It gave one reservation business a tax break that no other business got.

The vote was 11 to 5 and what followed was almost two years of controversy that ultimately forced the tribe to rethink its approach to taxation from the ground up.

How It Started

The business was the Akimel O’otham Smoke Shop, located near Interstate 10. The owner was Gila River Lieutenant Governor at the time - William Rhodes.

Some important context is that Rhodes was a long-time political fixture in the Community. He was one of the young people that was very instrumental in the implementation of the Vh-Thaw-Hup-Ea-Ju Plan back in the 60’s and 70’s, he was a long time political leader, and in the future he became a very controversial GRIC Governor.

Before we get too far into this story, I want to note that I think Bill Rhodes was an all around awesome dude. Someday I’d like to write more on his life and his massive re organizational change of the Community in the mid 2000’s. He was a visionary guy, and I actually think his argument about tax breaks at this time in our history made a lot of sense.

You see - at the time Rhodes argued to the council that his smoke shop operated differently from other reservation businesses. He paid for his own power through a diesel generator, hauled his own water, and had no tribal road improvements serving the location. He was basically doing everything himself, including his own private security.

As a business owner and a Community member he was asking why he should pay taxes when the tribe was providing very little in the way of infrastructure or support. Whats worse, he employed multiple people and was concerned that without the tax break, he would likely have to close and lay off his seven employees.

The council agreed and reduced his tax rate from 6 percent to 2 percent for three years (09-88, p.1).

The problem was immediate. Renay Peters, who owned MTO Smoke Shop in Sacaton, tried to address the council at the same meeting. He wasn’t recognized before the vote was called and didn’t get to give feedback. He sent a letter to the governor saying the action wasn’t fair. He sent a letter to the tribal treasurer. He requested a hearing. Nothing was resolved (09-88, p.1).

Tribal Treasurer Alida Thomas looked at the tax ordinance and said she saw no provision in the existing law to lower the rate for a single business. “My job is to enforce the ordinance. There’s nothing to cover that in the ordinance,” she said. Without a formal amendment, she had no legal basis to implement what the council had voted (09-88, p.1).

The Decision Goes to Committee

By October 1988 the matter had been referred to the tribal council’s Legislative Committee. This was by itself an interesting development, since it raised questions about whether a committee could review a full council vote. Either way, the community was watching (10-88, p.1).

November 1988 brought a quote that (for me at least) turned out to be the most important line in the whole saga. Mary Thomas, chairperson of the Legislative Committee, was explaining why the committee was taking the tax question so seriously rather than just resolving the smoke shop dispute and moving on. She said: “If we are to run our own government in the future…I believe taxes will always be with us if we want to prepare ourselves for an independent future” (11-88, p.1).

It was a statement that reframed the entire conversation. It wasn’t just this one smoke shop, the questions was about whether the tribe had a coherent, enforceable, and fair tax structure that could support self-governance over the long term.

The Interim Solution

By February 1989 (~6 months later) the council had made a decision. Rather than adjudicate the original tax break or simply deny Peters his hearing, they did something more sweeping — they temporarily reduced the privilege tax for every reservation retailer, down to 2 percent. They also eliminated the separate taxes on alcohol and tobacco products entirely for the period. The change applied to all retail businesses on the Community, tribal and non-tribal alike, and would be active from February 1 to August 1, 1989 (02-89, p.1).

Peters acknowledged it wasn’t exactly what he had asked for, but said the key point had been addressed: “This decision affects all retail businesses on the reservation — while before, it affected only one, and adversely affected all the rest” (02-89, p.1).

The projected cost was about $45,000 in lost revenue over seven months — roughly $7,500 a month. Thomas noted that the committee was already working on ways to broaden the tax base and find alternative revenue to offset the reduction (02-89, p.1).

The Overhaul

The temporary measure bought time for the Legislative Committee to plan next steps.

By October 1989 the GRIN reported that five major changes to the tax law were coming, including a provision specifically for closing the kind of individual waiver that had started the whole controversy (10-89, p.1).

By November, council actually passed seven major tax changes — the most significant reform of the tribal tax structure in the community’s recent history (11-89, p.2). Among them was a blanket prohibition on all future tax waivers. No individual business would be able to get in individual waiver, regardless of the circumstances. There were also a number of other major changes I’d recommend any tax nerds check out.

Conclusion

The smoke shop controversy is a good example of how a seemingly small governance dispute can be the beginning of a larger change.

The original vote wasn’t corrupt — Rhodes made a very reasonable argument about the unique costs of his business and lack of infrastructure the tribe provided… why was he paying taxes when he received little or nothing in return?

I also thought this story was interesting because I think Rhodes had a pretty fair argument to start with - he had paid out of pocket for infrastructure, he was providing jobs to Community members, and he was being asked to pay 4% of his revenue to the Community for… what?

Keep in mind at that time there was no GRPD, GRFD, and many of the infrastructure systems we have today didn’t exist. Rhodes was paying for many of these costs himself - this was not a government enterprise where the Community would come in and bail him out if he got himself 700k in debt… unlike some other ventures of the tribe.

But the council had no mechanism to grant it fairly, no framework for evaluating exceptions consistently, and no way to apply the decision equally across other businesses. When challenged, the waiver didn’t really make sense.

So.. sticky questions coming up in this story - but I think it is a cool look in the evolution of our tax code. And… in the end things worked out. We redid the tax code to make it stronger and we know that Rhodes didn’t end up closing the smokeshop - it remained in business and is still around today. So whatever tax changes they made must have been enough to keep the business around.

Anyway - Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me - if you are interested in checking out the stories I used to craft this article you can find them here:

Issue Page Title

09-88 1 Smoke Shop Tax Break Draws Fire

10-88 1 Smoke Shop Tax Waiver Matter Considered by Council Committee

11-88 1 Tribal Committee Continues Work on Tax Question

02-89 1 Tax Controversy Prompts Tribe to Reduce Retail Tax Rate

10-89 1 Major Changes in Tribal Tax Laws Coming

11-89 2 Gila River Approves Seven Major Tax Changes

You can find the full pdf archive on my Gila River News Database or at the original source Gila River Indian News

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Lets get into it!

What Was The Gila River Indian Community Land Claim Case, Docket 228?

Docket 228 was compensation to the Gila River Indian Community, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and the Ak Chin Indian Community for the denial of their rights to aboriginal land. This was a claim won in the U.S. Claims Court in ~April 1985.

Docket 228 was part of The Indian Claims Commission (ICC). The ICC was a US judicial panel established by Congress in 1946 to hear Native American grievances against the US government, primarily concerning land loss and broken treaties. It operating from 1946 to 1978, it awarded over $800 million for land taken at unfair prices, providing monetary compensation rather than land return.

But Docket 228 also represented a denial of rights for GRIC and other communities by forcing a cash settlement for stolen land. The settlement legally removed our title to our ancestral territory without returning any portions of it. This process also undervalued the land and was meant to legitimize the loss.

Basically think of it as the US Government’s way of paying for all our lands outside our reservation boundaries. But paying pennies on the dollar…

Some tribes refused to take the ICC settlement - one case is the Sioux related to Black Hills - they received a 100 million settlement in ~1980, but refused to accept it. It has now grown to over 2bn dollars, but the Sioux tribe maintains that the land was not and will never be for sale.

But, if a tribe took it or not, the federal government considered the land forfeit. They had and still have no intention of ever giving it back.

Back to Docket 228 at Gila River

This article isn’t all about that travesty though, we are going to look at what happened with the settlement when it came to Gila River.

The original award for the three tribes was about 6.3 million dollars minus ~10% of the total award deducted for attorney fees.

The money would be divided among the three tribes according to their enrollment numbers — Gila River with 10,370 members, Salt River with 4,352, and Ak Chin with 490 (08-87, p.5). During this time the money was sitting in investment accounts accumulating interest since 1985 while the tribes worked out their use plans (08-87, p.1).

Under the use plan approved by Congress and the Gila River Tribal Council, tribal members would receive 80 percent of the Community’s share as a per capita payment. The remaining 20 percent would stay with the tribal government as required by law, pending the development of a financial investment plan.

By the math available in August 1987, Gila River’s 80 percent per cap share worked out to roughly $330 per person — though the exact figure would depend on how much interest had accumulated by the time payments were actually made.

Simple enough on paper. What followed was anything but.

The Politics Behind the Money

The first sign of how charged the Docket 228 issue had become in the Community shows up in the very first issue of the GRIN in this period. January 1987 opens with a story about an effort to unseat two District 1 tribal council representatives through a recall election - Drake Lewis and Leona Thomas.

The recall was specifically tied to Docket 228.

You see, the original plan for all of the judgement money was to invest it rather than distribute most of it as per capita payments. When the money was first awarded to the Community the tribal council had made the decision to fully invest all the money.

But… then the tribal council reversed course in June 1986 under pressure from community members and passed a resolution calling for the 80/20 split. But many council members still believed that it was a bad idea for the long term good of the Community. For example Lewis and Thomas continued to support the original all-investment plan.

The recall petitions, circulated by Peter Miguel III and Eleanor Kumpula, read: “We, the undersigned, hereby petition the Gila River Indian Community Tribal Council for a recall election…for gross neglect of duty. (He/she) refused to represent the majority of the people in the matter of Docket 228, voting against us at every opportunity” (01-87, p.1).

The petitions had to be resubmitted because the original versions weren’t properly notarized to show the signatures were genuine, but once corrected, they moved forward through the Legislative Committee.

Both Lewis and Thomas ultimately survived the recall. But Drake Lewis lost his seat shortly after in the May 1987 election, narrowly beaten by Ardell Ruiz 38 votes to 50. A margin of just 12 votes (05-87, p.1).

I want to take a moment here - because I think this is a point of tension I still see today. I’ve had this per capita conversation with a lot of folks and it’s always a tense discussion.

First, Community members clearly wanted the per capita money. The recall fight over Lewis and Thomas, and Drake’s narrow loss at the ballot box shortly after, showed how strongly people felt that the judgement belonged to individual members — not to a tribal investment fund, and not to government programs designed to help people by proxy.

We see the same spirit come up later in the 2000’s when there was a fight to receive per capita payments from Gaming. The people wanted a higher split than the Council was willing to give.

On one side: trust the money to the government to run programs, build infrastructure, invest for the future. On the other: put it directly in people’s hands and let them decide what they need.

The Docket 228 fight suggests that at Gila River, community members have consistently landed on the same side of that argument. They have pushed for direct distribution over institutional control. The 1986 council resolution reversing the all-investment plan didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because people showed up and made their voices heard.

But… there’s a reasonable case for both sides. Tribal programs funded by retained money have built amazing things in our lifetime - hospitals, roads, housing, education infrastructure.

On the other hand there’s also something important in the principle that people are best positioned to decide what they need.

The politics eventually settled. The 80/20 split was put into law. But before any check could go out, the tribe had to do something that turned out to be a challenge: prove who was actually on the roll.

The Enrollment Problem

Once we got past the drama of the recall, there was also a deeper obstacle to actually getting checks in the mail - updating enrollment.

Before a per capita payment could be made, the tribe needed an approved membership roll. And that roll was a mess.

As BIA tribal operations officer Paul Smith put it bluntly in August 1987: “They have got a roll on which they have a lot of work to do, so it may be quite a while before they get a per capita distribution. It’s not accurate, there’s a lot of missing data” (08-87, p.1).

Governor Donald Antone Sr. pushed back, saying the BIA had changed the rules midway through the process by asking for a separate listing for the payout after the tribe was already halfway through updating its membership roll. “We ended up with two sets of rolls, and that’s when it began to fall apart,” he said (08-87, p.1).

The specific problems were what you might expect after years of inadequate record keeping. Women enrolled under maiden names who had married long ago. People using their grandparents’ names or middle names as first names. As Tina Notah, the Enrollment Office coordinator, explained some of the issues in July 1987: “A lot of people have taken on their grandparents’ names, a lot of them just didn’t like their names, and some use their middle name as their first name” (07-87, p.2).

The tribe had published a full list of eligible members in January 1987 as part of the legal requirement to give community members a chance to contest inclusions or omissions before the roll was certified. For each name on that list to be confirmed, the enrollment office had to complete an ancestral trace, verify blood degree, confirm tribal ID numbers, verify current address, and carefully check the enrollment date, since only those who had submitted applications by October 8, 1986 would be eligible for per capita payments.

It was painstaking work. The office only had six employees and was processing names at a rate of about 300 per month (05-89, p.5).

Two and a Half Years Later….

The January 1989 issue reported the enrollment office still had a minimum of three to four months of work left on the final 800 names, followed by a final approval process through the tribal council, the BIA, and then the Interior Secretary (01-89, p.1). The BIA superintendent was careful to clarify her office’s role: “Our only job is to certify the roll that the tribe sends to us” (01-89, p.1).

By May 1989 — two and a half years after we first saw the story - the end was finally in sight.

Only about 387 names remained to be added (05-89, p.1). The total amount sitting in the Gila River Docket 228 account at the end of March 1989 was $3,702,203.66 — the original settlement had earned more than $1.2 million in interest, coming in at about $30,000 to $32,000 a month from investments in 20 to 25 banks nationwide (05-89, p.5).

With roughly 10,000 names on the roll, each member was estimated to receive about $410. But as the roll crept closer to 11,000, the per capita payment would come in closer to about $375. A September 1989 target date was set for disbursement — though both the enrollment office and the BIA emphasized it was only a target, and that much more work was needed (05-89, p.5).

Members under 18 at the time of distribution would have their money held in trust until they turned 18, with interest added. And anyone who had been approved for tribal membership but had submitted their application after the October 8, 1986 cutoff would be on the tribal roll but left off the Docket 228 payment entirely.

Wait… $410? What is That in Today Money?

I want to take a minute to translate all this into inflation adjusted dollars for today.

So, imagine you are living in 1989 - you just found out all your ancestral lands finally went through the ICC and after all this time you get notified that you will be getting

Drum Roll……

~$400.

Inflation adjusted that is about $1,000 in 2025 money.

Yep… All our ancestral lands and we received about less than a year of gaming per capita. Crazy.

I keep thinking of this… we get more each year in per capita than we received for the settlement of all our ancestral lands.

Gross.

Conclusion

The papers in the archive don’t give a clean ending, though we know the payments went out at some point and the enrollment cleanup helped set the stage for the much cleaner systems we have today.

The per-cap vs. investment debate is real and I don’t think it’s going away. But beyond the Docket 228 drama about if the funds should be per capita or go toward supporting GRIC government, there is a deeper and sadder story about where those funds even came from - the loss of our lands.

Anyway - sorry to end on a bummer here, but .. history is a bummer sometimes.

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me - if you are interested in checking out the stories I used to craft this article you can find them here:

Issue Page Title

01-87 1 Drive for Recall Election to Unseat District One Officials Continues

01-87 7 List of Eligible Members

07-87 2 Tribal Roll - Fixing Names and Marriages

08-87 1 Docket 228 Money Goes to Tribes

05-89 1 $3M in Docket 228 Money Almost Distributed

1-89 1 Docket 228 Payout Creeping Closer

You can find the full pdf archive on my Gila River News Database or at the original source Gila River Indian News

Alright - last article we talked about some of the really cool stuff happening around Gila River during this period for Economic Development… but it wasn’t all fun and games.

The late 1980s were a complicated time for economic development at Gila River. The tribe was managing a high-profile business failure and creating new rules for how our economic development would be managed.

I wanted to put together some of the interesting stories from this period. One of the front page stories was about the Sacaton Auto Supply, but there were some other economic mishaps as well.

The Sacaton Auto Supply Saga

No story better captures the tensions of economic development in this period than the Sacaton Auto Supply fiasco.

In case you didn’t know - we used to have an auto supply story in the Community. It is funny because I was just at Book Club the other day and I was chatting with some elders about this venture. They were asking what ever happened to it and how much it was helpful for everyone who was working on their cars…. Well we have some details on it from the newspaper.

So, I don’t know when the store opened - the paper doesn’t have that information, but we do know that in 1987 there was story that the store had accumulated $700,000 in debt over three years under manager Robert F. Lontkowski. So it might have opened around 1983 or 1984?

Either way, by the time the tribal council confronted the situation in 1986, the numbers were staggering. The tribe agreed to write off a $79,000 loss outright and assumed another $631,000 owed to vendors.

Valley National Bank alone was owed $200,000. The council directed the tribal legal counsel to look into holding Lontkowski responsible (02-87, p.5).

Ruben Norris was hired initially as an outside consultant and later appointed director of the Economic Development Office. He explained in February 1987, that the tribe had no visibility into the store’s finances while the debt was accumulating.

At the time, the accounting firm used to manage money had professional standards that stated financial records were confidential and only available to the person who signed the letter of engagement. In this case, that was Lontkowski.

Nobody else at the tribe had access to see the books (02-88, p.1).

This eventually led to some changes in the practice of the Tribe, but it was an expensive lesson. Still, the tribe believed that the store was important to the Community and it could eventually be saved.

The store stayed open. The tribe paid the bills, brought in new management, and tried to stabilize things.

By October 1987 Norris reported the store was paying its current creditors, paying payroll, paying taxes to the tribe, and paying rent - but that the $300,000 the tribe had injected to give it new life was almost certainly never coming back. “I don’t know if the debt will ever be paid. It was in such a sick position that $300,000 was needed to give it new life,” he said (10-87, p.2).

Then in January 1988 Lontkowski pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to embezzling tribal funds. He was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to repay $49,061 - only a fraction of the $700,000 hole he had created. Thirteen other charges were dropped as part of the plea deal (01-88, p.1).

The February 1988 issue carried a follow-up on what the tribe had changed to prevent something like this from happening again.

New rules required that the community manager, tribal treasurer, the enterprise manager, and the Economic Development director to all sign the letter of engagement with the accounting firm. This gave multiple people access to financial information and reports were now filed directly with tribal council’s Economic Development Committee. “I think it’s a safeguard, one that wasn’t practiced in the past,” Norris said (02-88, p.1).

It was a painful lesson, but an instructive one. The Auto Supply story forced the tribe to build better oversight for its enterprises - something that would matter a great deal as the economic stakes got higher in the years ahead.

Eventually the business did close - I don’t quite know when, and I’d love any memories from folks who know. Or any other pictures of the place folks have!

Issue Page Title

02-87 5 Sacaton Auto Supply Debt

05-87 2 Businesses Losing Money

10-87 2 Sacaton Auto Supply Update

01-88 1 Sacaton Auto Supply - Embezzling!

02-88 1 New Rules to Stop Sacaton Auto Supply Fiasco

Other Struggling Tribal Enterprises and Businesses

The Auto Supply wasn’t alone in these struggles though.

Around the same time, the tribe’s Chandler Supply store closed its doors in November 1986, citing insolvency. Norris was tasked with settling that one too. Bankruptcy wasn’t an option - the tribe was the direct owner of the store, meaning a bankruptcy filing would have required the tribe itself to declare bankruptcy. So they just worked through paying the vendors one by one (02-87, p.5).

The May 1987 issue ran a broader accounting of what had happened across some of the tribal enterprise portfolio.

The Sandwich Shop at Sacaton had also been closed, losing money slowly. “Money-wise, we weren’t in a great debt in comparison to previous tribal businesses, but the same situation existed - we were accumulating debt faster than we were able to pay it off,” Norris said (05-87, p.2).

Chandler Supply was shut down entirely and debts were being paid off. Sacaton Chevron, Komatke Market, Casa Blanca Market and Gila River Farms were all undergoing financial assessments.

Norris was direct about what had happened: “What happens when you don’t make enough money to cover the debts? You go out of business. It’s pretty simple.” He credited the tribal council for choosing to close failing businesses rather than continue to subsidize them with community money (05-87, p.2).

Some of these businesses are still around today, so even with the struggles they were either subsidized or changed their business model to keep afloat. We still have our gas stations and the Gila River Farms is still in operation - so I have to hope that we eventually got to a place where we were making more money then we were spending…

I think something important to consider is that this was the growing pains of the Community working to build wealth for the people. One of the primary pillars in The Vh-Thaw-Hup-Ea-Ju plan in the 1960’s was centered around building local business, local economy, and local jobs.

Sometimes the gambles didn’t pay off, but during these decades the tribe was throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to see what sticks. Yeah - sometimes the businesses failed or we had some type of financial or environmental disaster… that is part of growth.

We learned from the mistakes, we dusted off, and we moved on. And as you saw last article, some of these businesses worked out and have survived almost 30+ years!

Sometimes the spaghetti really sticks!

Anyway - Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me - if you are interested in checking out the stories I used to craft this article…

You can find the full pdf archive at the original source Gila River Indian News or on my Gila River News Database

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There was a lot of amazing economic development in Gila River in the 80’s. This is a collection of some stories that I found and wanted to share.

Casa Blanca Market - RV Park

There was an expansion of Casa Blanca Market and the construction of a new RV park next door, both funded through a $317,000 Community Development Block Grant and a private loan from the San Tan Economic Development Corporation (01-87, p.4).

Work started in December 1986. The market expansion added 1,200 square feet of retail space and another 1,200 square feet for a new laundromat - the first laundromat in that part of the Community. An arcade porch and a road sign visible from the interstate were also added. The RV park was built right next to the Gila River Arts and Crafts Center with 22 full-service hookups of water and electricity to each space.

By October 1987 both were open and operating (10-87, p.2).

The RV park in particular was an interesting concept. It was a 50-space facility aimed at capturing some of the I-10 tourist traffic that passed by the Arts and Crafts Center every day. Emmett White of District 5 was awarded the landscaping subcontract (01-87, p.4). It opened at the beginning of tourist season with a hired manager from Casa Grande.

If it worked out is harder to track through the papers, but the January 1989 annual report noted it had been operating without adequate resources for some time after opening (01-89, p.5).

I also don’t ever remember seeing it growing up, so I wonder what happened to it.

Issue Page Title

01-87 4 RV Park Construction - Expansion at Casa Blanca Market

10-87 2 Casa Blanca Market Update

10-87 4 RV Park Opens

ATL Labs and the Guayule Experiment

Another fascinating economic story of this period was happening in Sacaton at the Amerind Agrotech Laboratories - ATL. Director Marc Mittleman, a botanist, was running an operation unlike anything else in the Community (07-87, p.3).

The flagship project was guayule — a desert shrub native to northern Mexico and the Big Bend area of Texas that produces natural rubber. The Department of Defense had determined that a domestic rubber supply was a national security priority, and poured nearly $10 million into exploring whether guayule could be commercially cultivated.

ATL had a $1.3 million DoD grant to maintain 400 acres of guayule and work on improving rubber yields. Firestone Rubber and Tire Company had an $8.3 million DoD grant to design and operate a prototype extraction plant.

Mittleman stated the production cost was running $1.50 to $1.80 per pound of rubber, while foreign rubber was selling at about 48 cents a pound. The math didn’t work yet, but the goal was to bring costs down while finding uses for byproducts like resins that could make the whole operation more cost-effective (07-87, p.3).

ATL wasn’t just about guayule though. It was exploring a range of underused Southwestern crops — gum tragacanth for food thickeners, Mexican oregano for the culinary market, Canaigre root for leather tanning, tepary beans as a traditional food crop ready for commercial development, and devil’s claw for basket makers. The laboratory’s whole philosophy was finding commercial value in crops that had been overlooked.

By January 1988 the Firestone processing plant at San Tan Industrial Park was dedicated — senators, representatives, and the Arizona governor on hand for the ribbon cutting. ATL had shipped about 240 tons of guayule to the pilot plant. The annual report this year noted ATL had 17 regular employees and up to 12 seasonal workers (01-89, p.7).

I wonder what ever happened to this development - I don’t know if I’d ever heard about it growing up, but would love to know more.

Issue Page Title

07-87 3 From Guayule to Devil’s Claw at Sacaton’s ATL Laboratory

01-88 3 Guayule Processing Plant Opens at San Tan Industrial

GRICUA and the Utility Fight

One of the bigger economic stories of the period was the tribe’s effort to get into the power business. This is one we know has a happy ending - our GRICUA enterprise is a leader in energy… but a lot of growth happened in these few years.

The Gila River Indian Community Utility Authority had been evolving since 1980, originally conceived to provide better electric service to the reservation and support economic development in the I-10 corridor.

Board chairman Cecil Antone explained the history in July 1987: a task force formed in 1980, four tribal board members appointed (Cecil Antone, Richard Thompson, Joe Manuel and Perry Sundust), then adding another three retired non-Indian utility industry experts advise the Community.

The experts were Harold Taylor, retired from Arizona Public Service (APS); Eugene Lauerman, Salt River Project (SRP); and Rex Tynes, Rural Electrification Administration (REA).

The authority spent years preparing by working with the REA for federal loans, negotiating with SRP and APS to eventually acquire their reservation-adjacent systems, and doing the groundwork to eventually take over power service (07-87, p.4).

The fight over hydroelectric power generation added another layer of complexity through 1988 … but that’s a story that deserves its own article someday.

Anyway, during this time a unique opening came with federal legislation to sell off the BIA’s San Carlos Irrigation Project electric system. If passed — and it had near-universal support including from the BIA itself — it would give GRICUA a shot at buying the system that already served most of the reservation, putting the tribe in the retail utility business (06-87, p.1).

Not a whole lot happening in this period, but cool to see the history and some of the steps for what has become an amazing part of our modern day energy independence and sovereignty.

Issue Page Title

06-87 1 BIA to Sell SCIP - Pave way for GRICUA

07-87 4 GRICUA History

07-88 1 Gila River Utility Mired in Fight Over Hydroelectricity

Some Other Quickies

The Olberg Trading Post Closes

One quick, mostly non-tribal economic story is that the The Olberg Trading Post was closed during this period. In 1988 the Post closed over a lease and water dispute (06-88, p.6).

I imagine that the tribe didn’t want to put time and money into supporting the business when it was focused on developing it’s own economic development.

The Post was a fixture of the Community since 1927 and it’s loss didn’t generate many articles during this period, but it’s pretty sad that Sixty-plus years of history were gone so suddenly.

Gila River Farms (Pima Farms) Hits 20 Years

During this period is when the Gila River Farms hit 20 years in existence. During this period there was a major inflow of federal cash to the Farms for crop diversification.

Ardell Ruiz of the farm board states this is the first time the Farms had ever asked the federal government for money, but that since so much development was happening in the metro areas, it left a lot of room for the Farms to expand to grow more citrus.

Gila River Baseball Stadium

Just a quick note that I didn’t see any follow up for - but GRIC was also proposed as a site for a baseball stadium for the Phoenix Firebirds.

Given we don’t have any major baseball stadiums in our lands today, I’m guessing it didn’t pan out. Still, I think worth showcasing that there were some major, large scale developments in planning phases at this time. Even when they don’t work out, it is cool to see the plans.

Also - side note I had to do a whole rabbithole on the Phoenix Firebirds - who eventually became the Tucson Sidewinders. Holy moly what a convoluted story!

Issue Page Title

06-88 6 Olberg Trading Post to Close

10-88 7 Gila River Farms Marks 20 Years

08-89 1 US Senate Approves 1.4M for Gila River Farms

08-89 1 Major League Baseball Stadium Considered for GRIC

What It All Adds Up To

It’s important to understand that much of the economic development we were doing on our own really only started in the 60’s - the Vh-Thaw-Hup-Ea-Ju plan really got things moving, and we started taking on larger and larger developments… but even into the 90’s the Community was learning and growing.

These few decades from ~1960-1990 were a major part of our growth and independence coming out of almost 70 years of really intense Federal Control. We had some growing pains that we will get to in the next article - but I want to focus on all the amazing progress we made!

I’ve always said - most local economic development in Sacaton or other districts is not going to make money. We just don’t have a large enough or rich enough population.

Someday we will get there, but sometimes the Government needs to build things for service to the people. Sometimes we need to subsidize and recognize it isn’t going to have the growth that modern business expect.

Anyway - Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me - if you are interested in checking out the stories I used to craft this article…

You can find the full pdf archive at the original source Gila River Indian News or on my Gila River News Database

That’s not quite the origin story you’d expect for what became one of the more enduring institutions in the Gila River Indian Community, but that’s what the June 1988 GRIN shows.

Just a group of volunteers calling themselves the Gila River Youth Advocates, promoting the idea that young people on the reservation deserved a voice — and doing something about it (06-88, p.2).

The First Conference

Before the formal Youth Council existed, there was the A’kimel O’odham Youth Conference.

The August 1987 GRIN announced the first one — scheduled for August 19 and 20 at the Gila River Career Center. The conference theme was “Indian youth, voice of today, leaders of tomorrow.” Workshops would focus on leadership skills, self-image, communication, decision-making, cultural awareness, and educational opportunities (08-87, p.2).

The contacts listed for that conference were Greg Mendoza, Carlene Myers, and Martha Reed.

The same core group that would go on to form the Youth Advocates the following year.

The Founding Members

With the first conference under their belts the Advocacy group began forming into something more official. The founding group is documented by name in the June 1988 issue.

From left to right in the picture:

• Carlene Myers of Sacaton

• Ramsey Moffett of San Tan

• Gregory Mendoza of Goodyear

• Carol French of Sacaton

• Mario M. Torres of Sacaton

• Arlene Howard of Sacaton

• Tim Gomez of Blackwater

• Ira Paul of Sacaton

A few of these names will already be familiar if you read other GRIN issues from this period. Arlene Howard had just completed her term as Miss Gila River 1987-88, she wrote an open letter to the community in February 1988 encouraging young women to apply for the title and talking about how it had shaped her sense of civic purpose and sharpened her O’otham language skills.

And Greg Mendoza — well, Greg Mendoza had a lot of presence in this period of the newspaper, but we will get back to him later.

Forming the Council

In the June 1988 issue the Youth Advocates were publicly pushing for formal establishment of the Akimel O’odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council. Their stated argument was direct: young people ages 14 through 25 made up more than 25 percent of the Community’s population, yet had “little or no voice in helping to determine the future of the tribe.” And for the most part, young people hadn’t been asked to help resolve their own problems (06-88, p.2).

The council would serve three purposes, they said: provide an active, non-partisan voice in tribal affairs; create constructive activities for young people; and enable young people to help solve problems affecting them.

One of their first planned activities was a youth rally, dance, and cookout on June 16 at the Gila River Arts and Crafts Center. Low-key, community-centered, practical. That’s consistent with how this whole effort was started - showing up and doing things.

The Second Conference

The Youth Advocacy Group, now fully established and holding smaller events in the Community also planned and held the second Youth Conference in August 1988.

This time the conference drew about 200 students and the format expanded significantly — a 2-mile fun run, workshops on tribal culture, tribal government, sex education, substance abuse prevention, family values, a basketball tournament, volleyball, a talent show, and a banquet.

The conference also included the first election of district representatives to the newly forming youth council (08-88, p.1).

The Council Takes Shape

By September 1988 the GRIN carried a letter to the editor from Mendoza — now identified as “advocate, Akimel O’odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council” — reflecting on the second youth conference with obvious pride.

He wrote about witnessing “tremendous growth and positive self-discovery as they took on the challenges and obstacles placed in front of them.” One youth at the conference sent a message he quoted: “We always hear our leaders tell us we are the leaders of tomorrow. I don’t believe that! We are leaders already today, and it is today that is going to make a difference for all Indians” (09-88, p.6).

The AOPPYC structure came into focus in December 1988. The GRIN ran a full article on the Akimel O’odham/Pee-Posh Youth Council with a group photo and a list of elected officers and district representatives.

First Youth Council Presidency:

• President - District 2 - Tim Terry

• Vice President - District 3 - Ben Notah

• Treasurer - District 5 - Ginger Martin

District representatives named in the article were :

• District 1 - Mary Marrietta and Alex Marin

• District 3 - June Pablo

• District 4 - Donald Williams and Letha Lamb

• District 5 - Loren Johns

• District 6 - Penny Norris

• District 7 - Orleen Mercado and Brennagean Evans

Two vacancies remained in Districts 2 and 6 (12-88, p.6).

Letha Lamb’s name might ring a bell — she had been profiled in August 1987 as a 14-year-old gymnastics prodigy who had just returned from a dance tour in Russia. By late 1988 she was a district representative on the Youth Council.

I didn’t see any specific articles on any of the other members in this period.

December 1988 is also when the Youth Council got it’s first official Coordinator in Greg Mendoza. He was hired into the Office of Planning and Evaluation (OP&E) as the first Youth Council Coordinator.

The council structure also had three supporting layers:

• a Parent Steering Committee made up of the parents of each representative;

• the Youth Advocate Group — the original founders — serving as advisors; and

• an Advisory Committee of tribal government program staff.

Terry described the Advocates’ role as: “Most of the advocates are older…and they basically know the ins and outs of things” (12-88, p.6). The steering committee and Advisory Committee were less clear from the articles.

AOPPYC Fully Formed

And…. that is part of the origins of the AOPPYC - it started as a group of concerned young people who wanted to make sure that young people were in some part of the decision-making process. It was all volunteer to start with, but we see that eventually there was some government support given to the group and now it’s a well-established and long-running government department.

Would love to hear more from any of the old-timers that were part of starting things. Crazy how many of these folks are now on the edge of being elders now - 40 years later!

But that is all I found on the group during this period.

Another related story worth discussing here is the story around Greg Mendoza. I mentioned him earlier as a founding member of the Youth Advocates, but his history from before the group is interesting too.

Greg Mendoza: Background

Not to make this a Greg Mendoza biography - all the early volunteers had a pivotal role in getting this organization started, but Mendoza had a number of articles about him at this time and … well, he did eventually become Governor….

Anyway - Ok - so by the time the Youth Advocates formed in 1988, Mendoza was already visible in the Community. The GRIN had been running his letters to the editor since mid-1987, and each one showed a person who had been thinking seriously about the community’s future for a long time.

But his backstory - at least in these papers, actually starts in February 1987, when the GRIN ran a photo of Governor Donald Antone congratulating Mendoza for winning a Congressional Award — the only award the U.S. Congress presents to young people in recognition of voluntary public service and personal excellence (02-87, p.1).

Mendoza was 21 at the time, a junior at Arizona State University majoring in political science, and working full-time at a Phoenix marketing company while carrying a full course load. His days regularly ran from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

To qualify for the Congressional Award’s medal level, he had accumulated 1,007 volunteer hours even though the requirement was only 400. He also logged 4,160 hours of personal development activities against a requirement of only 200.

(Side note - these awards are still available today. A great goal for youth to work toward: https://www.congressionalaward.org/the-program)

In a profile published with the award announcement, Mendoza talked about overcoming shyness by taking a speech class in high school.

“I took a speech class, and it gave me the opportunity to speak before non-Indians, it gave me the opportunity to speak about my culture, it gave me the opportunity to speak about my community,” he said. “I got more involved with school affairs, and just about practically everything else I could. I just had to overcome my shyness” (02-87, p.2).

He was clear that his interest in Pima history and culture came from not knowing it growing up. He’d had to research and study what others might have absorbed growing up and he was thirsty to learn and give back where he could.

And even at this point in his life he was already talking about going into Community politics someday. His early goal was to being back his education and help the Community, and he was most focused on fellow Youth and their struggles.

The Letters

Mendoza’s had a whole series of letters to the editor through 1987. He wrote so consistently The GRIN editor (Urban Giff) at the time noted that his letters were quickly “becoming a recurring section of the paper”.

July 1987 brought a lengthy vision statement addressed mainly to the youth of the community. Envisioning an America where Indian poverty and unemployment were no longer defining conditions, where young people excelled across every field, where infighting and factionalism gave way to cooperation.

“I envision a more self-sufficient people — doing all they can for themselves instead of looking to the Federal government or some other source to solve all the problems,” he wrote. “I envision the Gila River Indian Community to be that strong and effective tribe which serves as a vehicle through which Indian youth of this community come together, get acquainted, exchange ideas, and work cooperatively to build a great future” (07-87, p.6).

By August 1987 he was writing about alcohol with the concern of someone who had watched it damage people he knew. He talked about attending an Indian conference in Washington and seeing groups of people drinking at 5:30 in the afternoon, and wondering what the Indian youth walking by were taking in.

“I don’t believe that our Indian people have come to realize that the worst enemy we have in the 20th century is not fighting for our rights — it is alcohol,” (08-87, p.6).

By September 1987 he was back with another letter, building on the same themes. Focused on the theme of building a better Community for the youth he wrote

“As many leaders have told me, we cannot afford to lose another generation of O’odham youth…..Yet, the future of many of our O’odham youth is in jeopardy because of alcohol and drug abuse, educational dropout rate, suicidal tendencies, teenage pregnancy and illiteracy.” (09-87, p.6)

Getting Hired

A detail from December 1988 is buried in the new employees list on page 4.

“Among those recently hired by the tribe: Gregory Mendoza — Youth Council coordinator, Planning and Evaluation” (12-88, p.4).

The person who had been writing letters, helping organize conferences, and building the groundwork for two years had now been hired by the tribe to do it formally. The volunteer work had become a job.

And that is how Greg Mendoza became the first ever Youth Council Coordinator and the AOPPYC became an official institution. Pretty cool to see how his personal arc is detailed in the issues at this time.

Conclusion

Reading the arc from 1987 to 1989, what stands out to me is how deliberate the Youth Advocacy group and it’s members were about getting this group started. .

The Youth Conference in August 1987 was structured, thematic, and clearly aimed at testing what young people in the Community would respond to. Greg, Carlene, and Martha were clearly working on this idea for some time and were passionate about getting a youth voice into government and decision-making.

The Youth Advocates in June 1988 were people who had already been working on this for at least a year, knew the community’s infrastructure, had tribal contacts, and had a clear theory of what the coming Youth Council should do and why.

Issues throughout 1989 have little bits and pieces of ongoing work from the Council. They show how the Youth Council representatives were at District Meetings, different events they supported, and a whole bunch of other articles.

I didn’t record all of it because I felt like these ones here are the major moments, but you can go back yourself and see how the Youth Advocates shifted the conversations to be much more inclusive of Youth and their perspectives.

Anyway - Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me - if you are interested in checking out the stories I used to craft this article you can find them here:

• 02-87, p.1 — Mendoza Congressional Award

• 07-87, p.6 — Greg Mendoza Letter

• 08-87, p.2 — First Youth Conference

• 08-87, p.6 — Another Greg Mendoza Letter to Editor

• 09-87, p.6 — Greg Mendoza Article – Again

• 06-88, p.2 — Youth Council Origins?!

• 08-88, p.1 — First (?) Youth Conference

• 09-88, p.4 — Second Youth Conference Mixes History and Future

• 12-88, p.6 — Akimel O'odham Youth Council Wants to Be Voice for Young People

• 09-89, p.6 — Youth Conference Doubles in Size

You can find the full pdf archive at the original source Gila River Indian News or on my Gila River News Database

It’s one of the stranger rabbit holes I went down in our history…

The tribe spent nearly four years fighting in federal court for the right to open a jai alai fronton on the reservation. The whole saga unfolds in the 1987 to 1989 issues of the GRIN, and it’s a fascinating window into just how contested Indian gaming was before IGRA locked things in and how we could have had a whole different set of Gaming enterprises than we have today.

Before we get into history - lets talk a bit about Jai Alai because I think this is so interesting.

The Heck is Jai Alai?

For those who don’t know jai alai (I didn’t…) - it’s a fast-moving court sport with a long history in Latin America and Florida, and it’s built around pari-mutuel betting. Pari-mutuel betting is where bettors pool their money and the winners split the pot minus a cut for the house.

Jai Alai was super popular in a few states back in the 60’s and 70’s and during the 80’s it was growing and spreading to other states. The game itself originates from Europe and was first played in America at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair.

The game revolves around these rock-hard balls that are whipped at a wall and travel at speeds of 150-200mph. Notice on the video below that there are white spots all over from how hard that ball hits everything.

@jaialaileagueJAI-ALAI 101: We gotten many new fans this season, so to clear up any questions about how the game works. #jaialai #sports #miami #rally #catch #howto

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The game requires a specialized arena called a “fronton” that has thick granite walls and usually has an arena for viewers - and hopefully guard or barrier so the audience doesn’t catch a ball in the face.

The betting structure was interesting to me because pari-mutuel wagering works fundamentally differently from what we ended up with in our Casinos today.

When you bet on a jai alai match, your money goes into a pool with everyone else’s. The house takes a fixed cut off the top, and the rest gets split among the winners. You’re betting against the crowd, not against a machine or dealer.

Probably wouldn’t have helped us build the economic success we had from our modern casino’s, but it interesting to me to consider how we tried different things in the past.

Anyway, onto the history!

How It Started

In the late 80s the tribe had been creating all kinds of economic development growth due to it’s Vh-Thaw-Hup-Ea-Ju Plan from the 1960’s. Yes the plan was already about 20 years old at this point, but it was still helping set the stage for Community growth.

We were actively looking for more and more enterprises that could provide jobs and economic growth to the Community, and we were in a prime position for catching folks from both Tucson and Phoenix - so lots of wacky ideas were coming along to us.

This saga began in early 1985 when a company called C.A.H.K. Enterprises approached the tribe with the idea of developing jai alai and pari-mutuel wagering on Gila River land.

The state of Arizona opposed the project immediately and started legal action. The tribe fired back in February 1986, applying for a summary judgement in U.S. District Court that would have allowed them to open and operate a fronton despite Arizona’s opposition.

The matter was heading to trial when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the California v. Cabazon Band case in early 1987 — finding that California couldn’t regulate high-stakes bingo on Indian reservations. Giving a big win to Indian Gaming and re-igniting the possibility of Jai Alai in Gila RIver.

In the May 1987 GRIN, tribal general counsel Rod Lewis said C.A.H.K. was planning to resume its efforts: “They advised us that they are going to begin — whether that means next week, next month, we’re not sure” (05-87, p.2). The tribe and C.A.H.K. read Cabazon as a strong signal that Indian gaming was free from state control.

Lewis was cautiously optimistic, but flagged one major problem: While the BIA had initially approved the tribe’s contract with C.A.H.K., they reversed course when the state pushed back. “We’ve asked them to reconsider in light of the Supreme Court ruling. I thought they would rethink their whole approach, but they have not,” he said.

That same May 1987 issue also carried a separate piece on bingo - because the tribe had been thinking about that option for years too. Urban Giff, then operations manager for the tribe, said interest in bingo went back about four years and the council had already received around a dozen proposals on it. A draft bingo ordinance had been written but never acted on.

The attorney general of Arizona, Robert Corbin, was already making threats that if reservation gaming evolved into casinos, the state would legalize and tax gambling off-reservation to compete. “I think you will have started something you will lose in the long run,” Corbin reportedly said at an Indian gaming symposium in Tempe (05-87, p.2).

The Lawsuit Falls Apart

By July 1987, the first cracks appeared. C.A.H.K.‘s lawsuit was dismissed. Lewis told the GRIN the tribe thought C.A.H.K. was probably “reassessing its commitment to the project.”

But the tribe’s own parallel lawsuit was still alive, and Lewis was determined to keep it going: “We’re still waiting for the judge to make a ruling on whether it should be dismissed. We don’t want our suit dismissed, and we vigorously oppose it. It’s my feeling that we’re in the right, and we will get a favorable ruling” (07-87, p.7).

They didn’t…

By September 1988 it was over. U.S. District Court Judge Earl Carroll dismissed the tribe’s lawsuit, ruling the challenge to the attorney general’s opinion was premature — there was no actual violation of a law to contest. The final blow came from an unrelated ruling in New Mexico v. Santa Ana Pueblo, which found that if a state prohibits a gaming activity, tribes can’t establish it on reservations in that state.

Assistant tribal counsel Steven Heeley summed it up bluntly in the September 1988 GRIN: “Pretty much finishes it, unless the state decides to get into jai alai.” A big “Don’t Bet On It!” billboard near the I-10 was about all that was left of the whole effort (09-88, p.1).

The same issue ran a full retrospective history piece on the jai alai saga, tracing the whole arc from 1985 forward — the state opposition, the BIA reversal, the Cabazon optimism, and the eventual collapse (09-88, p.2).

What Came Next

As you can probably guess, the end of Jai Alai wasn’t the end of gaming, the Community continued looking for ways to get into the field.

The September 1988 issue also ran a piece on Senate Bill S.555, a gaming bill reintroduced by Senator Daniel Inouye that would have allowed tribes to pursue various gaming activities - but only through agreements with states, and with some state jurisdiction on reservations as part of the deal.

Gila River opposed it. Heeley’s concern was pointed: “It opens the door to state civil jurisdiction on the reservation, and it somewhat smacks of application of state taxing on reservations” (09-88, p.2). Some Arizona tribes with existing bingo operations supported it. Gila River did not.

Inouye’s bill, revised, eventually became the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IRGA), signed into law in October 1988, just weeks after that September issue of the GRIN came out. The tribe had opposed the version on the table, but the amended IGRA is ultimately what opened the door for our gaming future.

The Casino Pivot

By January 1989, the pivot was underway. The tribal council at its January 4 meeting approved a $15,000 contract with an Albuquerque consulting firm — Grover, Stetson and Williams — to develop a management plan for a bingo operation. Governor Thomas White presented the proposal. A similar proposal had been rejected the previous spring. This time it passed (01-89, p.4).

But, in an alternate universe we could be heading down to a local Jai Alai fronton instead of the new San Tan Mountain Casino.

… well ok - probably not. Interest in Jai Alai pretty much died in the early and mid-90s. So probably a good thing GRIC didn’t go all in on the plan…

Anyway, the bingo management plan in January 1989 is where the modern gaming story really gets moving. But that is all a much longer article and a lot of it is outside the record of these issues.

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with me - if you are interested in checking out the stories I used to craft this article you can find them here:

Issue Page Title

05-87 2 Jai Alai Developer - Court Battle

05-87 2 If Gila River Wants Bingo…

07-87 7 Jai Alai Lawsuit - More Info

09-88 1 Closing the Door on Jai Alai and Pari-Mutuel Wagers

09-88 2 Jai Alai History

09-88 2 Senate Bill Covering Gaming Opposed by Gila River

1-89 4 Bingo Management Plan Firm Hired

You can find the full pdf archive at the original source Gila River Indian News or on my Gila River News Database

Surprise, Surprise!

I went to the PDF archive to look up a story the other day and found that they had added some new issues from 1987-1989. What a treat!

I started going through them and wow — what an amazing period of history. My “interesting stories” page on the Gila River News Database was already long, but it is going to get even longer. This period just had so many cool finds.

My plan over the next couple of weeks is to post short-ish reflections on some of the stories I think are worth pulling out. Not to say these are the only ones “worth it” - I found a ton of really cool stuff — but I think some of these are the most publicly and historically relevant.

Before I get into it — a quick note on the paper itself. At this point the Gila River Indian News (GRIN) was only about two years old, having first published in 1985.

The editors at the time were Urban Giff and Colleen Moyah (01-87, p.5). From what I’ve heard, this was before the paper was fully controlled by tribal government — it was a related entity but still mostly independent. It wasn’t until around 1998 that it was fully taken over and lost most of that independence.

You can really feel the difference reading through these issues. The journalism is pretty in-depth, stories developing almost in real time across monthly issues — direct quotes from Community leaders, real back-and-forth in the letters to the editor, some genuinely uncomfortable “truth to power” moments.

Just a very different vibe from what we see today. Worth reading through yourself if you get the chance.

Anyway — let’s get into some of the finds. I’ll start with a few quickies.

The Casa Blanca RV Park

Did you know there was an RV park in Casa Blanca?

Right near the Arts and Crafts Center there was construction was underway in early 1987 with 50 spaces planned, and Community member Emmett White was awarded a landscaping subcontract (01-87, p.4). By October of that year it had opened with 22 fully serviced hookups (10-87, p.4).

I’d love to know if anyone remembers what eventually happened to it.

Issue Page Title

01-87 4 RV Park Construction - Expansion at Casa Blanca Market

10-87 4 RV Park Opens

ATL Labs and the Rubber Plant Experiments

This one is super fascinating.

Sacaton and Gila River have a long history of experimental agriculture — Pima Cotton was developed here, after all. The ATL Labs articles from this period detail some pretty remarkable work going on with guayule, a desert shrub that can be processed into a rubber alternative.

There were large-scale growing operations happening, and by early 1988 a partner processing plant had opened up at Lone Butte in what looks like a public-private partnership with Department of Defense funding behind it (07-87, p.3 and 01-88, p.3).

Issue Page Title

07-87 3 Sacaton’s ATL Laboratory

01-88 3 Guayule Processing Plant Opens at San Tan Industrial

A Lot of New Infrastructure

This period was a big time for Community infrastructure. There are some other articles on GRHC that I’ll be doing a separate piece on. But..a few highlights:

The Ira Hayes Memorial Library

The library opened in June 1988 out of the old Pink School building in Sacaton, with startup support from the Kiwanis Club and donations from folks up near Sun Lakes (06-88, p.5). The building is still there today.

The Sacaton Sewer System

That’s right, this is when Sacaton got its sewer system. The completion is covered in the August 1988 issue (08-88, p.2). Something a lot of people probably take for granted today.

The Juvenile Rehabilitation Center

The old juvenile center was opening during this period, with GRIC taking over operations from the BIA and Laura Yergan hired as director (12-88, p.5).

I’m pretty sure this was the facility across from the current IT Department (the old Jail). I think this is the facility that was demolished a few years ago. I don’t think this is the juvenile facility near the current day Department of Rehabilitation and Supervision. But if anyone knows better please tell me!

Issue Page Title

06-88 5 Sacaton’s Ira H. Hayes Library Opens

08-88 2 Sacaton Sewer Nearly Complete

12-88 5 Tribe Now Operating Juvenile Rehabilitation Center

And Some Places Closed…

Not everything from this period was a new beginning. The Gila River Career Center, a nearly 20-year partnership with Central Arizona College, came to an end. CAC voted to cancel its lease in December 1988 (12-88, p.5), with GRIC wanting to repurpose the space for youth programming. Some training continued through JTPA but I don’t think we ever did get college-level programming back at Gila River.

The Olberg Trading Post also closed during this period — a fixture of the Community since 1927, shuttered over a lease and water dispute (06-88, p.6). And by the end of 1989, the Ryobi plant at Lone Butte closed, costing 52 Community members their jobs (12-89, p.3).

Issue Page Title

06-88 6 Olberg Trading Post to Close

12-88 5 CAC Votes to Cancel Skill Center Lease

12-89 3 52 Community Members Lose Jobs

A Quick Note on Culture

One thing I noticed reading through these issues — there isn’t a lot of local language, history, or cultural content in the paper during this period. What’s there is mostly republished outside material, mainly journal articles. There were a few notes on “Pima traditionalists” (03-87, p.4), a story on Arlene Howard speaking the language at Miss Gila River (04-87, p.3), and a fascinating piece on Emmett White blessing the Pope (09-87, p.4).

There are a few re-printed articles from local journals that have some interesting history in them, but none of these are locally created… I’m assuming the editors (Urban Giff and Colleen Moyah) wanted the histories in the articles to be known by the Community.

It’s a pretty sharp contrast to the consistent cultural content we see in the modern GRIN.

A striking piece is a November 1988 story about Sally Pablo driving to Hermosillo, Mexico to find Pima speakers. She talks about how she read that there used to be a thriving O’otham speaking tradition there, but when she went to go find someone she could only find a handful of speakers, and even the elder she met took time to remember how to speak the language.

The reflection at the end of that article hits hard: “[Hermosillo] - This is Gila River in 50 years — no more Pima-speaking people. That’s very frightening and yet very possible” (11-88, p.1).

Whats cool about her making that connection is the Elder from Hermosillo was later invited to an O’otham Arts and Crafts Festival later in the year.

Anyway… maybe the subjects of language, history, and culture didn’t seem as urgent when there were still many first-language speakers and elders who had lived that history. But I know I’m very grateful to Emmett White, Billy Allen, Robert Johnson, and all the other folks who have contributed to the modern GRIN for the past 10-20 years. They have done an amazing job keeping language and history alive for our Community.

Issue Page Title

03-87 4 Frank Vavages

04-87 3 Arlene Howard - Culture and Language

09-87 4 Emmett White - Blesses the Pope!

11-88 1 Curiosity and Book Made Her Search for Pima Speakers

And the journal re-prints if you want to check them out

Trennert - History of Phx Indian School

• 09-88, p.8 — Phoenix Indian School: Indians Must Conform Peaceably or by Force

• 10-88, p.8 — After Boys Were Chosen, They Were Given a Good Scrubbing and a Haircut

• 11-88, p.8 — The Only Right Belonging to the Indian Is...to Make a Man of Himself

• 12-88, p.8 — From Slouchy, Dissatisfied Girls to Ladylike, Agreeable Young Ladies

Fontana - History of Christianity and O’odham

• 12-87, p.7 — Taking to Christianity Was No Easy Task for the Early O’odham

• 01-88, p.7 — The Early O’odham Took What They Liked, Discarded Parts of Christianity

• 02-88, p.7 — O’odham Liked Christianity, But They Didn’t Like the Personal Abuse

Anyway - this is long enough.. these were just a quick collection of cool stories I pulled out, but I’ll be digging deeper into other stories and some of these stories in the next few weeks.

If you see anything that needs corrected in this article or in the future articles, feel free to reach out to me at Lfnbrucie [at] Gmail to let me know. This period is something that a lot of folks lived through, so would love to have some reflections or memories from people

More to come =)

Database HERE

The idea for this project originally came from Robert Johnson over the the Huhugam Heritage Center. I was in a meeting with him a few months ago discussing language and history learning- he brought up that GRIC already has a pretty sizeable set of curriculum in the public - the HHC staff has been posting regular articles for about 15 years!

On the history front, you have the great work by Billy Allen, and then going further back you have articles from Emmett White as well. Robert said we should just go through and pull all these articles together – so I started working on that.

What is It

This is a database that has the various articles regarding history, language, or culture that I’ve found in the various Gila River Newspapers.

I searched through the issues I have available in the Gila River News Database - specifically in

• Pima Gazette (1935-1946)

• Gila River News (1964-1970)

• Pima Maricopa Echo (1971-1982)

• Gila River Indian News (1998-2024)

You can see from the database that there are still a number of issues missing from my collection, so there could be additional material out there. I’m sure that Emmett was doing articles before 2008 - but my collection only goes back to there. Maybe someday I will convince CPAO to digitize the rest…

How?

This was a lot of manual effort - luckily I had already tagged many of these articles in my “Interesting Stories” listing.

When I first went through the papers I tried to note articles related to history, culture, or language. So I had some foundation already. Going through this time I found more than I original tagged - but I’m sure I missed some side stories that were written here and there. But it was pretty time consuming … so it’s good enough.

I was thinking about pulling the actual article out of the paper through some extraction software - but with over 200+ articles I just don’t feel like putting the effort in to do that. Maybe someday I’ll do some extraction to make the text easier to search, but for now this is a good start.

How to use it?

Read!

No seriously - I think of two major uses

1. History - A lot of the history work I do is built on Billy Allen’s articles over the years and I highly recommend reading through all of them. He does a great job with easy to read articles that have a great mix of personal and data-driven information. Similarly, Emmett White also did amazing and very personal articles about all kinds of local history.

2. Language - Like Robert Johnson recommended, you have all the elements here to start your own little curriculum. There are word-searches, crosswords, and line connecting puzzles to have activities. There are in-depth sentence structure and other linguistic lessons as well that HHC has put together over the years. A great place to start your language journey or practice your skills!

   1. Oh - and there is also a great partial series of language lessons from the 1960’s that is fun to read too! Orthography is a bit different, but you’ll get used to it.

Ways to make it better

As usual - there are probably lots of ways it could be better, but here are a few I’m thinking about

1. More Content!!!!!

I wish I had more of the newspapers digitized - I’d love to be able to complete this collection. Especially with the GRIC issues from the 80’s and 90’s - I hope to someday go through them to see if there is any other content in there…

2. Other Language Lessons

Something I considered but didn’t pursue was a broader set of language lessons from newspapers on all the Four Southern Tribes - Gila River, Ak-Chin, Salt River, and Tohono O’odham.

I was thinking about an intertribal super-collection of these resources so folks can have a one-stop… But, I don’t know their newspapers well enough and what I have so far was already pretty time-consuming.

Still…. it would be cool if anyone from any of these tribes wants to copy this base and start their own collection. Happy to help you get started and maybe we can link them together.

HMU if interested in a collaboration =)

Conclusion

And, well… that is about it. Not a crazy new project, not a lot of cool technical bells and whistles to get it developed. But I hope that it will be useful for folks who want to get quick access to publicly available language and history resources.

Obviously, there is also the O’odham Learning Library you can access and find academic and scholarly sources - but to me these local sources are more important and powerful than those. These are the words from our local experts, they are lessons from the people who have been doing this work in our Community for decades.

And they are aimed at COMMUNITY - not some ivory tower publisher.

Anyway - hope this resource helps you on your learning journey =)

Pepperidge Farm Remembers.

Well, I did just a bit more than gathering the photos…. I also colorized them.

What Is Colorization?

Colorization is a technique to add color to black and white photos. You likely already read my post on creating the photo database, if you haven’t go check it out.

There are a lot of ways to colorize photos, but I chose to use an AI system to do it in large batches.

Some folks will hand-color pictures, but it takes a lot of time and a pretty in-depth understanding of colors….

So I used an AI model called DDColor to colorize them instead.

DDColor is an open-source model designed for photo colorization. If you ever use one of those colorizer programs online or do it through something like Ancestry or Family Search — this is similar. I downloaded the model and its weights onto my computer, set up a Python environment, and ran batch processing across the full set of photos.

It wasn’t … easy. I had to troubleshoot a lot of compatibility issues, the scans kept failing to load because of inconsistent image formats. A whole lot of stuff to fix…

Anyway I got it done, got them processed. Some of the images didn’t come out well, but I’d say like 80-90% of them came out looking pretty good.

I then uploaded the colorized versions into Airtable.

AI? OMG NO, OUR DATA!

Hol’ up! Let me explain.

I tried my best to keep these photos out of the hands of the major AI companies by using local tools on my computer. The photos were not uploaded to any janky online systems. The model ran entirely on my machine.

I’m doing my part, but knowing how AI companies work, I’m sure they have long scraped these images from the archives where they’re already publicly posted.

Still, I tried =)

Why do this?

Because I can, mainly.

Because as much as black and white photos are cool, there is context you miss if you don’t think about how much color was part of our history.

Maybe it’s just my own brain, but seeing color helps me see photos in a new way and pick out details I missed before. I’m hopeful they might have the same effect for others, helping people view these photos from a new angle.

But HOW do I see the pictures?

That is a very thoughtful question - if you go onto the database they should be in the gallery. Below is a video that helps show how to see the color version if it is available.

You should be able to mouse over it:

Want to ONLY see the pictures with color? Check out this quick tutorial on setting filters or sorting below

And reminder - you can check out just the gallery HERE or the full data set HERE

*NOTE - this doesn’t work well with mobile - sorry. If you are on a phone or tablet, use the full data set to browse the photos instead. Someday I’ll make time to figure out a way to get it to work. Someday…

Ways to Make It Better

The main issue is that free colorization models have some limitations. Or maybe I just need to learn more. But there were some issues in these photos.

Some didn’t get colorized at all, some came out in very strange colors, and some got really weird and wonky.

But… it was free, it was fairly fast, and I think the results came out looking pretty good. Good enough, at least.

Just keep in mind this is a version of what the colors might have been - but it is an interpretation… not exact. The system is trying to interpret colors based on shades, so different model weights create different colors.

Still, I think it adds a cool dimension to the photos.

Final Thoughts

There isn’t much to wrap up here. Mostly I want to encourage you, dear reader, to take a look at these photos and remember that our ancestors were not living life in some monochrome, dreary reality. We were colorful people with bright, vibrant lives.

Also keep in mind that not all AI is killer robots and sucking up water. Especially for smaller local projects, we can do this stuff on our own and minimize the environmental impacts while also putting cool stuff out into the world.

Just one example of AI being a pretty cool tool.

Hope you enjoy - here are some samples:

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You can view the gallery here or check the full data set here

What Is the Project?

This is a database of photographs and metadata related to O’odham and Pee Posh history. It brings together images from dozens of archives and collections into one central, accessible place.

Why Did I Do It?

I originally started a version of this project a few years ago while working on my 3D modeling project. I had collected a few hundred images to use as visual references, and that process was one of the ways I first got pulled into history. I had all these incredible photos and no real plan for them. Then, as tends to happen, I got distracted. They mostly sat on my hard drive.

A few months ago, Community Elders asked me to participate in an event and put together a short presentation on how the Community has changed over time. They asked me to find photos to support the topic.

As I started digging through my local files, it hit me that I wanted to give people more context with the images. Who took them? Where did they come from? Who was pictured? What headlines were used? When were they taken?

I had not kept good track of that information, and it felt important to do it right.

I asked around to see if there was a public record of O’odham-related photo collections. I couldn’t find anything easily accessible. HHC and other local archives required in-person visits. Many finding aids didn’t tag or surface O’odham material clearly, it was mixed into larger datasets.

The deeper I went, the more I realized... I’m already doing this work. I should make it easier for the next person. So I put this together.

What’s the Goal?

The primary goal was to create a central, publicly accessible source of archival photos that our Community can access from anywhere, without a gatekeeper.

A secondary goal is to encourage engagement with history. If people want to create an Airtable account and add comments, names, or details, that would be incredible. I found the Ramsey collection and also a large collection of “North American Indians” on Facebook that had a ton of comments from Community members on the photos. I’m hopeful that this could help spark some of that same conversation.

But even if nothing else happens, I want people to be able to browse these collections and, if something catches their interest, have a direct link to request a high-quality copy from the original archive.

How Could You Use This?

I see three main uses.

• Browse it. Scroll through the gallery. Group photos by year or location. Sit with them. Enjoy the history. Maybe do some research on the photographer and the time period.

• Use the images for teaching or storytelling. Under fair use principles, non-commercial, educational, and research use should generally be acceptable. That said, I strongly recommend checking with the original rights holder and requesting a higher-quality copy when possible. Either way, use the photos for community presentations or to teach folks about our history.

• Digitize more! I pulled together material from across the internet, but there is far more out there than I could ever capture. One benefit of this database is that it helps identify what exists and what is still missing. If you know of collections I missed, let me know and I will try to add them.

However you use it, please be respectful of the photo subjects and the wishes of the families involved.

How Did I Do It?

The process was fairly straightforward, but time-consuming.

First, I conducted wide-ranging internet searches across major archives and public-facing collections. I used Pima, Papago, and Maricopa as main keywords along with a lot of other variants (O’otham, O’odham, Pee Posh, GRIC, SRP, TON, etc.). Similar to the O’odham Learning Library, I figure we are all closely related, so it made sense to cast as wide a net as possible.

Then I used AI to supplement the research. I used ChatGPT 5 Pro’s “Deep Research” tools to identify additional archives and O’odham or Pee Posh-related photos. I burned through several months of credits experimenting with different search strategies. I found a lot of really cool small collections and projects I’d never seen before. Found a lot of other cool archival docs I’m looking into as well, but that’s a story for another article.

Next, I downloaded low- or mid-resolution images and attached them to Airtable. I intentionally avoided high-resolution downloads to save space and to strengthen the fair use case for the database. The idea is to give a sample visual of the photo so users can go to the original source to request official use.

Metadata was copied from source websites and run through ChatGPT to generate standardized data tables. If you are curious, I link to my primary prompt HERE.

Most of the work was manual. Entering records one by one. Moving photos around. Tracking down sources. I also restructured large portions of archive finding guides so they could live inside the database, including notes for images that exist but are not yet digitized.

A quick note on AI. Without it, this project would have taken far longer. Trying to standardize dozens of archives manually would have been soul-crushing. AI made it easier, but not easy. Most archival websites are optimized to block automated access, so I couldn’t simply scrape and automate. In the end, manually reviewing each photo and metadata entry helped reduce errors and hallucinations, and it also let me learn a ton about each photo.

It’s not perfect. But it’s a pretty good start.

How Long Did It Take?

This was another nights, weekends, and free-time project. I estimate roughly 200 to 250 hours. Holiday breaks around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year made a big difference in pushing it across the finish line. My poor kids had to put up with me having my nose in my laptop for the past few months.

It helped that this was a second-screen project. I made it through a lot of background TV while working, and I finally started Stranger Things with the kids, so at least there was some family time during this project.

I’m not going to get into all the weird technical stuff I had to learn either. Moving attachments around in Airtable was nightmarish. But it’s good knowledge to have whenever I go back to the OLL or other projects for updates.

How Could the Database Be Better?

There is a lot of room to grow.

• More collections. There are many undigitized or inaccessible collections I would love to add. The Smithsonian has a lot, and the Arizona Historical Society and Arizona State Museum hold materials I couldn’t include because I couldn’t find very robust finding guides. And to be really clear, this is a tiny sample of what’s out there. There are hundreds and thousands of images at HHC and at other archives across the country. But ain’t nobody got time for all that, so at least this is a start.

• More recent photos. I focused heavily on older material due to copyright and collection size, but there are incredible photos buried in government reports and departmental archives that deserve to be included. Local newspapers are another major gap. The Pima Maricopa Echo and later papers contain fantastic images I would love to add someday.

• Community photos. These are the trickiest but potentially the most important. Much of this database reflects an outsider perspective. I would love to find a respectful way for families to contribute their own photos and narratives.

• A proper front-end. Someone smarter than me could turn this into a beautiful, intuitive interface. Long term, it would be incredible if HHC or another organization could build this into something more polished and maybe formalize relationships with archives so photo requests could be directed through the tribe, rather than Community members having to go to these archives on their own.

Before You Dive In: A Content Warning

A warning up front. Some of these materials are sensitive, and some are outright racist.

You will see titles and captions like “A Pima Squaw” or “Primitive Housing.” History is not always pretty. I strongly encourage you to explore the context surrounding these photos, captions, and descriptions. In many cases they are dehumanizing or demoralizing.

The people taking these photos were not always enlightened. Many were operating within colonial, extractive, or openly racist frameworks. Still, I am grateful that these images exist at all. They give us something tangible to reflect on, critique, contextualize, and reclaim.

At the same time, our ancestors endured all of this so that we could be here today. I encourage you to celebrate how far we have come and recognize the hard work we are all building on. Now it is up to us to make the future even better for our future generations.

If you are interested in helping add context to these photos, such as identifying people, places, or correcting descriptions, I invite you to participate. You can sign up here: Sign up to contribute

On Nudity and Sensitive Imagery

I struggled with how to handle this enough that it felt worth addressing directly.

For those familiar with our history, you know that it was common for women to be topless during parts of the year, wearing only a grass or cotton skirt or maybe a wrap-around. Some of these photographs reflect that.

Reading Aleta Ringlero’s dissertation helped me better understand how many historic photographs were deliberately staged to frame our ancestors in a specific way: uncivilized, unkept, poor, broken. Or as simple sexual objects.

So I am conflicted. On one hand, some images are manipulated or falsified. On the other hand, they depict real people from our Community. And staged or not, they have existed publicly for over a century and do attempt to show a reflection of Community history.

With that in mind, I chose to keep these photos in the database but clearly tagged them as Not Safe For Work (NSFW) so they can be filtered out. I tried to label images involving nudity, human remains, or graphic content the same way, but please let me know if I missed any. You should be able to choose how you engage with this material, and I hope this approach helps.

Final Thoughts

Before closing, I want to give a huge thank you to Carol Shurz and Linda Andrews. Both invited me to be part of their event, and that unknowingly sparked this project. Also a huge thank you to my family who had to put up with me being hyper-fixated on this over the holidays.

I hope this database is useful. I discovered so many powerful images that will inform future projects, and now I know exactly where to request proper high-quality copies instead of relying on pixelated scans from forgotten corners of the internet.

Hopefully this project helps you find our history easier, makes it easier to engage with, and easier to carry forward and share.

I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it supports your education, research, and storytelling.

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Wanted to share this video I made for a recent event in the Community.

A few months ago, elders asked me to help prepare some images and a quick history for the 2026 Elder Day Conference. I sat in on planning meetings and listened to their conversations, and the topics they wanted to cover were far-reaching: housing, farming, education, religion, social life, culture, and more.

A big theme kept coming up: how much the Community has changed. The elders remembered a time when there were more events, more people showing up, more engagement at district and community meetings. And the more we talked, the more I think they’re right. There have been some major shifts, both in the Community and in the world around us, that have changed how we live.

But I didn’t have a huge timeslot. My original pitch ran about 45 minutes, which was way too long. This was a celebration, a gathering of elders from across the Community, a time to visit and catch up.

They didn’t come to sit through a long lecture from some whippersnapper.

So I chopped it down and tried to hit the highlights, broad “waves” of change in the Community. Each topic the elders raised could be its own lecture series, but I tried to capture them into themes. Maybe someday I’ll come back and do deeper dives.

I broke the history into four main sections, and I’m being super reductive. A lot of groundbreaking events had to be left out, and even starting at 1880 leaves out a huge amount of history. But I had to keep things manageable.

I also wanted images to go along with the words. I’ll post part two tomorrow showing some of the other work that went into this project. For now, I hope you enjoy the video and it inspires you to learn more about our Community history!

PS - If you prefer no captions, this version below makes it easier to see the photos.

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Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy

This is a project I actually received funding for! I applied to a fellowship with the Center for Cultural Power and I received about 18 months of funding and support to help me work through and create some amazing artwork in collaboration with Three Precious Miracles. It all culminated in a final showcase at the Huhugam Heritage Center back in 2023.

The idea was to create some models that would help to bring connection and story to folks around history. I specifically wanted to focus on O’odham history as part of this project. I’m most excited that some of the models are still being used today at Three Precious Miracles for events with children in the foster care system.

As part of this project I created 10 O’odham-inspired 3D models through going out to local district meetings and other groups like Youth Council and Elder Concerns. Had some amazing feedback and worked with some amazing artists to help design some 3D models that are more representative for our Community.

Above is a segment completed for Gila River Broadcasting on the final showcase. As far as I know, the diorama of models is still available to view at the Heritage Center near Wild Horse Pass.

If you are interested in seeing the full set of models I put together an audio playlist that explains the thoughts behind each model here.

I could probably write a lot more about this project - I can’t thank the Center for Cultural Power enough for the time and support to do this project, and the freedom they gave me to do… basically whatever I wanted.

It was that time and support that also helped me to dive very deep into a lot of culture and history knowledge and complete the first iteration of the O’odham Learning Library.

I’ll also post a link on the main Substack page for folks who want to view and download the 3D files directly. Happy Printing.

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Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy

This is a short discussion of my first 3D model project. I eventually used this first project to spin out the idea for IndigeModels and some of the other 3D printing/History work I’ve done.

But it all started here when I was first thinking about this project….

Who could have guessed that this would have been my first real entry into learning so much about culture and history? It started from skimming a bunch of books and pictures for inspiration and ended with me doing all kinds of history projects to make it easier for folks to learn and access the information I was uncovering.

What is the Data Source?

The data source is mainly from Frank Russel’s “The Pima Indians” and J William Lloyd’s “Aw-Aw’Tam Nights”. Thin Leather or Thin Buckskin tells some of the earliest recorded stories and songs in these books.

Why did I do this Project?

When I first started learning about 3D printing I wanted to print out something related to Native Americans for my kids. Something I could print and use as a prop for them to learn about their culture and where they come from. But I couldn’t find anything online other than tipis and half-naked men with tomahawks.

So, I started thinking about designing my own models. I originally wanted a home or an object like a Kiaha or baby basket, but I kept coming back to these two books and the O’otham man that was the source of all this early recorded knowledge about our Ancestors, songs, and stories.

So, with some guidance from GRIC elders and my friends I decided to commission this O’otham model inspired by one of the most inspirational intellectuals in our history. I also put together the short historical summary using Thin Leather as my inspiration for this model - “O’otham Man with Bow”

I’m hoping to eventually come back and do more of these when I find time (and funding) – there are so many amazing people in our Community history and living today!

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LB Edit:

(Spoilers… I did get funding and I did get more models created. Take a look HERE)

Along with the original model, I also developed this small information booklet to go along with the model for folks interested in the inspiration. Looking back this is much too simple for such an amazing man… but maybe I’ll go back and update it someday….

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy.

This is another recent project - and I wrote this blog after my Papago Woman Audiobook project.

In it I am reflecting on using AI for those who have walked on. This AI landscape keeps changing - and is making me more and more nervous… but I still think it is up to us to try and wrangle some good from it.

This also includes another short blog post I wrote in 2023 about the AI Afterlife more broadly. It wasn’t public, but I posted it along with this to give some more information in case folks are interested.

AI Afterlife - Thoughts on Digital Legacy

I’m assuming you came here from my blog on creating an AI voice to use in narrating Papago Woman. If you didn’t, you should go check it out.

Before we dive in, I wanted to give a quick shout-out to the moral and legal implications of voice cloning—keep in mind that at this moment (2024) we are in a bit of a Wild West scenario. There are not a lot of clear legal precedents around voice cloning, and the ones that DO exist are typically built to protect people that make money from their voices (actors, singers, etc).

If you want to do some nerdy exploring, I recommend this article to get a pretty good overview of the current legal landscape. But, to summarize—we don’t have a solid legal grasp of this tech yet. There is little stopping someone from cloning your voice or likeness. While there are some deepfake laws that stop using your likeness for generated pornography or laws being developed to stop “misinformation campaigns” related to public officials—there are not a ton of policies in the pipeline for us normies.

With that in mind, I want to call for anyone reading this to be cautious in their use of the tech. Be respectful, be kind, remember your Himdag. Just because there isn’t an explicit law against it... don’t be a jerk. This is especially important when dealing with something as intimate as a loved one’s voice or likeness. The technology may be new, but the values we bring to it should be as old as our communities—rooted in respect, empathy, and understanding.

My Experience Recreating My Mom’s Voice

I want to focus this on my project and the use of my Mom’s voice specifically. My mom passed in 2014, and I used voicemails of her to create a synthetic AI voice for a project narrating a book.

In my project, I altered her voice to the final result, but I still have a voice clone that is pretty similar to her. The idea of hearing her voice again, after all these years, was both comforting and disconcerting. It felt like a way to bring a piece of her back into the world, a way for my kids to hear the voice of their grandmother, whom they never met. But it also made me keenly aware of the limitations of the technology.

I’m not doing a novel application of the technology—in fact, there is a huge industry being created around the AI afterlife. I wrote a blog in 2023 that I’ll copy below that explores that a bit.

In it, I discuss my thoughts on the current landscape, how I see it culturally, and how I see it personally. You’ll see my early thought that I wish I had more media to re-create my mom in some form. Now that I’ve done it, I wanted to circle back to my thoughts on the process and the outcome.

The Emotional Terrain of Voice Cloning

First, the process was weird. I didn’t like it. I already have issues dealing with the passing of my mom; I have since she passed over 10 years ago. I’m not good with emotions.

But despite not liking it, I think this project actually helped me process my grief.

Part of it was re-listening to her voice over and over to make sure I had it right. I kept thinking, “Man, this doesn’t sound like her at all.” Part of it was that I had a very limited voice sample of her—only a few minutes of audio. But I also think that AI just isn’t dynamic enough. Even with troves of data, I don’t think it can grasp the nuances of a human life and the complexity of something even as simple as a voice.

One memory I have of my mom is that she did baby talk. A lot. I remember as a teenager, I would get so embarrassed by her talking like a baby. Saying my name like I was a baby, or mis-pronouncing words like a toddler would.

As a parent - I realize now why she would do this. When you have your own kids you pick up some of those words and stick with them because they remind you of how cute they were at the time, and now I find myself doing the same baby talk voices she once did as I re-create my children’s stumbles at english.. “Straw-babies” tends to get a lot of play in my house.

Anyway - as I listen to this AI creation that is attempting to mimic her, I realize I’m missing that quirk of my mom. This voice may rise and fall in a cadence that follows her, but it doesn’t randomly change into a joking and passive-aggressive reminder that I have a dental appointment. It doesn’t have the memory of my childhood and the random mis-pronounced words that are sprinkled in as subtle reminders of our shared history.

This process made me reflect on the idea that a person’s voice is not just a sound; it’s a living part of who they are. It carries with it the weight of experiences, emotions, and relationships. My mom wasn’t the same with me as she was with her husband, her friends, her co-workers. She was a plethora of different people, and this AI voice, no matter how close it came, couldn’t capture those differences.

The Limitations and Possibilities of AI Afterlife

Maybe with a larger data set or a better AI model, we will get something closer to replication in the future, but I just don’t think it will ever be perfect. How do you record every nuance of a human? Even my own voice, as I cloned and used it for narrating projects, made me realize it was such a limited scope of me.

It isn’t using the same speaking voice I use for my friends—it isn’t dropping a casual “straw-babies” in a conversation because my daughter used that name for fruit when she was learning to talk, and it just… stuck with me. It was me, but in a very limited sense that I had only moderate control over.

So, even though the industry is on the rise to re-create and simulate life after death, I think AI creations of this type will ultimately be a bit hollow. They may serve as a tool for remembering, but they can never fully replace the presence and complexity of a living human being.

That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have a place in society—as I said in the blog of my project, I’m glad I have a way to share even a small amount of my Mom’s voice with my kids. Being able to use that voice to tell a story for my kids is something that I’m really excited about. Is it a replacement for my mom? No. But I want my kids to have a frame of reference for this human being who raised me and helped me to become the man I am today

…

I also think of my own legacy - what will my children have of me after I’m gone. Will they want to share it with their children? How will my spouse remember me? Will she want to hear my voice to remember me when she is lonely?

I know many who have lost love ones and they listen to the same voice mails or watch the same videos of them because they miss them. These are slices of their life as well - little moments in time that don’t encompass the complexity of that person.

Is generative AI much different?

Ethical Considerations and the Future of Digital Legacies

On the other hand, I do worry that it might complicate grief for some folks. Not being able to let go of someone is powerful. But I don’t view these AI Afterlife technologies any differently than the next step in recording an oral history or taking a picture. It is just a new version of archiving and memorializing. For me, I view the tech as a means of preserving memory - a voice, a piece of who they were.

Where I grow concerned is if it is being used with an AI chatbot backend and being presented as a replacement of the person. Creating a “Bevvie Chatbot” that pretends to be my Mom would be profoundly gross to me. Even if it was accurate and full of transcripts of her words and writings, it feels unnatural. I don’t want to pretend my Mom is back, I want to preserve her legacy.

But maybe that is my own reluctance with my own bias?

But—to each their own. I’m sure using her voice in the first place is wrong to some. We will see how technology, our grief, and our thoughts on death and the afterlife change as AI technology becomes more common in our lives. As we navigate this evolving landscape, we must ask ourselves important questions: What role should technology play in our memories? How do we balance the preservation of legacy with the natural process of grieving? These are questions that don’t have easy answers, but they are ones we must grapple with as we move forward into this new digital frontier.

(And here is the other blog I wrote on the AI Afterlife more broadly. If interested it details some of the movements happening right now to create post-death content through AI.)

2023 Blog Post: AI Afterlife

During a recent discussion on AI, my friend made a comment on death that got me thinking about AI and the discussion of the “AI Afterlife”. I remember reading this Verge article back in 2016 that was about an AI chatbot that was developed from the digital data left behind by someone who passed. Even before that, Black Mirror had an episode related to the topic in 2013, Be Right Back of a woman who uses her lover’s digital legacy to create a robotic copy of him after he passes.

Now we are seeing the rise of generative AI and everything is accelerating. There has never been a time in history where so many people have a “footprint”. The majority of people throughout history have passed with few artifacts of their lives outside of maybe some written journals or perhaps a few pictures. We have stunning 8k resolution videos, decades-long blogs, and crisp audio from millions of people.

Often the stories around this technology are focused on the elite - folks who hold massive economic or cultural power and have high-stakes surrounding their estate; but the technology has become increasingly available for use by us normie folks. It won’t just be a Tupac hologram dancing on stage in the future - it might be our grandmas too. It isn’t just George Carlin’s family who has to grapple with a public image being altered and re-generated, anyone with a youtube channel or instagram profile can be next.

An AI Afterlife isn’t coming - it is already here. There are companies that have been around for nearly a decade that are dedicated to using AI to re-create us or our family members. Microsoft and Amazon are two giant corporations that are delving into this space right now as well. What this technology is going to mean for society is still being decided, but we should all be knowledgeable about it!

My Traditional Worldview

I’ve always been taught that the O’odham tradition is to keep away from death. My people would traditionally burn the home that people died in, we didn’t say their name so as not to “call them back” from their journey to the next world - the next dimension.

But - We stopped burning homes in the early 1900s, instead we started packing a small bag of their belongings for their grave. We say their names, now with “-bat” or “-hook you hii” added at the end to note for others that they passed and show our respect. We name parks and buildings after departed tribal members. We even have annual memorials for some members, sometimes with large and extravagant celebrations to honor their passing. For many of our community - our traditions around death have changed dramatically from 100 years ago. Not everyone is happy with these changes, and many view them as untraditional and wrong.

Traditions change. Perhaps in 20-30 years it will become normal to have voice, memories, and likeness memorialized into an AI. Maybe we will curate our image after death as carefully as we curate our lives on social media today?

I don’t know what it will mean for our traditional views - to be constantly called back forever. Pieces of our identity - video, audio, text - tucked away in data centers around the world. As pieces of our identity are integrated into large AI models and influencing the generative art and words of people 100 years from now through tiny subtle changes in an algorithm. Not a direct copy, but the subtle influence of thought or likeness to an indescribably large system.

I think of the power created by our voices telling stories or singing songs to our 7th generation and beyond. The ability of our descendants to tap into ancestral knowledge and memory without a gatekeeper in the way. I think of the multitude of people who won’t need to work through an institution to get their voice in the world and be remembered. They have the ability to turn on a camera and start their digital legacy today.

For Creatives

These questions of legacy and digital footprints are especially pressing for creatives. For years there has been a constant drumbeat to get a brand. To post as much as possible about our lives, our processes, our thoughts and passions. To form a public persona and brand that will get others excited for our work, to become “known”.

Unfortunately much of that public brand can and will be co-opted through AI. For example we have holograms, AI George Carlin, etc. The more public the figure, the easier it is to use their existing digital footprint to re-create their likeness.

There are many questions this technology brings up -

• Who gets to control your image and likeness when you pass?

• How far does that control extend and who keeps ownership?

• Should we even keep data and information after passing or should it be wiped?

• What does that do to legacy and remembering?

• Who gets the right to be remembered, who gets erased?

• What parts of us get erased?

• What about people who specifically wish to be saved in this way?

With the amount of data we have in the world, and the amount of personal likeness, voice, and personality we put into social media and other places – having a clear directive for family and descendants becomes even more important.

I personally don’t like to think about my digital afterlife. I hate thinking about death generally - I don’t like it, and I think most folks don’t want to think about it.

I know other people of color don’t want to deal with it - it’s one reason they don’t typically have a Will when they pass. AI is just another reason that creatives of color need to ensure they outline what happens to their work and their public data when they pass!

Personal Notes

I have mixed feelings about the AI Afterlife. It feels creepy - but I also think about how I wish my mom had recorded more of her life before she passed. I wish I had more stories from her lips- and even though I realize an AI would be a pale imitation of her, having some way to share her likeness and her stories with my kids would be amazing.

At the same time, I had a hard enough time with her passing that maybe it would have made the grief process even worse if I was able to load a chatbot and have her voice or stories in front of me?

As something of a creative and public figure myself, I consider how my own children will have a much broader and intimate view of my life after I pass. The public brand I’ve created, the writings I’ve done, the photos and videos that I have, the many many stupid comments I’ve left on Facebook. Not even considering if they visit a data broker and get my purchase history, “interest profiles”, or other assorted digital cookies I’ve left behind from my many years of internet use.

I don’t think there are any good answers to this issue yet - other than we should lobby for more personal data protections, take the time to write a will or estate plan, and talk to your family about how you want to be remembered. It’s a bit morbid, but questions of legacy are extremely important for all of us, especially those of us that create a public persona and post pieces of our lives online.

Further Research:

2024 - Is the AI afterlife coming? Sundance Documentaries say yes https://www.fastcompany.com/91021083/generative-ai-death-sundance-documentaries

2024 - ‘I Died That Day’—AI Brings Back Voices of Children Killed in Shootings

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai-brings-back-voices-of-children-killed-in-shootings-7d72cb8d

2024 - George Carlin’s estate sues over AI-generated stand-up special

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/george-carlins-estate-sues-ai-generated-stand-special-titled-glad-dead-rcna135808

2017 - Speak, Memory: When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot

2017 - The strange legacy of Tupac’s ‘hologram’

https://andscape.com/features/the-strange-legacy-of-tupacs-hologram-after-coachella/

2013 - Black Mirror S02E01

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

AI after Life Companies:

https://www.soulmachines.com/

https://www.myyov.com/index.html

https://www.hereafter.ai/

https://www.almayalife.com/

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy.

This is another pretty recent project - so I did a lot of documentation and context for it already. It’s also another one that I eventually want to come back to someday. I wanted to do a proof-of-concept for an AI audiobook on one of my favorite books, and I think it turned out pretty good. But - I’ve been thinking about coming back to try to finish the rest of the chapters…

Maybe someday? I don’t know if it is work the work to do the whole book unless folks are going to listen to it - but I’ve met enough folks out in the Community that don’t know how to ready… so I think something like O’otham Audiobooks would be useful. Especially one as special as this.

Papago Woman continues to be my top recommended book for folks interested in our history. It is short (ish), it has amazing pieces of knowledge about our social and material lives, and it is one of the most accessible glimpses into our history I’ve found.

What is the project?

This is a first pass at creating an O’odham audiobook for Papago Woman by Ruth Underhill using an AI voice clone.

Why did I do it?

The main reason is even though I recommend this book to literally everyone, few people have read it yet.

No shade - I’m busy too, I can count the books I’ve read for “fun” the past year on one hand.

But that is why I wanted to try this out - I wanted to create a way for more folks to access this amazing story that has been so impactful to my journey to learn more about O’odham history.

The “Why” for creating an AI voice is that I wanted to explore the capabilities of the technology for creating new mediums to tell our stories. But I couldn’t just use an off-the-shelf AI voice - I wanted the voice for this book to be more authentic to the character of Chona. I couldn’t find an AI voice that sounded quite like what I wanted - an O’odham elder telling a story. So I created one.

At the end of the day - it isn’t quite perfect, but I think I’m happy enough with the outcome and the process that I want to share what I have so far.

How did I do it?

I’m going to focus on two main parts here - the AI voice and the Audio processing. Before I get too deep, I want to be clear that I don’t know what the heck I’m doing so take my process with a grain of salt. I’m sure real audio engineers have much better (and quicker) ways of doing this:

The AI Voice

The voice you are hearing as part of this production is a hybrid of a few different voices.

First, the “base” or foundational voice is from my Mom, I then added more voices from ElevenLabs AI library to get the voice to sound older and have more of a raspy tone.

I will warn you reader, this was probably not the best way to go about things… having multiple voices in the model created some weird outputs in the audio - it was very hard to get a consistent audio level from the AI models.

But - I think it worked out well enough. The final voice is certainly NOT my mother - even though I hear some of her coming through, it sounds much like she is aged 20-30 years. It did catch her slightly southern accent though.

Why my mom?

To start - my Mom passed in 2014. She passed just a few days after her 50th birthday from cancer and her deterioration happened so rapidly, I don’t think me or my sister really recognized how fast we were going to lose her. Unfortunately we don’t have much audio or video of her. In fact, I had to train this model on only about 2 minutes of crappy audio from voicemails that she left my sister and I.

One aspect of this project was me trying to see if I could re-create her voice from the limited samples I had available. Partially because I think the technology is interesting, but I also wanted to see if I could create a way for her voice to be part of my kids lives - to tell them stories, to teach them history and culture.

I can’t think of anything my mom would have loved more than to be part of her grandkids’ lives to help steer them into womanhood. I think she would have loved the idea of being able to expand that to teaching others in the Community as well. To be a part of this project with the goal of growing historical and cultural knowledge.

And in some ways that part of the project worked well. If you are interested in learning more I’ll link to further thoughts on the AI portion specifically, but anyway - lets move on. .

Why mix the voice?

I wanted the voice in this production to be an O’odham one. To be clear, no one voice “sounds O’odham” we all sound different. But I wanted this story to be told with a more authentic voice, and while I don’t think there is any one way for O’odham to sound, I like knowing that the story is being told by an O’odham woman.

I originally had the voice of an elder that I thought would be perfect for this project, but I wasn’t able to get the family’s permission to use the elder’s voice I wanted and I don’t think it would be correct to create a voice without some type of permission.

I was already testing out AI voice cloning for my own voice and my mom’s. But neither of our voices worked by themselves. I’m a man, and I believe this story needs to be from a female perspective. And for my mom, her base voice didn’t work for this story for a number of reasons.

The AI version of my mom’s voice had a lot of issues. One major one was that all of my voice clips were of her are in a very low voice, almost whispering at times. It made the outputs from the model sound too melancholy.

The other issue is that Chona is telling this story at an old age - Underhill states she thinks Chona was somewhere in her 80’s when they met. So, my mom’s voice didn’t sound “old” enough. She was only 50 when she passed, and I just didn’t think her voice matched the character.

In the end, I used her voice and others from ElevenLabs in a type of “hybrid” model to create the voice you are hearing.

Why Use AI?

I’ll be writing a whole blog about the ethical implications of this project, but here are some general reasons -

After the Anton’s Defiance production I wanted to test if this AI technology could be used to help bring to life more books or stories from our Community. We have such amazing resources to learn from, but no one is going to create more accessible versions of them for us - so I did it myself. I think there are a lot of ways generative AI (images, text, voice, etc) can be used for bad - but I think this is a cool example of how the technology can be used for good.

The second reason I used AI is that I wanted to have a voice for this project that evokes the auditory experience of hearing the story first hand. Chona’s story is so amazing and I didn’t want it to sound like a California valley girl or British woman. I wanted it to sound like one of us.

But, I’m doing this project in my free time and with my personal funds - I don’t have the money to hire someone to record a book. Renting a recording studio, taking time to read and re-read, and editing the audio - it’s expensive. So this was a low cost solution to getting the outcome I wanted.

A large part of my work the past few years has been trying to leverage technology to support our Community - we have amazing tools at our disposal, lets use them!

How long did it take?

Completing this project took well over 180 hours of work doing the following:

• Thinking about the implications of using AI for the project

• Testing different methods of voice cloning

• Testing different AI models

• Pre-processing audio (normalizing, compressing, editing)

• Re-writing Papago Woman to match AI pronunciation (CHO YAH!)

• Re-generating janky audio outputs

• Post-processing audio (normalizing, compressing, editing)

I spent a lot of time thinking about this project before I got into it, and It took a long time to complete due to token limits for generating the audio. Next chapter won’t be as difficult I think.

How much did it cost?

This was a bit of an expensive project - Here is a breakdown of my general costs

ElevenLabs (Creator) - $24/mo ($72 total)

ChatGPT (Premium) - $20/mo ($40 total)

Descript (Creator) - $35/mo ($70 total)

Da Vinci Resolve (free) - FREE!

Audacity (free) - FREE!

So ~$200 out of pocket and whatever my night and weekend hours are worth.

What was the process?

I’m not going to outline the whole process - but be sure I spent a LOT of hours fiddling with generating voices. I’ll give a quick outline and some pointers…

1. Pre-Process The Voice - Keep in mind that the model is going to be using whatever voice you add, so any ums or ahs are going to show up. Long pauses, etc. I learned that pre-processing the audio to remove that made a huge difference in the audio quality of the AI voice. I also found that using ElevenLabs voice isolator and Descripts “Studio Sound” add-on made a HUGE difference in the clarity of the voice.

2. Generate! - Once I had the base voice cleared up and isolated, I added it into ElevenLabs and used the “instant voice clone” option. I fiddled with the voice settings until I thought it sounded right. This took a lot of tokens because I was trying to get the right output - but eventually I landed on (30% Variable, 90% Similar, 49% Exaggerated) that worked the most often and sounded the best.

3. Post Process the Audio - After I had the Papago Woman chapter generated I first used Audacity to clean the audio - Normalize, compress, Truncate silence. The AI sometimes had some weird gaps in the words and this process helped to make it sound a lot better. I also send the audio back through Descript at this point to have its “Studio Sound” add-on clean up the audio.

4. Re-Generate The Weirdness - Look… AI voices are still pretty new and the tech has some really weird outputs sometimes. Weird noises or speed ups on certain phrases. So I went back and re-generated and cut in some of the “outtakes”. It sucks because the audio change is noticeable - but better than what was there before.

5. Celebrate - And that is it! I’m being SUPER reductive in how much work it was, but now that I’ve done it I think it will be easier in the future.

What are ways to make the project better?

There are a few ways this project could be better:

1. Don’t Use a Hybrid Voice

The biggest issue I think is the hybrid voice. If I continue to use AI, I think finding and using a single voice - preferably recorded with a good microphone - would be best. I think the current voice I have is passable, but having a dedicated voice for this project would make it much easier.

I’d love if we (Indigenous, O’odham, GRIC) had a voice database for projects like this. I’m looking for some other books that would make sense to use my own voice to narrate and try to do this with a single voice instead of a hybrid one.

2. Get a Local Voice Actor

Honestly, if I had the funding I would really like to just hire someone to do the voice acting to narrate the book. I’d like it to be someone from Community and look for the perfect voice. I think this would work well because I haven’t found a way to give AI direction in it’s reading. So, while I read some parts of the book as funny or joking - the AI reads it all in a bit of a serious manner. I just don’t think AI is a replacement for a real human being.

3. Get a Real Audio Engineer

Look - I don’t know how audio works. I’m stumbling my way through it watching Youtube tutorials. Getting someone who knows how to clean and process audio on the pre and post processing side of this project would elevate it a LOT.

Final Thoughts

I’m glad I spent the time and effort on this project. I know a lot more about how voice cloning works, I’ve developed some voice models of myself and my mom to use on future projects, and I created a really cool initial chapter that will hopefully get people interested in reading Papago Woman. I might circle back to create an audio production of the rest of the book, but for now I’m marking this project complete.

If you are interested in some of the more theoretical AI thoughts you can check out my companion blog tomorrow.

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Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy

This is actually a pretty recent project - and one of my most popular so far. I’ve had a few hundred views on this one, which is pretty good considering how niche the subject is.

Since this is pretty recent I already have some good context around it - but this is still one of my favorite stories to talk about and one of the reasons I really wish we had more historical documents available from our history. This one transcript gives so many amazing insights into our history.

Someday maybe I’ll do an update on this project - I’d still love to get real voice actors and maybe trim it down a bit. It is pretty long. I cut some of the transcript to even get it down to this length, so if you are interested you can take a look at the whole transcript HERE.

PS - Yes, I know that isn’t how we dressed. AI models suck at representation. But I needed an image to post to Youtube. I’ll get a better image sooner or later!

What is the Project

I created an audio production based on a transcript conversation between an Akimel O’otham man and the local Indian Agent from 1912 around O’otham singing and dancing in the Gila River Indian Community.

Why did I do it?

Because Gina at CPAO told me to - blame her for this. I’ve been kicking this story around in some personal conversations since I first read it back in 2016 or so. I think this story has so many powerful themes and provides a glimpse into the struggle of our ancestors to maintain some type of cultural legacy.

I’ve told the story of this transcript to multiple people, but it was Gina who encouraged me to do something to tell the story more publically and put it on my website. Sometimes it takes a push to get started with something, and I’m grateful to her for providing it to me. I know this isn’t the only story of resistance from our ancestors, but I think it is a great look into history and I hope other folks enjoy it!

Also, it gave me a good excuse to play around with audio production and AI =)

How did I do it?

This project was broken into a few steps with a few different systems -

First - I read the hell out of this document. This step is the most important! Don’t skimp on the reading folks - AI will only get you so far… and you gotta know when it’s hallucinating on you.

Second - I took the original document and put it through Adobe OCR. This makes the PDF able to be copied (Ctrl + C) and pasted. It wasn’t perfect. As with most older documents (or poorly scanned ones..), the OCR was filled with errors, broken grammar, and weird characters. Don’t worry - this is where the AI comes in.

Third - I used Open AI’s Chat GPT-4 to transcribe the text. This is useful for two things - first GPT-4 was great for filling in the gaps or errors in the text. There was a bit of hallucination and creating false words, but it was pretty minimal and easily fixed by hand.

The other useful part was that GPT-4 re-structures the text to make it easier to transfer to a document. I can’t stress how important this is because you need to “chunk” the project into smaller pieces - more on that later.

Fourth - I used Chat GPT-4 to simplify and shorten the text and format it for a podcast or audio production. This step was hit or miss. I kept some of the suggestions it made, but it kept using language that sounded too… AI. I changed my prompt to ask for more “natural language” and it helped… but I didn’t feel right about it.

Fifth - Sooo…. I went back and reversed all of the AI language changes. Sometimes you do stuff and it doesn’t work. sigh. I realized I wanted to keep as much of the original wording and nuance as possible and the AI kept wanting to summarize things, even with prompts that told it not to summarize. Fail.

Sixth - I was worried that the transcript would be too long so I did some editing and cleaned up some of the sections manually. While I wanted to keep the original text as much as possible, I was worried it would be too long - too many “tokens” – more on that later.

Seventh - Now that I had the text ready, I wanted to record it into audio. My original intention was to read it myself - but I had a cold and my voice was jacked. Then, I found GPT-4 can do audio reading of outputs. I was blown away by how good and natural the AI sounded, so I had the idea of doing AI voices for the different parts of the transcript. GPT-4 doesn’t allow exporting their audio, so I tried some different text-to-speech systems.

I ended up using a website called ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs has a creator tier that allows for uploading “projects” and you can assign different voices to different sections of the text. After a bit of fiddling I was able to find some pretty good voices and assign them to the text. I then downloaded the audio file.

Eighth - While I was listening to the audio file I realized it was too… boring. I wanted to add some spice to it and not just have two voices talking back and forth. Also, some of the text was too close together - there weren’t enough natural pauses between the speakers. So I uploaded the file into a program called DaVinchi Resolve - because its freeeeee.

Ninth - In DaVinchi, as I was editing the audio it still sounded… boring. I wanted to have some background music and some foley - or sound effects. The AI in step 4 had given some ideas about sound effects when it was formatting the project as a podcast, so I had some ideas to start with. I downloaded DaVinchi’s sound library, but it was limited so I went online and found some other audio on Pixabay.

Tenth - Finally, I used Audacity to record the introduction and conclusion to bookend the production and add context. Boom - project done.

Why use AI?

For this project, I think AI was very helpful in getting the transcript cleaned up and easier to read. I’ll 100% be using it for this in the future.

As for the audio - I’m still on the fence about this. I think if I had a budget and more time I would like to have some real voice actors, or at least real people to read the scenes. The AI works well, but it is such a limited selection for “elder” voices - and NO selection for voices that have the accent I want - O’odham/Arizona.

One solution ElevenLabs has for this is Voice Generation. There are ways to create my own voice actors based on a voice sample - but I didn’t want to get into that with this project. It might be something for the future, but I didn’t want to spend the time and effort testing it at the moment.

Overall - I think the AI was super useful in getting the project created and into the world. It isn’t perfect - but I’d say it’s about 80% of my vision. Which… good enough for a pilot project!

AI Tips?

This was a longer set of text, which meant I had to “chunk” it - or break the text into smaller pieces. I find that breaking the project into smaller chunks of text makes it easier for quality assurance (QA) when sending it through the AI. It also reduces the chance that the AI will hallucinate.

Chunking your project will also help reduce the “tokens” that you are using. Most AI systems run on a token system that limits the work you can do or you pay for overages. Chunking the project helps to make sure your prompt actually works without using too much of your token quota.

On AI models - For the text, GPT-4 or higher is a must. I tried to do the transcription and other work on 3.5, and it was a terrible experience. A ton of mistakes, the AI wouldn’t listen to my instructions, and even when starting new threads or clearing the history it would keep injecting weird hallucinations of words that were said - or change the words mid-sentence. Maybe I didn’t prompt it well enough?

Either way, GPT-4 was so much easier to use and it rarely made mistakes. I had an existing subscription to Open AI for past projects, so I didn’t try other models (Gemeni/Claude/Etc).

How long did it take?

Not counting how this story has been in my head rent-free for like 8 years… this project took about 32 hours. Most of it was fiddling with audio settings and figuring out how the heck to get it on Youtube.

I spent:

~8 hours doing the transcription and editing for the text

~18 hours doing the audio editing and foley work

~2 hours doing narration and writing

~4 hours of chatting with mentors about the project

What were the costs?

I normally try to create my projects in a way that is free and easy for Community to re-create. This one isn’t free :(

Like I mentioned before, the free GPT versions will make it harder to transcribe the text and the headache isn’t worth it. Similarly, I tried a bunch of free Text-to-Speech platforms and none of them were even close to natural. Most of them sounded like straight-up robots.

Adobe Pro - $20/mo (OCR)

Open AI Chat GPT Premium - $20/mo (Text Transcripts)

ElevenLabs Creator - $20/mo (AI Voice acting)

DaVinchi Resolve - Free (Audio Editing)

Pixabay - Free (Sound effects)

Audacity - Free (Audio Recording)

On the note of “chunking” the project - this is especially important for paid versions of GPT and Eleven Labs. Both have pretty limited tokens and I just barely avoided the limit on ElevenLabs.

What are ways to make it better?

1. Real Voice Actors

The AI voices aren’t perfect. They get the job done, but there is a loss of nuance. Having genuine voice actors would make this project much better.

2. Add to the Story

I’d love to learn more about the story and find the family to learn more about the events here and around the Community. Maybe adding more episodes or doing a whole deep dive into this time period. I’ve heard the line of songs still exist as well, so adding more of the actual songs would be great too. Maybe someday…

3. Better AI Models

This is always my general complaint - the AI space isn’t diverse enough! I’d love if we (O’odham) had our own datasets to help create more authentic content. O’odham voices in this case.

One idea I had was to engage with some local folks to explore creating a voice clone through ElevenLabs. I felt like it would take too long and require a lot more testing. There are also a lot of implications for voice cloning I’d want to ponder.

It would be amazing if a indigenous community was a hub for this kind of dataset so I don’t have to create it myself - that way we had authentic voices and information for AI generation.

4. Re-do the Dialog?

I don’t know if this would make it better or not. I feel like the original dialog is pretty good… but some of the parts are super longwinded - even with my editing. The last section with Thackery droning on is especially annoying for me. So, I wonder if the project would be made more readable or listenable with more focused dialog.

5. A Play?

Finally - I think this whole situation would be perfect for a play. This is not my expertise, but while I was adding in the sound effects and listening to the final project I kept thinking of how amazing it would be to have this visualized on stage. Especially with O’odham actors!

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Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy

Action Sheet Database ← Click Here to check it out!

This was one of my first major data projects and still one of the most useful ones for me today. I spent so much time doing this one - Imagine the height of 2020 when the pandemic is keeping everyone at home. I started working on this at night while my wife and I were watching netflix. It has become a bit of a ritual for me to do these projects during my nights and weekends. Dang COVID habits…

Anyway, this was one of my first major projects on Airtable - and this was all done before AI was popularized. I look back and think about the massive amount of time I spent transcribing information and my heart hurts… so glad to have AI as part of my process now!

This was before I did very detailed project updates on my process, time, and costs.

Anyway, I still come back to this database to track legislative history. It isn’t perfect - the data set didn’t include special meetings or committee meetings so there are cracks. But, it is a helpful way to see what is going on in Council over time.

I know a few other folks using this or a fork of it to help track the data over time as well. Personally, I stopped updating it, but it is something I think about updating…. With AI I feel like it would be so much easier to keep updated - but I need to make time for it. Oh well.

​What is the Data Source?

The data for this project came exclusively from issues of the Gila River Indian News and the Council Action Sheets printed each month.

Why did I do this Project?

I kept seeing all these action sheets and seeing them month after month with all this interesting data, but no way to search for anything or track subjects. So... I made a way to do it!

How long did it take?

A long, long time. From tracking down newspaper copies to transcribing the information by hand - getting this database together took months of night and weekend work.

I also did this QA blog post after I received initial feedback. Posting here in case you are interested….

I need somewhere to respond to various questions that I receive from the public on the Action Sheet Database. As I get new ones or as information evolves I will update here!

Q. Can you shade every other line in the database for easier visibility?

A. I wish! This would make it much easier to read. Airtable doesn’t allow this function right now, but it’s on their product roadmap. Once it’s available I will implement it or add a tutorial on how do it yourself.

Q. Can you link the items associated with their files? PDFs of Resolutions, reports, etc?

A. Maybe. I pulled this information from GRIN action sheets, but the original documents are housed in CCSO. I believe they have an electronic copy of most submissions, but those are not all public records according to CCSO policy.

It is possible to add documents to this database for resolutions and ordinances, so maybe someday. It will mean a LOT of record requests to CCSO, and that is time consuming.

Reports and information in new and unfinished business are NOT considered public record. In my past experience with CCSO I have been told that reports need to be requested from the reporting agency following their individual departmental or organizational policy. So this is a maybe, but unlikely.

Also, note that meeting minutes are NOT considered public record and can not be requested.

Q. Can you post the associated GRIN documents where you found this information?

A. Yes! You can find most of my sources at my Newspaper Database. Note that my records and this database are missing the following:

- Action Sheet - second June Meeting 2011

- GRIN issue April 2012

- GRIN issue June 2012

- GRIN issue October 2012

- Action Sheet - second December Meeting 2019

- GRIN issue (2) February 2020

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(THROWBACK)

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy.

I originally posted this as a companion article to my OLL post - it was a longer version of the “why” from the original project. I had a lot of questions and comments from folks on how some materials shouldn’t be so easily accessible, or how some people were giving information they shouldn’t.

And… I wanted to address and respond to those comments and hopefully help folks understand where I’m coming from and my goals.

More Thoughts on the OLL

I think of an autobiography I found while working on this project - “Desert Indian Woman, stories and dreams” (2001). It is the story of Frances Sallie Manuel who lived from 1912-1985. Frances worked with Deborah Neff to record her story and a ton of poems and writings in both O’odham and English. There was a poem toward the beginning of the book that stuck with me:

We were poor

I had no shoes

two dresses

never had anything!

I’m

very

PROUD of it so

I’d like somebody to read it

[softly] after I’m gone.

(1985)

Not every resource in this database is as personal as this, but throughout the whole project I had this passage running through my head. Our ancestors shared for us.

For us to learn, for us to teach, for us to discuss and analyze. Other people did work about us - and even that we should learn, discuss, and analyze. Then we should accept, correct, or reject - but not hide from it.

So I, for one, want more people to read these works.

One of my inspirations for this work is considering the folks who don’t have the privileges I do. Who didn’t have the opportunity to learn about our history and who didn’t get to have access to the training I’ve had to find it themselves.

I recognize that I’ve been very privileged to have amazing people in my life from a young age to mentor me in my Community’s stories and culture, but many of our fellow O’odham don’t have that. They are urban members far from home, or they are in a home with no guidance, or they have been through the foster system with non-native families, or they are non-enrolled members or any other reason.

Who knows - maybe they just turned middle age and realized that - holy crap - all this culture and history is important and I should learn it but I don’t know where to start and I don’t want to feel like a complete idiot trying to get started and I have a ton of anxiety because I’ve never even gone to a community event and where do I even start to ask questions?

You can start here bud!

I think about my own children - O’odham, but not able to be enrolled in my tribe. Blood quantum taking its toll on our Community.

Where would they be if I wasn’t here? If I didn’t teach them what I know?

How would they access our history and connect with our ancestors?

Would they ignore that side and lose their heritage entirely?

If they protect their indigenous identity, would they be welcome in my Community?

What about my grandchildren? What about my 7th generation?

I don’t know if this project will help with any of these questions for my children or any other O’odham - but I want it to.

I’m also super privileged because I’ve been supported by the Gila River Indian Community in my education and training. Going through college I had lots of training to do deep dives into archives and research repositories. These are skills everyone can learn, but I want to help so people don’t have to learn to access that knowledge - to not have to saddle themselves with thousands in debt just to find knowledge our ancestors left for us.

My mom always told me to go out and get my education - then return back and figure out a way to use what I’ve learned to give back to Community. This is one of those ways.

As I’ve pondered this project, likely too long, I found my thoughts falling into a few themes -

Culture is Power: A part of culture is history. The stories of our past are an important part of our legacy and it’s important to know they exist and how to find them. Our history and our culture shouldn’t be hidden - it should be celebrated as loudly as possible. We don’t grow our culture and our power by hiding. This database is my way of helping share the knowledge that has been generated by our communities so that other O’odham can reclaim that knowledge, revitalize that history, and grow our power.

Stewarding the Past and the Future: We are part of an arc of knowledge that stretches across history, and we should be learning and celebrating our past and helping future generations access build on our knowledge today. This project is about finding a way to steward our past and equip our future scholars to continue to tell our story.

Self Determination: Part of sharing knowledge is allowing our ancestors (and ourselves) the value of self-determination. That each of us has the right to share our stories and knowledge. I recognize that much has been extracted from our communities, but I want to assume those sharing their knowledge did so with the idea that us, their ancestors, will learn from it.This project is a way to honor those decisions.

Technology Needs OUR Culture and Values: Modern technology is often not made by us or for us. Our communities aren’t in mind when technologies are deployed - and so we need to insert ourselves into them. That means we need to take control of technologies to make our lives better, our communities stronger, and inject our culture and values into them. No one is coming to save us and build things for us - we need to do it ourselves. This project is a way to use technology to benefit our people and share our stories.

I’m generally an anxious person - I fear that one of these projects will be the one that gets me in trouble. Well, more trouble. I likely overthink the work and the impact it could make.

But, I believe this project could be a dramatic shift in the way we are viewing the past. There are so many amazing stories in our history that can, and should, be shared - but not easy ways to find them.

Still, as anxious as I am - I’m even more excited for the next steps from here. Enhancing the database by adding more entries, cleaning the data, finding ways to dive deeper and share more widely. Excited to find ways to make this trove of information more accessible - to leverage technology to propel us into the future by learning from our past. Excited to see the list of authors who have “O’odham” checked next to their name grow long with new entries.

And more than anything, I’m just happy there might be a few more nerds willing to chat with me about obscure O’odham books and stories.

<3

Leonard Bruce

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be posting older projects because I’m migrating my information over from my website. These are some older projects but I think still useful. Hope you enjoy

I originally completed this project in 2023 or 2024 and posted it on my website. The OLL is still one of my favorite and most used projects so far. I check it almost every day for a reference and I come back to my private server regularly to add new materials I find. Read until the end for a special server invite!

The O’odham Learning Library

What is the project?

I created an O’odham Learning Library by using ChatGPT to transform the entries from Bernard Fontana’s O’odham Annotated Bibliography (Fontana, 2009) into a searchable database.

Why did I do it?

I originally started a small database to organize my research library in 2022. I started a history project and I was frustrated by the lack of repositories that were related specifically to O’odham history. While there are repositories at libraries and other areas, they are rarely comprehensive and often hard to navigate. I wanted to have a central database of only O’odham related texts and resources. So I started building one.

I began by searching online for books and articles related to O’odham history to build my database and I slowly got to over 100 O’odham-related journal entries, books, and dissertations. I couldn’t believe all the cool stuff I’d found.

Then - I found the Fontana Annotated Bibliography.

I had seen Fontana’s name during my search, and I had many of his articles listed in my database, but I’d never seen this document before. Fontana (and others) had compiled this document of over a thousand pages with references to O’odham-related texts.

A treasure trove of data!

But - it wasn’t easily searchable. It was hard to navigate. So, I decided to transcribe it in a searchable format (excel) and enter it into my database (AirTable) so more people could have access to the data and more O’odham intellectuals can build on the amazing research available.

I’m deeply thankful for the amazing work that Fontana & Owen did, and recognize that I’m building on the work of a giant in the field. I hope my humble addition will be helpful to others!

Be sure to check out the full database HERE.

How should you use this?

Any way you like - but respectfully! Don’t assume everything you find is accurate - find a knowledge-keeper in your community to double check things.

In my vision I hope that O’odham are accessing this database to learn about the vast amount of amazing history our ancestors have shared. Some ways I think it is helpful:

1. Browse

Just scroll through and see if anything pops out for you. I’ve been amazed at the amount of random stories I’ve found that lead me down the coolest rabbit holes. If you really want to nerd out, find a dissertation, thesis, or journal article to get a deep dive into a subject. If you want a more casual read, find a magazine article or read some poetry!

2. Find a research topic

Maybe you are a student and you want to find past work done with your Community? Look around your field and see if there are any past studies or papers related to what interests you. Take a critical look at their work, maybe even see if you can replicate it? This database will help you find a wide variety of work to add to your research bibliography.

3. From O’odham fingertips to your eyes

One part that I love - and will be working on more - is signaling when an author is O’odham. Reading, watching, or listening to a work from an O’odham just hits different. The sources feel more authentic and helps me feel connected. Go through the Author section and filter by O’odham Author to find media that had an O’odham author involved!

How did I do it?

My first crack at the database was doing searches for key words across different libraries - Arizona State University, Public Libraries, Worldcat, Anna’s Archive, etc. I used keywords like “O’odham, Papago, Pima, Tohono” and so on. This led to some success, but the work really popped off once I found Fontana’s bibliography.

First, I created a copy of Fontana’s Annotated Bibliography that was OCR optimized with Adobe Acrobat. Most of the text was simple, but I would get occasional errors, so I used the OCR tools in Adobe to correct errors before transcription.

I then copied and pasted ~6-10 bibliography entries at a time into ChatGPT 3.5 model with the following prompt:

“Organize the data in the following columns: full Article Title without quotations, year, resource type, author (First, middle, last), journal, the exact notes associated with the entry between the [], and the pages referenced .

Also include a column that summarizes in three general topics the resource using the following categories or a close similar category: History, Stories & Legends, Water, Music, Art, Education, Employment, Economy, Government, Culture, Health, Environment, Religion, Language, Youth Book, Boarding School, Children”

I found that the prompt would keep the information organized in a similar fashion, but after a few entries the AI would start to have small variations in the output and I would have to correct the model by adding prompts like

“This table is missing a column” / “The title is cut off” / “The author name is wrong”

Occasionally the chat thread would become too long and begin to slow down my web browser - likely because the model consults with past prompts to help guide it’s response.

I began to start new chats using the same prompt to stop the slowdown. I needed to provide correction prompts to the new chat, but I found that it was easier to “train” a new thread instead of dealing with the slowdown.

While AI made the process easier, it was still time consuming. There are some systems that can process larger chunks of text, but I also wanted to review each entry to ensure the format and data had higher integrity and fewer AI hallucinations or errors. The AI model would occasionally hallucinate in the note summaries, but it was rare.

The model generated an excel-readable table and I copied the table into my AirTable database.

Why Use AI?

This was the first major project that I used AI in my workflow - and it was amazing. Using AI helped a TON. Being able to paste the data into the model and have it be transcribed into an Excel-readable table saved a huge amount of time.

I will be integrating AI into my workflows in the future for text processing - and I included my general workflow here for others to learn from. It wasn’t an easy process to learn and implement, but I can’t wait to try it out in different projects!

Issues using AI

A list of the variations that I had to look out for as I was doing this project:

1. The categories would often change.

Even with a predefined list of categories that were outlined, I found that the AI did have good suggestions for other topic areas and I decided to allow the variation. This is an area that will need to be cleaned at some point.

2. The table format would often change.

Even following the same prompt, the AI would often make changes to the table - adding new columns, removing columns, cutting off titles, or summarizing Fontana’s notes. When found, I would re-do the prompt and the system would generally fix the error. For the notes, I allowed the summarization, but the exact notes should be added at some point.

3. Pages were often inconsistently numbered.

A common inconsistency was that the AI would change the way that pages/page numbers were read from an entry. This is likely because of the difference in a book, journal, magazine, etc. Some entries have a page range and some are the number of pages in the entry. This section should be cleaned at some point to add some consistency.

4. Topics were inconsistent.

The AI was useful for creating topics, and saved a lot of time. I found that the model kept developing its own tag suggestions and kept them instead of only allowing the prompts limited list. The database ended up with too many highly specific or duplicated tags and these will need to be reviewed, combined, and cleaned up at some point to serve as a better finding guide to users.

How long did it take?

Completing this project took about 160 hours of work doing the following:

• Testing different methods of transcription

• Testing different AI models

• Thinking about the implications of using AI for the project

• Testing prompts and outputs

• OCR/Text Cleaning

• Actual transcription

• Light Database Cleaning

A large portion of my time was taken by testing different methods of transcription and different tools and AI models. I found that some tools worked better than others and had better outputs. I settled on ChatGPT 3.5 because it was free and accessible for most people who would want to do similar projects.

There were many models from www.HuggingFace.com and similar repositories that overall worked better ( higher character limits, more accurate transcription, etc) - but may be harder to use due to the hardware and technical knowledge requirements of a self-hosted AI model. Many of the better self-hosted models require higher end computers and at moderate levels of comfort with programming.

What are ways to make the database better?

There are a few ways this database could be better:

1. The Annotated Bib needs to be reviewed and the exact notes should be added.

While doing the project I noticed that Fontana’s notes were being summarized and there is some loss of detail for some entries. The summarizations work fine, but adding the exact text would be useful for doing searches or for finding specific sources. This could be done quicker using a different AI model or a premium ChatGPT 4 model.

2. The data needs a general cleaning - Book Type, Authors, Pages, Topics

Most of the data output is clear and accurate, but there are some transcription errors and other mistakes that need to be cleaned. Book types are somewhat inconsistent, Authors need to be reviewed and names corrected - especially when there are more than one listed, the page numbers need to be corrected and standardized, and the topics should be standardized.

3. Extra Context Should be Added

While the database includes most data points to help a user find and retrieve the entry - more context from the Fontana bibliography should be added. For instance, many entries are missing the journal volume and issue the entry comes from. A more specific prompt may help.

4. Entries that Fontana missed should be added

This Annotated Bibliography is one of the most comprehensive I have seen for O’odham subjects, but it isn’t fully complete. Finding and adding past materials that have been missed by Fontana would help make this more comprehensive. Also to re-examine the field of O’odham literature to add new sources is needed as well!

5. A ranking system should be implemented

I’ve found that this database is so big that there is just too much information. One solution could be to create a type of ranking system to show how “useful” the source is. Highly ranking sources such as documents that are tied directly to member voices or that have specific information in them and ranking sources with generalized or off-hand notes lower.

6. A list of recommended entries and focused deep-dives should be developed

Another solution to the vast number of sources in this database could be to create “recommended” lists for certain topics or creating a blog to highlight specific resources. A recommended reading list could point users to a collection of highly useful sources for a specific topic for instance. Or a blog could focus on one or more entries to explore them in depth.

7. Documents should be found and linked to entries

I’m not sure how licensing and copyright issues would allow this, but each entry should have the source document attached to make it easier to review. Many entries could be found through internet searches using Worldcat, Anna’s Archive, or other digital libraries. For physical copies, partnerships can be developed with archives to digitize records and attach them to the base.

Final Thoughts

Again - I am endlessly thankful for Bernard Fontana and the work he did with his annotated bibliography. His work is truly amazing and I’m glad to have been able to do my small part to transform it into something a bit more searchable, and more accessible.

I hope this project makes it easier for other O’odham to access these amazing resources and discover the knowledge our ancestors left for us.

—

The main database here is publicly available and has a lot of great information, but for copyright reasons I can’t include digital materials with the public version. If you are interested in reading any of the collected digital materials, please sign up HERE for private server access to a fair use version of the database.

I originally started the book club because I had a conversation with Dr. Anthony Newkirk about how much I love reading O’odham history books and I wish there were more people to talk about them with. His answer was “so … go do that”.

So that is pretty much where it started. I pondered it a few months and with Anthony’s support I got it started.

Our first meeting was out in Phoenix - Newkirk let me use his building at Warrior’s Code to have a few meetings, I bounced around and did some meetings in Sacaton at “The Ranch” to get more folks involved.

And… the rest is history. Here we are a year later and still going strong. We have read 10 total books together, I’ve had about 30 unique attendees and ~75 total attendees come and chat about books.

Sometimes the session is about the book itself, sometimes we skirt around the book and talk more about the time in history or the people named in the book and their place in the Community. Sometimes we get an elder who tells an amazing story, sometimes it’s just me and a few folks online…

But either way, it has been a great ride that I’ve learned so much from.

I want to close out the year by writing a “Thank You” to all the folks on my mailing list for their interest in the idea. I know many of you follow along with the books we read, even if you can’t make the meetings.

I also want to thank District 4 for being my partner for the past few months and allowing us to have our meeting in their space.

A huge thank you to all the amazing people who have made it out to one or more sessions and engage in the content. Appreciate you taking the time to come out and for the time you are spending with the reading. An extra double thank you to Ramona Sabori and Belinda Nelson who have been to nearly every meeting in D4 so far. Appreciate the hometown support.

Finally - I want to give a big shout out with my appreciation to Jackie Thomas out in D6. She has come to every session online since we started. She has also been very good at keeping me on schedule with sending out information on the books and study guides.

I’m excited to look forward to next year and another full schedule of amazing books to learn more about our ancestors and our Community.

If you are interested in learning more about the book club you can sign up for the mailing list HERE

Or - if interested to see more of what we have been reading you can find our past books at this link HERE.