Shane Anton stood at the mouth of a hand-hewn irrigation canal that dates back centuries before the arrival of the first European explorers. The ancient waterway, 10 feet wide and about 5 feet deep, sits in a small desert park surrounded by tract homes in Lehi, a neighborhood in north Mesa. "Our belief is we've been here since time immemorial," said Anton, an Onk Akimel O'odham and a member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, "and the need to farm was always there." The 4,500-foot-long-canal at Mesa's Park of the Canals is a tiny fragment of a system that once spanned more than 700 miles along the Salt and Gila rivers, bringing life-giving water to Anton's ancestors, the Hohokam, or as the contemporary O'odham peoples call them, the Huhugam.