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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.