open-weave juncus baskets

Luis Rodriguez, below, is a student in master basketweaver Abe Sanchez’s whole rod juncus basketweaving class at the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. Luis is also the museum’s Education Specialist for the Community Outreach Programs. He’s wearing a Día de los Muertos shirt in honor of the festivities which he helped organize at the Palm Springs Art Museum a few blocks away, where he constructed a beautiful altar as a floor installation.

Open weave baskets were used for gathering berries, nuts, acorns, flowers, etc., and were often quickly woven at the gathering site.

Luis and the other students are using the juncus Abe gathered last week-end with his pal, Acjachemen elder, Marian Walkingstick.

Abe brought his most recent and astonishingly beautiful basket to show the class—Rhus trilobata, aka basket sumac, for the coils, juncus and dyed juncus for the patterns, on a foundation of deergrass. The basket is inspired by basketweavers who used cross stitch patterns for their designs. This is the first time Abe used cross stitch patterns for his baskets.

The students’ open-weave whole rod juncus baskets are less complex than Abe’s coiled basket, but I imagine they will be treasured by their weavers.

Teaching classes is a large part several contemporary basketweavers’ commitment to revitalize the indigenous cultural tradition of basketweaving. This revitalization is of critical importance. Until recently, traditional California basketweaving was an endangered art. Yet in the past, nothing else touched indigenous people’s lives so completely. Native Californians used baskets for cooking, sifting acorn meal and serving food, storing water and household goods. They wove harvesting baskets, seed beaters, winnowing baskets, granaries, burden baskets, fish-trapping and fish-netting baskets, cradle-board baskets, intricately woven gift and ceremonial baskets. Some of their houses and ramadas were essentially large woven baskets.

M. Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild discusses this revitalization in comprehensive detail.

California Ethnobotany

Gaudalupe Montes

Edible, Medicinal, Material, Ceremonial: Contemporary Ethnobotany of Southern California Indians is featured as the cover story in the Fall issue of News from Native California. Our project documents the contemporary uses of native plants of profound importance to the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural vitality of California Indian people.

Rose Ramirez and I have collaborated with many knowledgeable and generous consultants who are repositories of cultural knowledge and eloquent defenders of the land, its sacredness for Indian people, and its importance for all species who inhabit it.

One of our consultants, Guadalupe Montes, is a talented young Kumiai basketweaver from San Jose de la Zorra, a basketweaving village in Baja. Her basket is woven with Juncus textilis, and she used the darker brown, earth ends of the juncus stems to create her pattern of three sycamore leaves.

Romancing the Stallion

I thought this book definitely belonged on my ethnobotany blog, which features so many prickly pear cacti. At first, I couldn’t quite figure out which one is the prickly pear, because I don’t think the author is referring to the Opuntia with its succulent green pads and scarlet-saturated blossoms at their feet. Text from the back cover helped:

“Camile Cordell, willful blond firebrand who’s bad news with a lariat and could rope her way out of Hell itself; or Wade Langtry, untamable virile stranger who has what it takes to wrestle cows and break stallions,” etc. etc. etc.

Rhonda Thompson’s sequel to Prickly Pear is titled, appropriately, Desert Bloom. Other titles by the author include Cougar’s Woman and Walk Into the Flame . . .

I’ll have to find an image from the art installation, Our Bodice, Our Selves, that I created about romance novels and the visual cues on their covers: her unkempt hair, his bronzed male torso, her ripped decolletage, etc. etc. etc.

gathering juncus

Master basketweaver Abe Sanchez gathering Juncus textilis, one of the four predominant plants used for basketweaving by southern California Indians.

This particular stand of  juncus has really rich browns on the earth ends. These are the brown colors basketweavers use for the patterns in their baskets.

Abe and Sean Bogner are tying up bundles of juncus, which Abe will then store in his refrigerator until he teaches his Living Traditions class next week-end at the Agua Caliente Cultural Center in Palm Springs where participants will learn to weave whole rod juncus baskets.

Yokuts-style basket / Abe Sanchez

This is Abe Sanchez’ Yokuts-style basket using redbud and bracken fern for the design elements, and sedge root as the predominant coiling material. He uses deergrass as the foundation for the basket.

Abe is teaching a basketweaving class this weekend at the Agua Caliente Cultural Center in Palm Springs. See post above titled Gathering Juncus. Marian Walkingstick, Acjachemen elder and basketweaver, will be assisting with the class.

Abe and Marian’s generosity and willingness to share what they know with others and their dedication to the revitalization of indigenous cultural practices are quite extraordinary.

On November 7-8, Abe is once again hosting basketweavers from the Seri/Comca’ac Women’s Artisans Cooperative  from Desemboque and Punta Chueca on the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico. They will be showing their work at the Autry’s Intertribal Arts 2009 Marketplace in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

Seri artists are renowned for their ironwood carvings, such as the hummingbird below.

Flickr slideshow test

prickly pear glochids and spines

The glochids are the ochre-colored hairlike projections on this native prickly pear cactus, beautiful in close-up, but irritating to the touch. Very protective for the plant.

The photographs above are from the native plant garden at the Cahuilla Malki Museum. Today they had their annual Fall Gathering. Abe Sanchez and Marian Walkingstick had a native foods display. Below are two different varieties of cactus tunas which people could taste.

Dragonfly Lecture / Dorothy Ramon Learning Center

On October 19, Rose Ramirez and I are giving a presentation about our ethnobotany project at the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in Banning, CA. The Center is dedicated to sharing Southern California Indian cultures, languages, history, and arts. “Dorothy Ramon was an elder knowledgable in traditional ways and recognized as the last pure speaker of the Serrano language, that is, the last person who thought and dreamed in Serrano first, before English. In her final years before her passing in 2002 she worked tirelessly with a linguist and helped save the region’s own Serrano language and much cultural knowledge.” Please see their flyer and excerpts from three pages of our Ethnobotanical Calendar below. Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Blog.

We will be talking about the contemporary uses of native plants of profound importance to the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural vitality of Sothern California Indian people. Excerpts from 3 pages of our Ethnobotanical Calendar are below:

prickly pear / tuna juice processing

I love this painting, El Tunero, or Prickly Pear Gatherer, by Fernando Castillo, 1937. Only a few of Castillo’s paintings survive in private collections. El Tunero is using a basket to gather his tunas, which is a traditional method for gathering them. Now we use plastic buckets like the one below.

These tunas from the Opuntia ficus-indica are really ripe. I picked them yesterday from some large cactus stands near my home in the San Diego back country, but I don’t imagine they’ll be many more edible tunas in another week. The birds and bees are diving right in, now that the tunas are so ripe. I juiced them today with Minnie and Ray Tafoya and their nephew Daniel, who wanted to witness my new speed-juicing method for non-labor-intensive kitchen devotees such as myself. We’ve never worked with such overripe fruits before, but they processed relatively quickly and produced an amazing amount of really sweet nectar. Tastes terrific over ice with a bit of lime juice.

prickly pear cactus tuna and cochineal

Cochineal colonizing the prickly pear cactus tunas in my neighborhood. A couple of years ago, I went to a cochineal farm in Oaxaca where they farm the cochineal insects for their red dye.  In greenhouses they plant the cactus in shallow dirt beds on large tables. They then inoculate the prickly pear cactus with the insects. The cactus pads full of cochineal are quite beautiful. A thin layer of cochineal dust covers the entire pad, and the pads themselves reminded me of the milky way on a clear night.

Bladderpod / Isomeris arborea

On Wednesday evening, three guests came to my CSUSM Arts and World Culture class: Kumiai elder Teodora Cuero from La Huerta, Kiliwa elder Leonor Farlow from one of the southernmost Kiliwa communities who now lives in Ensendada, and Mike Wilken, an anthropologist who has been working in Baja for almost thirty years. Both Teodora and Leonor are renowned plant and language specialists.

Teodora became especially animated when she spoke of the bladderpod, Isomeris arborea, a beautiful plant covered with flowers in the winter and spring. They pick large quantities of the beautiful yellow flowers and boil them for four hours. It’s necessary to boil the flowers for that long, she told us, because they’re very bitter. After four hours, the flowers actually get a little sweet. When they’re ready, she sautés some onion in a frypan, stirs in a bit of flour, then adds the drained flowers. She adds a little salt, then puts the mixture on a fresh handmade tortilla for a bladderpod taco.

“Delicious,” Teodora tells us. “It’s one of the best foods there is.”

Neither Teodora nor Leonor eat the pods, but according to the Las Pilitas Native Plant Nursery website, the pods are also edible.

Bladderpod can survive extreme drought conditions once it’s established, an ideal plant for our globally warmed climate. In addition, the drought tolerant bladderpod is considered a fire retardant plant by the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum’s Fire Retardant Plant Research Project, the California Native Plant Society South Coast Chapter, as well as by other fire safe councils and nurseries. Another great perimeter plant for landscaping, along with the fire retardant prickly pear cactus, for all of us living in the back country. You can purchase bladderpod at Las Pilitas in Escondido, linked above, or the Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano.

The bladderpod shrub, a plant magnet for quail, finches,  sparrows, and doves, provides cover for ground foragers, shade and seeds. Hummingbirds, butterflies, and bumblebees visit the showy yellow flowers for their nectar. The harlequin bug, Murgantia histrionica, an herbivore pictured above, loves the bladderpod as well. The bugs can live their entire life on a bladderpod. The leaves have been described as smelly, with a disagreeable or unpleasant odor. I prefer to think of them as pungent. The inflated pendulous seedpods, “bladder pods,” hang on the plant for a long time, making it easy to collect the lentil-sized seeds for planting.

Teodora Cuero’s snake story

Teodora Cuero from La Huerta in Baja (see Bladderpod post above) told us a gathering story, which anthropologist Mike Wilken translated:

I went with my daughter and my son-in-law. It took us about an hour from my house to get up there to gather the sweet acorns. We found one tree that had a lot of the sweet acorns down below it. They just fall off on the ground.

And so I sat down on the ground, and once I’m sitting down—I’ll get all the way down on the ground—I can’t get up by myself. I need people to pull me to get up. And so there I was laying down on the ground gathering acorns. I was gathering and I didn’t even notice there was one of those very poisonous rattlesnakes coiled up right there. And I touched that rattlesnake. When I touched it and noticed it was a rattlesnake, I don’t know how I did it, but I was standing up right away!! I don’t remember how I got up there, I just did.

These rattlesnakes are so bad that if they bite you, you won’t go more than 4 steps.

The rattlesnake basket above was woven by Abe Sanchez, master basketweaver. The rattlesnake basket above is from San Jose de la Zorra, a basketweaving village in Baja.

Opuntia robusta / dinner plate prickly pear

Opuntia robusta. What a beautiful plant. These pads are monsters, thick and heavy, and the fruits really round and large. Luther Burbank, who cultivated a spineless variety, said that he would talk to his plants “to create a vibration of love,” and would tell them, “You don’t need your defensive thorns. I will protect you.”

We processed 5 quarts of prickly pear juice this week-end, using the fruits of Opuntia ficus-indica, a relatively spineless variety. The Opuntia ficus-indica still has plenty of those pesky glochids, what one writer aptly calls peach-fuzz barbed-wires. Glochids are not dangerous, just annoying, but you don’t want to get any lodged in your mouth. The apricot-colored juice is extraordinarily healthful and delicious. It’s not juice really, but nectar, thick and rich and luscious.

In North County San Diego, the cactus fruits, or tunas, are perfect right now for picking and processing. September is Month of the Tuna Ripening. I love all the prickly pear tunas, but I have to confess that I especially love the ones that are easier to harvest. I use tongs and True Blue gloves from World Market. Tunas are now being marketed as a superfruit, which they indeed are, with a long list of medicinal qualities. A great site with recent medical research is Natalie McGee’s Arizona Cactus Ranch website, where you can purchase organic prickly pear juice as well. Some scientists believe that it may prove to be a significant breakthrough in cancer prevention. Prickly pear juice already is being used successfully to help control blood sugar levels in people with diabetes.

Prickly pear plants are fire retardant as well, because as succulents they retain a great deal of water in their pads. They’re great to plant on the perimeters of homes in the back country. In the last few years, I’ve planted several of Burbank’s spineless Opuntias in my backyard, and Opuntia ficus-indica plants around the perimeter as well.

The image on the left is Frida Kahlo’s preparatory drawing of horticulturalist Luther Burbank. In the painting on the right, Burbank, who devoted his life to cultivating hybrids, is depicted as a hybrid himself, growing from a rooted tree and holding five enormous leaves of a philodendron, a plant native to Mexico. When Kahlo first exhibited in the painting in 1938, it was titled Burbank—American Fruit Maker.

Above is another Kahlo painting titled Cactus Fruits, 1938. I used to teach a class—Contemporary Women Artists—so all my Frida Kahlo books are stashed in my office at CSUSM. I don’t remember this painting, and I want to read more about it.

spider southern california

Jennifer from the Living Desert Museum in Palm Desert ID’d this as a jumping spider, Phidippus adumbratus.

Lydia Vassar / Diania Caudell

Last night we presented the first in a series of three ethnobotany events at California State University San Marcos. Lydia Vassar, a Luiseño basketweaver and basketweaving teacher at the Pechanga Chámmakilawish School on the Pechanga Reservation, spoke about her uses of native plants. Lydia is one of the most adventurous souls I’ve ever met. In many of my photographs, Lydia’s got something in her mouth: she’s either splitting juncus into three strands for her baskets, or gnawing on agave leaves that have been pit roasted overnight after harvesting in the desert, or tentatively tasting what we think are the closely-guarded-with-thorns desert apricot.

Last night she spoke of how basketweavers need three hands, and that the third hand, of course , is the mouth. She also spoke how dangerous this can be for basketweavers, because often they unknowingly gather plants from areas that have been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides.

Diania Caudell,  a Luiseño basketweaver and another collaborator on the our Ethnobotany Project, attended the presentation and also spoke about this pressing issue. Diania sits on the Executive Council for the Tribal Pesticides Program Council and works with local, state, and federal agencies on the uses of pesticides and other toxic chemicals which impact native plants used for basketry and other cultural traditions. In the photograph above, Diania is gathering deergrass, Muhlenbergia rigens, used as the foundation for her baskets.

Please see the poster below for more information on upcoming Ethnobotany Events at CSUSM next week.

Ethnobotany Events at CSUSM

All events are free and open to the public. Please join us.

prickly pear tunas / Opuntia spp.

Lydia Vassar gathering tunas of the prickly pear using kitchen tongs and gloves. These have many more spinas than the Opuntia ficus-indica prickly pear, whose tunas we gathered last year.

mastering the art of native american cooking: prickly pear tunas

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
—T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

4:00 a.m.  Alarm goes off.
4:30 a.m.  Drive to the Stater Bros parking lot to meet up with Lydia Vassar.
5:00 a.m.  At five o’clock in the morning, we drive off toward Palm Desert to meet up with a group of folks to gather prickly pear cactus tunas, and then process them for their delicious and healthful juice. By the end of the day, Leslie Mouriquand’s kitchen looks like the scene of a very bloody crime. We’re exhausted but have blanched, blended, pressed, and strained the tunas to make the richest magenta colored nectar I have ever seen.

I make it sound easy. But I should add that earlier in the afternoon, the top of Leslie’s brand new 10-speed Oster blender separated from the bottom, and the just-boiled magenta tuna mixture splattered all over Lydia, who was blending the recently boiled tuna mixture, as well as the walls, cupboards, counters, stove, and floor of Leslie’s once clean kitchen. We help Lydia get the hot tunas off her legs, but luckily most went on the kitchen. I put down my camera to help the clean-up crew. Later I had the realization what a terrible photojournalist I would make; just when the blood starts flowing, I stop photographing. Reminds me of a scene in Under Fire where the Nick Nolte character, a war photographer, puts down his camera and picks up a rifle after one of the mercenaries shoots a young (and charismatic) Sandinista rebel. Nolte tells the Joanna Cassidy character, a war correspondent, that something’s happening to both of them. It seems that they’ve lost their so-called objectivity. They’re siding with the rebels instead of the U.S trained Contras . . . (About time!).

So in a much less dramatic context, I put down my camera and pick up sponge, paper towels and rags, and Lydia, Leslie, Barbara and I begin to sop up what will be a deep magenta dye if we don’t. Fifteen or so minutes later, we’re ready to start processing tuna juice once again. I pick up my camera again, but too late to photograph the mess. Perhaps it’s better not to show everyone what happens when things don’t go as planned. But who doesn’t already know what that looks like.

Barbara Drake straining the seeds from the prickly pear juice. Barbara is a Tongva elder and co-founder of the Preserving Our Heritage: Native Foods Bank and Restoration Project, an intertribal collaborative project to promote the gathering, harvesting, preparation, and distribution of native foods, seeds, and plants. The goals for the project are to help to connect Native people to the plants and habitats that have sustained their ancestors for thousands of years, foster intergenerational ties, offer an opportunity to be of service to elders in Native communities, and revitalize cultural practices and traditions. I recently wrote a small grant for the project, which was funded by Maren Peterson and Bryan Endress, conservation folks at the Wild Animal Park, who will help the project use these renewed gathering traditions to promote plant conservation and restoration to sustain both cultural traditions and native plant conservation. In addition, the project will advocate traditional management as a viable conservation and restoration strategy.

mojave yucca / pinyon pine sap

As I was wandering around with my camera, un-mindfully it turns out, I walked into the bayonet-sharp leaves of a Mojave yucca, Yucca schidigera, and punctured my leg in two places. Ouch!! Mojave yucca is also known as Spanish dagger, and for good reason. I looked about to see what I might put on my bleeding wounds, but couldn’t think of anything, so I cleaned up the blood as best I could, and kept walking. Later that morning, Leslie Mouriquand, archaeologist for Riverside County, happened to show us how she gathers pinyon pine pitch, Pinus edulis, the soft, sticky, wonderful smelling stuff she uses to make a medicinal pinyon sap soap. Using a scraper, she gathered a large blob from a wound in the pinyon tree where a branch had broken and the sap was oozing out. Leslie told us that the pinyon sap is strongly anti-bacterial and antiseptic. Perfect. I asked her for a small blob and put it directly on my two puncture wounds. I love how the antidote for our injuries so often grows in proximity to what injures us. In the photo, Barbara Drake, a Tongva elder and edible plant specialist, stands in the foreground as Leslie gathers the pine sap in the background. When we left at the end of the day, Leslie gifted all of us with a piece of her amber-colored pine sap soap, which I will treasure. She also promised us a natural facial session, beauty cosmetic stuff, gals only, and everyone thought that was fantastic idea.

desert apricot / Prunus fremontii

A group of us went out early to gather prickly pear fruits from the pancake prickly pear, but wandering around with my camera, I found another fruit I had not seen before. Daniel McCarthy, Tribal Relations archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service, identified the fruit as a desert apricot, Prunus fremontii, a native stone fruit. According to Lowell Bean and Katherine Siva Saubel in Temalpakh, Cahuilla people considered desert apricots a highly prized food source. I tasted a few and found them sweet, nicely chewy, and certainly a delicacy in the desert. On the Las Pilitas Native Plant Nursery site, they report that you rarely see the fruit, so well loved is it by critters.

prickly pear ethnobotanical calendar page

Rose Ramirez and I, as well as many knowledgeable and generous consultants and contributors, have produced an ethnobotanical calendar that documents the contemporary uses of twelve native plants of profound importance to the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural vitality of California Indian people. Margie Adcock, a recent graduate from CSUSM, worked tirelessly to help us get this to print. Clarissa McCallum, an extraordinary birder, graciously allowed us to use her bird photographs. Teodora Cuero from La Huerta in Baja California is photographed above as she gathers the tunas from the prickly pear, and Leonor Farlow from Ensenada is harvesting the pads.

sycamore ethnobotany calendar page

This is the last page, featuring the sycamore tree, from our ethnobotanical calendar that we will be picking up from the printer next week.

Seri/Comca’ac Women’s Artisans Cooperative

The Seri/Comca’ac Women’s Artisans Cooperative from Desemboque and Punta Chueca, on the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico, are visiting in southern California for a week. My good friend Abe Sanchez is hosting their visit, and they’re staying with me for two days while they exhibit their work at the Pala Reservation for Cupa Days. Abe and I visited them in Desemboque two years ago for their summer festival, and participated in their harvesting the delicious fruits of the cardón cactus, or Pachycereum pringlei. The cardón is the largest cactus in the world, and the fruits are harvested in July when it’s really really really hot in the desert. Former CSUSM student Clarissa McCallum created the poster for them below.

Angelita Torres, Comca’ac elder, from Desemboque, applying her face paint.

Many Comca’ac women are master basketweavers. Last year Mike Evans at the Tree of Life Native Plant Nursery in San Juan Capistrano hosted them, and here they’re doing a basket dance around one of their large and beautiful baskets.

students at indian rock

We’re looking at my students blogs today, so I’m posting a photos of them from a fieldtrip to the Indian Rock Native Garden site near CSUSM. Greg Rubin, native landscape designer, joined us that day, and the San Luis Rey Band of Luiseño Indians’ Tribal Council and members once again generously provided dinner for all the students from my Advanced Digital Arts class and Joely Proudfit’s Sociology class. Indian Rock Native Garden is a sacred site, used in the past for Luiseño girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies. The pictographs on the rock have been tagged with blue and white graffiti, but the site still has an extraordinary power and beauty.

Rhus trilobata / Justin Farmer

In early February, several of us went to gather Rhus trilobata, or basketry sumac, on the Ramona Reservation in San Diego County. Justin Farmer, an Ipai (Northern Digueño) author, basket collector, and preeminent basketry teacher, is pictured above bundling the straight stems of the sumac he has just harvested.

Edwina Freeman splits Rhus trilobata

Edwina Freeman, Chumash basketweaver, splits Rhus trilobata, or sumac, into three pieces to be used as the coils for her basket.