Pascua Yaqui Tribe
The United States subsequently recognized lands that were part of Yaqui territories near Nogales and south Tucson.
In the early 20th century, the tribe began to return to settlements south of Tucson in an area they named Pascua Village, and in Guadalupe, near Tempe.
A syncretic Catholic-Native religion developed where Yaquis incorporated Catholic rituals, saints, and teachings into their existing indigenous worldview.
The 400 years of wars with the occupiers sent many Yaquis north from Mexico back into Arizona, and the southwestern United States.
This seasonal work melded well with the off-season when Yaquis would plan and carry out complex religious ceremonials that took months to complete.
[3]: 80-83 After fleeing to Arizona, most Yaquis lived in dire poverty, squatting on open lands most often near railroad lines.
In 1923, a retired teacher and humanitarian, Thamar Richey, successfully lobbied Tucson to establish a public school for Yaqui children.
To protect the Yaquis, Thamar Richey in 1935 established a civic-minded committee that included University of Arizona President H.L.
Spicer, whose work on the Pascua Yaquis would establish him as one of the nation's leading anthropologists, and the others contacted the Bureau of Indian Affairs to aid the group.
As this was during the landmark Indian New Deal when Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier was attempting to aid indigenous groups that for decades had faced federal assaults on their lands and cultures, at one point he offered a solution: the Yaquis could relocate to the Colorado River Reservation in far western Arizona.
[3]: 83-86 After World War II, a Yaqui veteran, Anselmo Valencia, returned to Pascua vowing to improve life for his people.
Around this time a University of Arizona anthropology student, Muriel Thayer Painter, began to study the Pascua Yaquis, vowing to aid the struggling group.
The PYA was a quasi-tribal government that worked with Congressman Mo Udall to prepare legislation to transfer federal land for the new Yaqui community Valencia had envisioned on the outskirts of Tucson.
Its programs required community participation, and Valencia and Spicer led the federally-funded effort to establish a tribal base at New Pascua.
In the early 1970s, a younger Yaqui, M. Raymond Ybarra, a protege of Anselmo Valencia, increasingly took leadership roles at New Pascua.
It has a land area of 4.832 km² (1.8657 sq mi, or 1,194 acres), and a 2000 census resident population of 3,315 persons, over 90 percent of whom are Native Americans.
The Tribe has accepted political integration into American society but continues to retain much of their former religious and cultural ways of life.
Casino Del Sol, the Tribe's second gaming property, opened October 2001[5] and has provided an additional 550+ jobs on the reservation and in the Tucson Community.
This status makes the Yaqui eligible for specific services due to trust responsibility that the United States offers Native American peoples who have suffered land loss.
This was motivated by the high percentage of Native American women being assaulted by non-Indian men, feeling immune by the lack of jurisdiction of Tribal Courts upon them.
This new law generally takes effect on March 7, 2015, but also authorizes a voluntary "Pilot Project" to allow certain tribes to begin exercising special jurisdiction sooner.
