Clissene Lewis can speak on the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation as one with roots that extend back to the beginning, when members of her family returned to the banks of the Verde after being banished to the San Carlos Apache Reservation in 1875. It was 25 years later they were told they could return to what had been the Army camp Fort McDowell.

Lewis had heard the stories from her mother and grandmothers about the history and culture of the Yavapai. She now tells those stories to others in her role as Cultural Coordinator for the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. She was the moderator for a recent tour presented by the L. Alan Cruikshank River of Time Museum and Exploration Center in Fountain Hills.

The popular tours were put on hold during the pandemic, but resumed on Oct. 11 with about two dozen people boarding a bus at the museum bound for the reservation.

In a presentation Lewis has made for the museum, she states, “My people have had a long arduous journey and have overcome many obstacles over the years. Today we are descendants of our Yavapai ancestors; whose story is our story.” Lewis talked about Four Peaks, known to the Yavapai as WeKoPa.

“My mother used to tell about the trips men took to the mountains to bring back deer for food,” Lewis said. “They would be gone maybe weeks but never came back empty handed. The women would clean and dress the game, and people would be called to come and get what they needed.

“There was no refrigeration so much of the meet was cut to strips and dried as jerky.”

The tour also visited the day school for preschool through kindergarten students. They also visited the Tribal Farming operation where they grow pecans and various types of citrus fruit as well as alfalfa.

The bus makes its first stop at the Yavapai Museum and Culture Center situated on the reservation between the Wassaja Medical Center and the tribal Recreation Center. Here Lewis starts at the very beginning, explaining the Yavapai origin story of the “first woman” coming out from Montezuma’s Well bearing a daughter and eventually a son to expand the Yavapai across a million square miles or more of the southwest.

Lewis also talked about the Yavapai culture at the tribal museum as it related to early agriculture, dress and basket weaving. They also have a display of artifacts retrieved from various sites related to the original fort structures. These are relics of the Army life at the post. Lewis talked about how kids used to play around the building sites related to the fort and turn up brass buttons and buckles associated with military dress.

The tour visited the Fort McDowell Cemetery and Lewis led a group to the gravesite of Carlos Montezuma, a native Yavapai who was orphaned and taken by members of the nearby Pima/Maricopa tribe and sold to an Italian photographer who named the boy Carlos Montezuma and took him to Chicago. He was educated there and became the first Native American medical doctor to practice in the United States. He found his way back to Arizona and his home where he served the people as a doctor and as an activist for Native American rights.

Lewis also told of the struggles the Yavapai had keeping their land at Fort McDowell. It was set aside for them by decree of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. The federal government tried to move the people to the very fringes of their land to create a lake for water storage for the Central Arizona Project when construction began in the 1960s.

The tribal members refused to sell their land and, with the help of environmentalists, pushed the Department of Interior to find other options for water storage for the CAP. Today tribal members still celebrate Orme Dam Days with a pow-wow and rodeo in November.

Lewis related her own experience as a young woman in 1992 when federal agents arrived in the early morning hours at the tribal bingo hall to confiscate bingo slots, which the government had deemed illegal. Word spread across the reservation quickly and residents swarmed to the only road leading into the bingo hall parking lot and refused to allow the moving vans loaded with the confiscated machines leave.

It took 10 days of cooling off and negotiation before the state would consider a gaming compact, allowed by federal law, and the machines were removed from the parking lot – already ruined from sitting in Mayflower moving vans in the hot May sun.

Lewis said she learned a lesson from her grandmother during that standoff. As a young woman looking for opportunities and finding them slim for Native Americans, she was angry. Her grandmother had been preparing food for the many who came from across the country to support the tribal members. Her grandmother handed her two plates of food and told her to take them to agents guarding the vans. Lewis said she was scared and angry and had a bit of a standoff herself with her grandmother, but eventually delivered the food.

Lewis said that left her thinking about how she was living her Christian values and how to improve.

“I don’t want to think about the things that divide us,” Lewis said. “We need to get to know one another and our culture.

“Hate just allows us to build the divide between people.”