Tribal influence over Arizona water growing
When Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit priest and explorer for the Spanish crown, came into what is now southern Arizona from Mexico in 1692, he was greeted by irrigated farms sprawling incongruously across the Sonoran Desert. The Tohono O’odham, among the first tribes Kino encountered near what is now Tucson, and others had been growing crops along Arizona’s waterways for thousands of years.