Piipaash

The Piipaash, also known as the Maricopa, are a Yuman-speaking people of the river valleys of the desert Southwest. Along the Colorado and Gila rivers, communities farmed floodplain land and maintained relationships with neighbouring peoples. The rivers linked a country of settlements and fields through an otherwise dry landscape.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, warfare with other river peoples contributed to Piipaash movement east from the lower Colorado towards the Gila and Salt rivers. They formed an enduring alliance with the Akimel O’odham, whose villages lay farther up the Gila. By the 1820s Piipaash settlements had shifted eastwards to lands west of the O’odham villages. Their shared river country became the setting for close cooperation between the two peoples.