surfing scripps / sandhill cranes / qarú:t

joel smith surfs scripps

Intrepid CSUSM student Joel Smith surfs Scripps. Joel sent me this photo yesterday. Former TA for my Advanced Digital Arts class, he introduced us to his friend, the incredible local Carlsbad avian photographer, Chris Mayne, who visited the class last semester.

chris mayne: sandhill crane

We hope to lure Chris back to campus for another visit this spring. A long-time surfer, Chris started out photographing other surfers, but became increasingly captivated by the shorebirds and wildlife in the local lagoons.

According to his website, Chris was “the first person to photograph a Sandhill Crane in San Diego County, hundreds of miles from where it belongs—it was only the third reported time a Sandhill has ever been in San Diego!” I was interested in this because in the Henry Rodriguez Archive Collection (1920-1992) we have housed at CSUSM, Henry includes a name for the Sandhill Crane in the Luiseño language, qarú:t. So I wonder if at one time Sandhill Cranes were  more prevalent in San Diego.

Chris’ beautiful photo above is from a series of Sandhill Cranes he shot at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico.

Redshanks / Adenostoma sparsifolium

Rose Ramirez and I went out early this morning to check out a recently burned area (September 2009) near Vail Lake on the 79 in Riverside County. After the heavy rains, it’s easier to negotiate the fire areas. In the photo above,  branches of redshanks, aka Adenostoma sparsifolium, are silhouetted against the burned intermittent-stream bank.

Above is a wider view of partially burned redshank trees, or arborescent shrubs as they’re also called.

Wild cucumber vines are growing everywhere, yerba santa is coming back, what we think is giant wild rye is beginning to sprout, and laurel sumac, Malosma laurina, in the photo above is growing again from the base of the burned branches.

This is a resurrected redshanks growing in a former burn area west of Vail Lake. Redshanks is a stunningly beautiful tree, but you don’t want to plant it in your garden if you live in a fire-prone area. Neither redshanks, nor the related Ademostoma fasciculatum, aka greasewood chamise, are fire-resistant.

Gathering sumac / Gathering deergrass

Last Saturday, January 9, Abe Sanchez and I went to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park to gather deergrass (Mulenbergia rigens) and basket sumac (Rhus trilobata). Abe uses deergrass as the bundle foundation, or warp, for his elaborate baskets, and split sumac as the coiling material. The photo above of a gigantic thicket of sumac growing on the side of the road was taken right outside the park .

At first glance, it looks as if the Rhus has not been recently burned or coppiced to produce the straight shoots necessary for basket weaving, but Abe was able to find many perfect shoots—long, flexible new stems with no lateral branches.

Abe is always a bit cautious about how many sumac shoots he gathers, because he’s very aware that he’ll need to split them as soon as possible when he returns home. After about three days, “it’s almost impossible to split.” The other consideration is that “it’s very hard on your hands. It’s very labor intensive—your tendons, your hands, you really wear out your hands splitting sumac.”

At the entrance to the Rancho Cuyamaca State Park campground, we stop to talk to the very accommodating ranger. Abe shows her his permit, and she is very enthusiastic about Abe and other basketweavers using park resources from what were once their ancestral gathering grounds to help revitalize their cultural practices such as basketweaving. In the image below, Abe  gathers deergrass, aka Mulenbergia rigens, a perennial native bunchgrass. Abe is wading waist-deep in the lush deergrass to gather the golden flower stalks.

Basketweavers and botanists agree that deergrass is one of those native plants well-adapted to fire that will regrow from its base in the spring after a burn. Fire eliminates the skirt of accumulated dried leaves and dead thatch, helps to recycle nutrients, and induces the production of healthy new flower stalks. Native Americans regularly burned deergrass stands as part of their traditional land management practices. In Tending the Wild, Ethnobotanist M. Kat Anderson estimates that tribes enhanced deergrass stands by setting small-scale controlled fires every two to five years. Abe and other basketweavers still love to gather the superior deergrass stalks found growing in recently burned areas. Large areas of Rancho Cuyamaca State Park burned in the Cedar Fire in 2003, and the deergrass still looks as if it couldn’t be happier. (You need permits, of course, to gather inside the park).

Although the heat and drought-tolerant deergrass is now grown as an ornamental landscaping plant, Abe prefers to gather deergrass in the wild. “If you grow it, and you water too much, it gets too thick. When deergrass grows in the wild, it’s going to stay thinner, and it’s going to be nicer” for basketweaving.

In the photo above, Abe beats his bundle of deergrass stalks against the rock to scatter the deergrass seeds for wildlife and to help disseminate the seeds for germination. Our friend, basketweaver Rose Ramirez, also speaks of tapping the stalks of gathered deergrass to shake out as many seeds as possible for the songbirds that feast on them. Abe and Rose’s gathering practices, similar to all the Native people I’ve worked with and documented, is respectful, sustainable, and enhances rather than diminishes the environment.

Here’s Abe’s most recent basket, which I wrote about in an earlier post. The white color is split and peeled sumac/Rhus trilobata, the brown is juncus/Juncus textilis, and the black is dyed juncus. Abe used deergrass as the foundation around which he coiled the sumac and juncus. Abe creates some of the most beautiful and intricate baskets in California, and is invited to give classes and workshops all over the state.

California baskets are world renowned for their beauty and watertight weaves. When immersed in water, deergrass expands, helping make the baskets watertight. Abe wove this chil’cut, or women’s basket hat photographed above, for his friend and basketweaver Marian Walkingstick. It also can be used as a cup or bowl when turned right-side up. If you look closely, you can see the bundles of deergrass (warp) around which the  juncus (weft) is tightly coiled.

Chil’cut
Grandmother would prefer to use the chilcut as a food bowl instead of a plate. She would diligently wash before and after using as food for eating. It seemed like ceremony. She would carefully and thoroughly wash and dry, patiently hold the chilcut towards the sun turning the chilcut around so as to—that to make sure that the surface of chilcot received the rays of the sun. Satisfied she would then ceremoniously put it on her head. Perhaps to receive spiritual nourishment. Perhaps to say thank you great Grandfather for all that you have given me.
—from the Henry Rodriguez Archive Collection, Luiseño, 1920-2002

On the drive home, the pungent smell of cut sumac suckers permeates the car. Luckily, both Abe and I really love the smell, but a few people I’ve met can’t tolerate the smell. The smell actually helps basketweavers ID the plant, because sumac and poison oak look very similar, but only sumac has what Abe calls “an unforgettable smell. I love the smell of sumac. To me, the smell of sumac is very hypnotic.” So we return home, happily hypnotized after a day of gathering, photographing and hiking in the park.

The photograph above of deergrass growing on the Pechanga Reservation in Temecula, CA. was shot by my CSUSM student, Cameron Sanchez, in Spring 2009. Native plant specialist and basketweaver Willie Pink (Cupeño/Luiseño) runs the nursery and garden area at Pechanga, and he’s careful not to overwater the deergrass. Although several of the Native basketweavers and gatherers with whom I work have successfully fought to obtain access to public lands such as Cuyamaca Rancho State Park to gather materials necessary for their cultural survival, many choose to grow their important cultural plants as well.

hawksbill turtles and chia: Nicaragua

This is my favorite photograph from our trip to Bluefields on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. It was pouring rain, and we were sitting on the dock at the Bluefields wharf waiting for our plane back to Managua. I don’t have the opportunity to take this kind of photograph in chaparral and sage scrub backcountry where I live. The abstractness and minimalism of the scene reminded of the luminists, 19^th century painters obsessed with atmospheric light and numinous phenomena. There’s often a minimal quality to their work, very moody, very poetic. I’ve always loved the fog-shrouded waterscapes of Fritz Hugh Lane, or Caspar David Friedrich, famous for his storms and mist, or Martin Johnson Heade.

I bought chia sold in a sidewalk market stand near the waterfront, but Bluefields was not our original destination.

Pearl Lagoon and the Pearl Cays on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, an hour away by boat, were. On one of the small islands, we were lucky enough to run into a fisherman turned biologist and passionate turtle conservationist, who showed us nesting sites of the critically endangered hawksbill turtle.

pitahaya, the cardón cactus fruit

 

Raquel Hofer harvesting pitayaha, fruit of the cardón cactus

 

Raquel Hofer eating pitayaha

 

Raquel Hofer pictured above is Gabriel Hofer’s sister. Gabriel, a member of Grupo Tortuguero Comcáac, an organization dedicated to sea turtle conservation, is featured in the following post.

We went out early one hot-hot-hot july morning to harvest the pitahaya fruits from the cardón cactus, Pachycereus phinglei, largest cactus in the Sonoran Desert. The fruit grow high up on the giant cardón, so the women use a pole with a hook to detach them from the cactus. The fruits are incredibly delicious and sweet.

gathering piyahaya

mesquite nation::Comcáac Nation::turtle nation

Gabriel Hofer, Grupo Tortuguero Comcáac

Fourth posting on mesquite, this from some research at 3 am reading People of the Desert and Sea by Richard Felger and Mary Beck Moser.  Abe Sanchez and I visited Seri basketweavers three summers ago in Desemboque, a village located on what environmental and political activist Winona LaDuke appropriately terms the “insultingly named Sea of Cortez,” and more aptly named the Comcáac Sea.

Traditional turtle harpoons used for sea turtle hunting were made of several pieces of a strong and flexible wood, often mesquite root. The pieces were joined with mesquite root cord.

Turtles have been a sacred and central part of Seri culture for centuries, but sea turtle populations are now endangered. Many young Seri such as Gabriel Hofer work with the non-profit organization Grupo Tortuguero Comcáac created by their elders to help save traditional knowledge about the turtles and to use that knowledge, along with technology and science, to help monitor and restore their sacred animals.

Groupo Tortuguero Comcáac

Armando Torres, Seri ironwood turtle carver

Armando Torres is a renowned ironwood carver. His beautiful swimming turtle bowls and sculptures are some of the most elegant, and they help celebrate the important relationship between Seris and their now endangered turtles. Ironwood, Olneya tesota, is one of the hardest of all woods to carve, and the ironwood trees themselves are now protected. The Ironwood Alliance was established to protect ironwood habitat and associated wildlife, and to protect the intellectual property rights of Seri artisans as well.

come into mesquite tree presence

Just picked up 3 honey mesquite trees in gallon pots to plant in my garden from Ed Schwind in Fallbrook, CA, whose California native plant business is called The Return of the Native. I had met Ed before at the Temecula Farmer’s Market selling native plants. The plants are pretty small, so the 3/8 inch needle-sharp thorns covering the branches don’t look so intimidating. They can grow us to 3 inches long, however. The thorns will diminish on lower branches as the tree matures.

The thorns were used to puncture the skin for tattoos if cactus thorns were unavailable, according to Katherine Siva Saubell and Lowell Bean in Temalpakh, their ethnobotany of Cahuilla Indians. The Yuma/Quechan Indians used mesquite thorns for tattoo needles as well, and mesquite charcoal as tattoo ink. I’m very impressed by these thorns.

Mesquite trees were so important to Cahuilla Indians that one way they named their eight seasons was based upon the development of the mesquite bean:

Taspa: budding of trees
Sevwa: blossoming of trees
Heva-wivw: commencing to form beans’
Menukis_kwasva: ripening time of beans
Merukis-chaveva: falling of beans
etc.

We’re in Uche0wiva and Tamiva, the cool and the cold days. There are only a few leaves on each of my saplings, as mesquite is a deciduous tree. It’s drought deciduous as well, so if it’s really stressed by extreme drought conditions, it will drop its leaves in summer.

I also picked up 3 bladderpods from Ed, and he gave me some extra bladderpod seeds so I could plant some more. I told him I wanted to be able to gather large quantities of the the flowers for food. He advised me that the seeds don’t need any special treatment, no nicking, no scarification, no pre-soaking—just plant and water them. He said I’d be ready to eat Teodora Cuero’s bladderpod flower tacos in no time.

The title of this post is inspired by poet Denise Levertov’s “Come Into Animal Presence”

Come into animal presence . . . .
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

grinding mesquite pods

I’m actually working on a story about how we gathered mesquite roots with people from the Santa Ysabel Reservation on November 22 for crafting a cradleboard, and I remembered these photos from Barbara Drake (Tongva) and Lori Sisquoc’s (Cahuilla/Apache) Native Plants for Food, Medicine & Utilitarian Uses class at Idyllwild Arts this past summer. Students learned how to grind the mesquite pods into flour using traditional tools.

After grinding the mesquite pods in a portable mortar to make mesquite flour, students helped to prepare a native plant feast which included processing acorns, pinon nuts, chia, and wild greens into edible dishes. With the mesquite flour, they made delicious and healthful cookies. Mesquite is rich in calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, protein & lysine, but it’s particularly healthful for people with diabetes who need to control their blood sugar levels.

Desert Harvesters, a non-profit, grassroots organization in Tuscon, are mesquite grinders extraordinaire. In 2003, they purchased a hammermill. With their mill on a trailer, they travel around the region to food festivals where people bring their pods to be milled into the healthy and delicious mesquite flour. This is part of the Desert Harvester’s efforts to restore people’s relationship to a healthy wild food that grows in abundance. In addition, they assist individuals and communities plant Prosopis velutina, the Velvet mesquite tree native to the region, helping to insure a sustainable foodshed. Below is an image from their website of the hammermill.

I think it would be terrific to write a grant to purchase a hammermill for the southern California Native Foods Bank Project, Lori and Barbara’s intertribal collaborative project to promote the gathering, harvesting, preparation, and distribution of native foods, including acorns from oaks as well as seeds/beans from the mesquite, yucca, sunflower, pinyon pine, wild cherry, chia, black sage, white sage, and thistle sage plants, fruits from the wild cherry, chokecherry, and currants, and the tunas and pads from Opuntia species, among other foods. All of these seeds, fruits, berries are delicious and highly nutritious.

The Native Foods Bank project helps to connect Native people to the plants that have sustained their ancestors for thousands of years, fosters intergenerational ties, offers an opportunity to be of service to elders in Native communities, and revitalizes cultural practices and traditions. The photo above is Barbara Drake conducting her native plants class at Idyllwild.

gathering mesquite roots

“The mesquite is God’s best thought in all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron rooted. —Mary Austin, 1903

Abe Sanchez and I accompanied Stan and Marta Rodriquez and Bonnie from the Santa Ysabel Reservation in San Diego County to gather the roots of God’s best thought, aka the thorny, iron-rooted mesquite tree. The mesquite has extremely deep taproot systems and expansive lateral roots for survival in arid regions. Mark Dimmitt from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum writes that the mesquite’s root system, in fact, is the deepest documented of any tree.

Mesquite trees are phreatophytes, or plants with a deep-roots extending down into the water table. According to botanist Bruce Pavlik, the honey mesquite is the most widespread phreatophytic tree of the Sonoran Desert, as well as the most ecologically important for its multitude of resources: Food. Fuel. Shelter. Tool. Weapon. Fiber. Medicine.

The mesquite is so indispensible that for some native people such as the Akimel O’odham, or Pima, two months of their traditional calendar honor the seasonal cycle of the mesquite: Mesquite Leafing-Out Moon and Mesquite Flowers Moon. The velvet mesquite was considered the Tree of Life for the Pima. Ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea writes at length about the mesquite’s importance in his monumental ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima titled At the Desert’s Green Edge.

Marta, Stan, Bonnie, and Abe dig up the pliable lateral roots from the mesquite trees growing in the wash of an intermittent stream. It’s a lot of work, although the ground is soft and sandy. It’s Abe’s first time gathering the mesquite roots.

As soon as the mesquite root is harvested, it needs to be bent into an elongated U-shape to use as the frame for a cradleboard. In the photo above, Bonnie holds her U-shaped mesquite root, using peeled mesquite bark strips to hold the U in place. In Precious Cargo, California Indian Cradle Baskets and Childbirth Traditions, Brian Bibby’s history of baby baskets in Native California, he writes that examples of Kumeyaay cradles are rare in museum collections. A Mojave cradle in Precious Cargo features the U-shaped, or hairpin-shaped frame, made from mesquite roots. Another cradle by Pai Pai/Kumeyaay Margarita Castro looks very much like Bonnie’s U-shaped mesquite root frame, although mesquite is not listed as one of the materials.

It’s late November and the wash is dry, exceptionally dry according to Bonnie and Stan. They find that the roots of some of the mesquite trees are unusable for their cradleboards because they’re inflexible and brittle rather than supple and pliable. We walk up the wash a considerable distance to find suitable mesquite trees to harvest roots. We’ve lost Abe and Marta, and Stan and Bonnie talk about the necessity to stay in tune with the subtle and not so subtle changes in their ecosystems in order to gather native plants successfully.

After returning home, I do some research about the changes in the water table have resulted in the demise of mesquite groves in our region. Mark Jorgensen, senior ecologist with the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, reports that the lack of water is killing several different desert plants, including the honey mesquite:

“A mesquite forest is showing what many of us consider very high levels of mortality, and some of these individual trees that are dying are hundreds of years old. Even though it has among the deepest roots of any plant in the world, going down 100 feet or more, this is a sign that the ground-water basin is declining faster than the trees can keep up with it.”

I find it difficult to contemplate the death of the “magnificent mesquite” (just ordered the book by that name by Ken Rogers through interlibrary loan), the tree of life used for edible, medicinal, material, and ceremonial purposes for centuries, a species so beautifully adapted to arid regions, seemingly so tough, so tenacious.

In 1941, western writer J. Frank Dobie wrote that for him, the mesquite, as lovely and graceful as any tree in the world, is itself a poem. According to George Sudworth in Forest Trees of the Pacific Slope , mesquite is the:

“most interesting and important tree of the arid Southwest, where through the phenomenal growth of its huge deep roots it defies drought conditions which kill other trees. Development of its enormous roots appears to be out of all proportion to the often insignificant stems above ground.”

But in 2009, Dobie and Sudworth’s revered mesquite tree-poems may not be tough enough to survive the relentless prose of golf courses, citrus groves, and housing developments competing for the desert’s most precious resources. Sadly for us and all our relations, those tree/poems may have difficulty surviving global climate changes.

O.K. So it’s time to rally and plant a few mesquite trees in the garden. I just ordered three from Moosa Creek Nursery in Valley Center, CA, but because they’re a wholesale California native plant nursery, I’m need to purchase the plants through one of their distributors. In my area, that’s Ed S., who runs a 4-acre native plant nursery in Fallbrook (famous as the Avocado Capital of the World and site of It’s a Wonderful Life / Frank Capra’s 1,100 acre ranch, but infamous as the former white supremacy stronghold for Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance). I’ll rendevouz with Ed tomorrow afternoon to pick up the 3 gallon containers of  honey mesquites / Prosopsis glandulosa.

On the phone, Ed mentioned that he’d seen some honey mesquites growing in Temecula. I don’t think he’s referring to Texas Lil’s Mesquite Grill in Old Town, Temecula, or Duke’s Mesquite Broiler Restaurant. There’s a huge controversy, as there should be, about the deforestation of thousands of acres of mesquite trees in the Sonoran Desert to satisfy North America’s desire for mesquite-flavored meats, chicken and fish cooked with mesquite charcoal and mesquite wood chips. My Dad, who’s visiting me for the holidays, said he used to add mesquite chips to the grill to flavor his hamburgers.

According to some sustainably-minded foodies, adding mesquite pods to a grill will impart the same wonderful mesquite flavor and aroma as the charcoal and chips. In fact, the Southwest flavor will be sweeter and more intense, and the pods are a super-abundant, sustainable resource, unlike a deforested mesquite grove. So grill with the pods and you can help to conserve mesquite woodlands, preserve the deserts, and eat like a gourmand . . .

Mesquite drawing from Forest Trees of the Pacific Slope, 1908

I also ordered 3 bladderpods / Cleome isomeris, another edible native plant, drought tolerant, fire retardant, wildlife friendly, sustainable, beautiful . . .

gathering deergrass and sumac

Marta Rodriguez and Abe Sanchez gathering deergrass, Mulenbergia rigens. Marta is from San Jose de la Zorra, a Kumiai basketweaving village in Baja. Deergrass is used as the foundation for southern California coiled baskets. It’s a beautiful plant, and many native landscape designers now are using it extensively in their work.

Marta lives on the Santa Ysabel Reservation in San Diego County with her husband, Stan Rodriguez, a noted Kumeyaay bird singer. Bird songs are the traditional songs of southern California Indians. A recent film, Sing Birds, explores contemporary Cahuilla bird songs and singers.

Abe, a good friend, is featured throughout this blog. We went with Stan and Marta to learn how they gather mesquite roots near their reservation, and later to gather deergrass. Abe and I were both impressed by our tri-lingual hosts’ ability to converse with each other, seemingly effortlessly, in English, Spanish, and Kumeyaay.

Earlier in the day, Abe and Marta gathered sumac, or Rhus trilobata, on the Santa Ysabel Reservation across from Marta and Stan’s home. Sumac thickets needs to be coppiced or burned to produce more of the straight stems necessary for basket weaving. These thickets had not been coppiced, but Marta and Abe were able to gather a few suitable stems for their baskets.

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.

A designer insect? Bee? What a beautiful graphic yellow/black pattern. And no fear of those pesky glochids or spines!

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.