The Yavapai Nation Uses GIS to Innovate Land and Tribal Asset Management

The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation is setting the pace in geographic information system (GIS) adoption among Indigenous communities. Application of the technology is enriching the nation's planning processes, improving operational decision-making, and building credibility with outside agencies.

Among Indigenous tribes, the lack of training resources and domain knowledge has often hampered the adoption of GIS technology to support tribal planning activities such as land-use management. With access to software and training through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a growing number of tribes are taking advantage of the technology to streamline internal processes and deliver comprehensive information systems supporting a variety of workflows across their organizations. At the forefront of these is the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, located in Maricopa County, northeast of Arizona’s capital, Phoenix.

The Yavapai Nation—at 40 square miles, one of the smallest reservations in Arizona—was formed by executive order on September 15, 1903. It is bordered by Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the south, the town of Fountain Hills on the west, and the Tonto National Forest on the north and east. The nation is bisected north-south by Verde River, one of the largest perennial streams in the state.

The Yavapai Nation operates Fort McDowell Tribal Farm, which produces alfalfa, pecans, and citrus. The nation also runs the We-Ko-Pa Casino and offers tourist activities through Fort McDowell Adventures. It is the home of the Yavapai people, 950 strong, about 600 of whom live on the reservation.

Erika McCalvin is the nation’s principal planner. Over the last decade or so, she—together with Alex Wood, founder and president of Precision Geographic, Inc.—has been instrumental in delivering the current Esri solution using ArcGIS software.

For many tribal nations, McCalvin notes, creating an inventory of their land and respective assets still tends to be a day-to-day, paper-based operation. She knew the Yavapai Nation needed to improve accuracy and remove much of the duplicate work that made asset and information management so time-consuming. At the same time, the tribe members wanted to get ahead of various transportation reporting requirements and engage more effectively with outside agencies to better manage and control their assets.  

The Yavapai Nation’s GIS began as a support tool for environmental siting and sampling operations. The initial desktop solution was created to support mosquito trap site locations, river sampling, air-quality measurement and reporting, and eagle nest monitoring. But over time, the solution was expanded to other applications, and use expanded greatly with the move to ArcGIS Online. 

One of the early challenges was assembling an accurate land information system covering all the tribal lands, and accurately capturing all the various land assignments.  Many of the land records dated back over half a century and were contained on 24-by-36-inch paper plat, with widely varying levels of accuracy.   

Bringing all the land information together and creating an accurate land basemap was a major task.  The same could be said for infrastructure mapping, Wood notes, as he and McCalvin assembled the various utility information while creating a detailed asset inventory of the tribal lands.  

The resultant solution was a comprehensive information portal containing not only the full transportation system but also the underground infrastructure (including freshwater and sewage, communications, and natural gas), other features such as stormwater catchments, and all the Yavapai Nation’s agricultural and other business enterprises.

Where previously it was difficult or nearly impossible to understand how everything fit together in a broader context, McCalvin can now access answers very quickly.

The operational advantages are also apparent.  For example, in the event of a water main break, McCalvin could immediately identify the appropriate valve location, as opposed to manually searching through paper-based drawings.  In the case of less urgent queries, because there is a dependable, single-truth source of spatial information relating to utilities, on-site crews know precisely what is underneath them before they start digging. 

In capturing and updating the tribal asset inventory, McCalvin and Wood have leveraged Esri’s mobile technology, with easy-to-use field applications.  Off-the-shelf features and functions were used to create drop-down lists for each asset type and were applied to all the field data collection applications.   Instead of having to type in values each time, mobile workers now have a series of drop-down lists to choose from.  For water infrastructure, for example, pipe and valve types and diameters are all predefined. This makes data entry simpler, faster, and more uniform.

Transportation infrastructure information, such as roadway condition, length, and materials, is all captured within the GIS and contains all the required attributes for the National Tribal Transportation Facility Inventory (NTTFI), which is submitted to the BIA on an annual basis.  The tribe is already prepared to submit this information digitally, though the BIA is not yet equipped to receive digital submissions.

For McCalvin, the visualization that is possible with GIS is a huge bonus from an asset management perspective. “For instance, if you can show a sign placement in picture form, you can show precisely what’s needed,” she said.

Wood, in turn, points to the safety improvements made possible by the application.  “Using GIS data, we can optimize road geometries at accident hot spots and improve lighting and add guardrails where necessary,” said Wood. “We’re able to look at things more holistically, especially on roads that are jointly managed with the county.”

The Yavapai Nation is a land-assignment tribe—its land stays with the tribe forever but individual parcels are allocated for members’ use across their lifetimes. Knowing where individual residents’ land assignments were relative to each other was an important part of the GIS application.

The accuracy of the system’s land-assignment application has enabled a host of positive outcomes.  For the first time, all land assignments can be seen in relation to each other on the same map, with ArcGIS helping validate the accuracy of prior surveys.  This has facilitated the optimization of land assignments because now the tribe can assign precise boundaries to individual properties, whereas before it had to include a rough buffer between properties.  This maximizes the available land for residential use, keeping built properties close to infrastructure and keeping down costs.

Because of the greater accuracy, land assignments are tending to become smarter, coming down from a full acre to three-quarters or a half, but still serving residents’ needs while promoting cohesive neighborhood areas.

At the same time, Wood highlights that arbitrary homesite requests can now be addressed with data-driven reasoning about where infrastructure already exists. GIS, he says, brings more objectivity to how land assignments are handed out.

“We can say, ‘Being closer to infrastructure . . . reduces the cost of development,’  and to justify that request we can just turn on the GIS layers—sewage, water, and so on—and show tribal members why their preferred homesite may or may not be a good idea in a particular location,” McCalvin explained further. “Also, you might look at a two-acre site from the roadside and think it’s a good location. . . . But then we show you the aerial imagery that shows that two-thirds of the area is unusable because it’s in or near a wash and the home probably wouldn’t survive monsoon season without severe damage.”

The GIS has helped reduce conflicts over land assignments or enterprise development projects, with the tribal council sometimes changing its mind on projects  it had supported until seeing the results in the GIS. As McCalvin pointed out, “It’s about showing an area as it is versus as we think it is.”

Having GIS has had a major effect on the tribe members' planning processes as well as on their wider relationships.

“It’s definitely influenced decision-making—over the last five, six years especially, we’ve been reaching out and educating the tribal council members and they realize the importance of GIS,” said McCalvin. “Its biggest advantage is that they can see what they’re trying to make decisions about—in the old paper environment, it was harder to understand things and put them in context.”

This ability to successfully influence internal decisions works in other areas as well. For instance, in the summer of 2022, Verde River rose especially high because of runoff from the mountains north of the reservation. GIS was used to identify low spots and those areas needing additional protection. This information was shared with the surrounding agencies and helped guide construction decisions as well as the expansion of culverts in the southern section of the reservation.

As a result of this work, the system has brought both proof and credibility to relations with outside agencies. According to Wood, coordination with surrounding agencies in terms of the needed roadway upgrades to counter flooding is improved because of the quality of information that the Yavapai Nation is now able to bring to the table.

“We’re intelligently and competently able to engage with other agencies and effectively manage our transportation, residential, and water systems,” McCalvin noted. “Because of our GIS system, we’re actually more advanced than other tribes.”