wooded slopes of Crawley’s Ridge on which sat the family house-trailer (which, to the delight of the youngster, could also be called a ‘trailer-house’ depending, he figured, on if you were running from his room, through the living room, down the hallway, into his parents’ room or from their room to his.) Unburdened with chores and not vexed by duties, he grew up without the constraints of social stratification a big city such as nearby Memphis, Tennessee would have imposed. Whenever he tired of sprawling on his bed, reading the latest science-fiction book he had checked out of the library, he would tumble out the door of the trailer into the heat and sunshine to run, whoop, and holler with an energy his mother described as “wild as an Indian.”

Three hundred years(1) before the boy lived with his family in their trailer in the woods, the French Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette and French-Canadian fur-trader Louis Jolliet passed down the Mississippi River basin, giving local geographic features proper French names because that was what Europeans thought they should all do. Before Marquette and Jolliet arrived, the people who had already been living there for hundreds of generations referred to themselves as Ugakhpa (or Ogaxpa or whatever linguistic label you fancy) meaning the ‘downstream people.’ However, the neighboring Algonquian-speaking Illinois tribes much further to the north called them Akanses, meaning ‘people of the south wind,’ and since Marquette and Jolliet met the Illinois first, they named the land at the fork of the Mississippi and another, lesser water course the French-derivative Arkansas(2). (The Anglicized spelling Arkansaw flickered in and out of vogue for a while, especially during the early 1960s, but it never took hold(3).)

After a few years, that boy grew into me, and I graduated college, married, and moved from the fields and forests of Arkansas to the sands and cactuses of Arizona. I followed a long-held dream and applied to the University of Arizona’s creative writing program, but young and stupid arrogant full of myself—figuring I could write well enough and just needed something to write about—I switched programs from writing to Native American Studies. Back when I had first registered for classes, with tribal life surrounding me so blatantly, I had, on the spur of the moment, signed up for a beginning Papago language class as an elective. What could be more perfect? Here I stood, surrounded by saguaros and prickly pears and mesquite trees, where the scant rain waited hovering just out of reach overhead until the rainy season when the saturated air would burst with downpours every afternoon, flooding arroyos and streets, sweeping away any gringo Easterner foolish enough to try to drive across what anyone could clearly see was merely a trickle of water ….

In Tucson, on 13 July 2025, the news staff of CBS television network affiliate KOLD-TV (Channel 13), aired, with rain in the forecast, a segment called “Looking back at Historic Flooding in Southern Arizona.” In October 1983, tropical Storm Octave had dumped “five-to-nine inches of rain across Tucson, triggering the worst flood in city history.(4)” Eight-foot-deep flood waters, with “people … sitting on their rooftops,” caused $64 million in damage with 13 deaths.

The “deadliest storm in the state’s history”(5), tropical storm Norma occurred on Labor Day of 1970, lasting from 4 September to 5 September, with 23 deaths, 14 of those in Tonto Creek with “many campers … helplessly swept away by a nearly 5-foot wall of water.”

As my studies produced better understanding of a group of people which had never concerned me before, the time came to stretch myself, to shuck off the carapace of white, middleclass, Euro-American, English-speaking capitalistic nearsightedness, and rise up on wings of Native words and alien grammar and share the change of worldview inherent in such a transformation. 

And as if confirming what enflamed my soul, the Native Peoples of the area—whom smug, self-satisfied money-managers had for centuries labeled Papago, an epitaph taken from an Apache slur meaning ‘bean-eater,’ those Native People threw off the tatters of an identity forced on them by pale-faced strangers and declared themselves no long eaters of beans, but as they had designated themselves in their own language from the beginning of time, O’odham. The People. Tohono O’odham. The Desert People. Closely related to, but distinct from their northern cousins, Akimel O’odham, the River People(6). Not mere Apache-fearing eaters of beans, but humans being human beings.

1-  Google https://bit.ly/41Cb1wT
2- Tanya Larkin (2003). Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet: Explorers of the Mississippi. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-8239-3625-0; Delanglez, Jean. Life and Voyages of Louis Jolliet (1645–1700). Chicago: Loyola University, 1948. (https://archive.org/details/lifevoyagesoflou00dela/page/n5/mode/2up)
3- Personal recollection of the author.
4- News Staff 13. http://bit.ly/3QvCttD.
5- Cohen, Sam. The Copper Courier. 9 July 2025. https://bit.ly/4sAl40d
6- Siiki, Jivik. Interview. Arizona PBS. “Two Peoples, One Name: Understanding the O’odham” 23 January 2026. https://bit.ly/4tgmVbJ