Message #432:
From: AzTeC SW Archaeology SIG
To:   "'Matthias Giessler'" 
Subject: Sonoran Desert as Bountiful/Putting History and Culture Back into Nature
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 1996 20:29:45 -0700 
Encoding: MIME-Version: 1.0


The latest on-line edition of Sierra: The Magazine of the Sierra Club
contains articles about Native Americans.  A lot of facts and figures are 
presented, some without attribution. The second attachment says in part:

"... Some Western intellectuals, in reaction to the romanticization of
indigenous peoples, have emphasized the alleged destructive impacts of
Paleolithic hunters, such as the megafauna extinctions of the last Ice
Age, while refusing to accept Native peoples as competent
conservationists and land stewards.  Unheard in the ruckus are Native
peoples themselves. Few Western intellectuals have lived or worked in
traditional, as opposed to assimilated, Indian communities. Few resource
managers or environmentalists have read the wealth of documentation in
ethnohistory and ethnography of indigenous land stewardship and
conservation available in libraries and archives (most still residing in
raw field notes) or contained within the oral tradition still passed
from generation to generation by elders in their own languages.  As long
as Native peoples are not heard, non-Native audiences will continue to
deal in caricatures. To begin to understand the Native perspective, it's
important to consider some often-overlooked facts. For example: 
Anthropologists have grossly underestimated both prehistoric indigenous
populations and the length of time this hemisphere has been
occupied--promoting the myth of an empty  continent, ready for
settlement.  Some indigenous cultures (Aztec, perhaps Mayan and Anasazi)
may have made serious environmental mistakes. But what about the
others?..."  

Many of you have e-mail but no graphical browser, so see two excerpts
below.   -- SASIG Ed.



http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199611/ndfood1.html	

FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
That Old Time Nutrition	by Jane Zastaury
Few people think of the Sonoran Desert as bountiful. The sun of southern
Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, is unrelenting, and apart from the
odd summer monsoon and an inch or two of rain in midwinter, water is
scarce. Yet the Sonoran has supplied Native peoples with sustenance for
thousands of years. Until the 1940s, the Tohono O'odham (formerly known
as the Papago) and their cousins the Pima relied on foraged wild foods
like mesquite pods, cactus fruit, and chiles for the bulk of their diet,
with the rest coming from cultivated indigenous crops like corn, beans,
and squash. Upon entering the American cash economy, however, the
O'odham abandoned their agrarian heritage. Wild foods were replaced by
processed junk, and the O'odham and Pima soon developed
nutrition-related health problems--obesity, high blood pressure, and one
of the highest rates of Type II diabetes in the world. In the early
1980s, the Tucson branch of the nutrition program Meals for Millions set
out to help the O'odham supplement their diet with homegrown vegetables
like broccoli and tomatoes. While politely accepting the donated
vegetables, the O'odham began asking for the seeds of foods they
remembered from childhood: yellow-fleshed watermelon, striped
sunflowers, fast-ripening corn, the fiery chiles called
chiltepines--varieties that had all but died out after commercial foods
became available. The hunt for the heirloom varieties began. Word spread
to other reservations in and around Arizona; seeds that had been lost in
one area were found in another, and small pockets of cultivable wild
plants, such as chiles, were rediscovered in hidden canyons and valleys.
Native Seeds/SEARCH (Southwest Endangered Arid Lands Resources
Clearinghouse) was born.  Once large numbers of O'odham began to return
to a traditional diet, the health benefits afforded by indigenous crops
became clear. Take the prickly pear, a common cactus. Its tender young
paddles (nopalitos) are cooked with onions and chiles, while its fruit
(tuna) is made into a sugary candy. Long a staple of indigenous peoples
in Mexico, it had been largely relegated to ornamental status in the
desert Southwest. But the O'odham found that prickly pear, filled with
vitamins, minerals, and soluble fiber, is among the most healthful
plants a diabetic can eat.  Fiber, the plant's way of absorbing and
conserving water, is what makes desert plants a good choice. High-fiber
foods slow the digestion and absorption of sugars in the body, and thus
help to regulate blood glucose levels. Plant-based diets also help
reduce cholesterol, a concern for non-insulin-dependent diabetics, who
are generally overweight and at high risk for coronary heart disease.
Among the O'odham, a diet high in desert plants has been found to
radically slow and sometimes even reverse Type II diabetes, obesity, and
high cholesterol. 
The fiber in some desert plants is found in the form of mucilage, a seed
coating that becomes gelatinous when combined with liquid. Some
mucilaginous seeds, such as chia, were traditionally used to make a
refreshing drink, while plantago (also known as psyllium seed) provides
the active ingredient in the fiber supplement Metamucil. Tepary beans,
another desert food, are higher in protein than soybeans. And mesquite
meal is sweet and nutritious; when used in baking, it partially
substitutes for wheat flour, while also reducing the amount of sugar
needed.  Native Seeds/SEARCH is now extending to other indigenous
communities along the U.S./Mexico border. Its efforts go beyond
demonstrating the health benefits of native foods: it also hopes to show
that a return to the foods of the ancestors can be a source of
self-sufficiency and pride.  Jane Zastaury is non-native to Tucson,
where she enjoys growing native plants almost as much as eating them.
Native desert seed packets are available from Native Seeds/SEARCH free
to Native Americans and, for a nominal cost, to other interested
gardeners. Flours, teas, herbs, and spices are also available. Send $1
for a catalog to Native Seeds/SEARCH at 2509 N. Campbell Ave., #325,
Tucson, AZ 85719.


http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199611/ndmart1.html 	

First People,
Firsthand Knowledge	by Dennis Martinez
Native people have taken care of the natural landscape for thousands of
years. If we lose their wisdom, we lose the land as well.  White images
of Indians have always changed with the social and intellectual climate.
Modern environmentalists have drawn inspiration from the
noble savage who "walked lightly on the land," failing to appreciate the
high degree of Indian influence on what they see as a "pristine"
environment. Some Western intellectuals, in reaction to the
romanticization of indigenous peoples, have emphasized the alleged
destructive impacts of Paleolithic hunters, such as the megafauna
extinctions of the last Ice Age, while refusing to accept Native peoples
as competent conservationists and land stewards.  Unheard in the ruckus
are Native peoples themselves. Few Western intellectuals have lived or
worked in traditional, as opposed to assimilated, Indian communities.
Few resource managers or environmentalists have read the wealth of
documentation in ethnohistory and ethnography of indigenous land
stewardship and conservation available in libraries and archives (most
still residing in raw field notes) or contained within the oral
tradition still passed from generation to generation by elders in their
own languages.  As long as Native peoples are not heard, non-Native
audiences will continue to deal in caricatures. To begin to understand
the Native perspective, it's important to consider some often-
overlooked facts. For example:  Anthropologists have grossly
underestimated both prehistoric indigenous populations and the length of
time this hemisphere has been occupied--promoting the myth of an empty 
continent, ready for settlement.  Some indigenous cultures (Aztec,
perhaps Mayan and Anasazi) may have made serious environmental mistakes.
But what about the others? Where mistakes were made (and generations
punished) lessons were learned for the future. Indigenous peoples differ
tremendously in cultural practices and cosmology, yet their conservation
ethics (stewardship practices, hunting and  gathering limits, taboos,
ceremonies of world renewal, thanksgivings, and stories) are nearly
universal in their understanding of a sustainable land/culture
relationship.  What follows is adapted from a talk I gave at the Sixth
Annual Bioneers Conference, held in San Francisco in 1994, where I
discussed the role of Native Americans in shaping the biodiversity of
North America. --Dennis Martinez.  The elders say that if you don't take
care of the plants and talk to them and relate to them, they get lonely
and go away. To the sophisticated and cynical modern mind that seems
like a quaint belief, yet there is a profound truth in it. If you take
care of the plants and animals, they will come back again next year to
give you food or medicine or shelter or clothing. It's a very simple
truth, yet it has been overlooked by most of the environmental movement.
It worked for tens of thousands of years and still works in many remote
Indian communities scattered throughout Canada, the United States and
Mexico, in Latin America, and among indigenous peoples globally.  If you
did something bad to the plants and animals, their spirits would return
to the spirit villages and report what you did. That's how Indian
children were instructed. This kind of restraint and respect was built
into every Indian worldview--and it still exists. Indigenous ethics had
spiritual teeth, and entailed a high degree of personal responsibility
for the state of the environment. To disregard these ethics was to
starve or to face personal calamity or genetic extinction. Yet this
tradition of caregiving is fading away, because indigenous peoples were
separated from their land base. The old-time traditionals are beginning
to lose out to nearly assimilated "progressives" willing to sell their
children's birthright for short-term profit. But land health is a
prerequisite for cultural survival, and cultural survival is a
prerequisite for land health. Support traditional people and you support
conservation. Support reserved treaty rights and co-management on public
lands ceded by treaty and you will support the environment.  By every
early pioneer account, biodiversity in this hemisphere was so incredible
as to be likened to the Garden of Eden. Yet when I talk like this, red
flags go up among academics. They say I'm romanticizing the past,
looking backward when I should be looking forward. But systems analysis
and chaos theory today show us what quantum mechanics showed us back in
the 1920s: that the ability of human beings to predict trends in matter
or living organisms is severely limited. That is a humbling thought. And
we need humbling thoughts. We are infatuated with our intellectual
abilities and capacities to predict and analyze, when what we need is to
learn to listen and to observe over time in one place, something
indigenous peoples--indeed the ancestors of everyone here--once did. And
they survived a long time. Survivability is the acid test of cultural
adaptability. That part of the indigenous past that is still retrievable
is a better guide for the future than limited computer modeling
(although computers are a useful tool up to a point).  Before computers,
good scientists were good observers, like the old-time general
naturalist who spent a lifetime in the forest in one place and saw what
nature was actually like. Book learning was not imposed on the raw flux
of natural complexity. Today, transects, plots, and computer simulation
have taken the place of the blank mind waiting patiently to be slowly
filled with firsthand knowledge. There is no substitute for experience
in a place and there is no substitute for the collective experience of
Native peoples over vast stretches of time. Listening and learning is
what made Native Americans into wise environmental managers. Yet this
wisdom is rarely recognized. How many people know that Indian women in
the San Francisco Bay Area were prescription-fire experts? How many
people know that the forest structure, function, composition, and
quality of habitat of areas like Yosemite were at least partly
determined through indigenous selective harvesting and fire, through
working with and assisting natural processes?  When settlers came over
the Oregon Trail, they thought that Indians did nothing to enhance the
productive capabilities of the land. This was their primary
justification for genocide. Because Indians roamed wide spaces, the
newcomers automatically assumed that Indian people were maybe noble, but
certainly didn't count much in the landscape.  Today, nothing has
changed. Indians are given token appreciation by people interested in
their ceremonies and their ways, and by environmental groups desiring a
charismatic morning prayer, but there is no real support for their
cultural survival. And little credence is given to the impact that the
Indian people have had on the very structure and composition of the
landscape.  The heritage of Indian people is the heritage of everyone.
There are 300 million indigenous peoples in the world. They are
land-based and have their traditional ways fairly intact, and they hold
the collective heritage of every human on Earth. We're talking about
perhaps 120,000 years of human coevolution with the natural world.  If
you are looking for models of this relation of Indians to the landscape,
and its relevance to the health of the environment, they're not too far
away. Recently I was at Walpole Island Reserve, which is Ottawa,
Potawatomi, and Anishinabe (Ojibwe) in southern Ontario on Lake St.
Claire. They have 5,500 acres of tallgrass prairie and oak savannah that
they have never stopped burning. Every one of Ontario's 65 endangered
plants is there in quantity. In less than nine square miles you have
acres of rare blazing star and big bluestem eight, nine, ten feet high.
Botanists can't believe the diversity there, all because of burning.
Although little reported in the media, there are thousands of similar
examples of sustainable land practices throughout the globe. We can't
turn the clock back and restore all the details of the ecosystems we've
lost. What restorationists do is look at recovering the key features of
ecosystem structure, composition, and function. A historical reference
ecosystem can be modified as changed conditions require by resorting to
Western ecological sciences. But the plants that grew up with fire and
selective harvesting have genetic memories that are far wiser than those
of any intellectual. And they are activated when they approach the right
intensity, seasonality, duration, and return-interval of the fires that
were set by Indian women in the fall or the spring. That is why
restorationists ought to begin with the historical reference
ecosystem--the indigenous managed landscape--and go as far as they can
go. Where I live in southwestern Oregon there is now almost no water in
the creeks that once ran all year. We have a forest that burns
repeatedly and catastrophically, which is not good for the soil. The
same goes for slash burning following clearcutting. It has to be the
right kind of fire--the fire that the Indian women set. This is what the
plants understand in the coevolutionary process between those natural
communities and fire. As the elders say, it's what will keep plants from
going away.  Native cultures don't separate themselves from these
communities. We cannot protect the land unless we have the capacity,
economically and spiritually, to be caregivers. That is fundamental.
There is no Indian word for "wilderness" because there never was a
wilderness. When I talk about "natural community," I mean our relatives,
the plants and animals--the diversity of life, which includes us humans
as well. The environmental movement has posed the question in typically
Western terms, as either/or, dividing the world into natural and human:
either we are biocentric or we're anthropocentric. I've coined the word
kin-centric. We are all related, and if we take care of our relatives,
they will take care of us. That's why native cultures have ceremonies to
renew the world, because we use the world up. We take personal and
collective responsibility for the earth's welfare. The Indian ancestor
spirits are still here, which is the best proof we have that this land
is still healthy enough to be restored. When those spirits go away, the
spirit of the land will be dead.  The modern mind is uneasy with talk of
spirits. But the rendering of nature dead, without spirits, is why the
modern world has lost respect. By putting history and culture back into
nature, we become rooted in a real past. We link up spiritually with
thousands of years of our own past. Euro-Americans are really very new
to this hemisphere. If spiritual healing does not occur between the
former longtime inhabitants and the new ones--and that includes a
willingness to learn from Native peoples about ecology and land
stewardship--the land and ancestor spirits will vomit us all from the
land. Together we must forge a worldview that doesn't deny the past, but
builds on it, forging a synthesis between the old and new, between
Western science and traditional environmental knowledge.  If we don't
change our ways of agriculture the wild lands will go away. That is
clear. And it's the same if we don't change the way we treat people in
terms of economic and social justice. The campesinos, the workers,
tribal people, the people affected by NAFTA in Chiapas--these are people
of place that have local traditional knowledge, and they see no need to
be part of the new world order.  We need to work with local people. One
of the things we're trying to do in Oregon is develop a Mexican and
Indian cooperative so that they don't get squeezed out by large
reforestation contractors. Every tax law and regulation in Oregon favors
big multinational corporations and excludes local people as well as
responsible stewardship. We need to rethink market economics so that
every time we use the forest for timber and non-timber products we
further conservation and restoration. Economics must follow ecology.
When Indian women burned the land, not only did they have straight
basketshoots, medicine, food and game, but the land benefited at the
same time.  Natives took care of the landscape, and it took care of them
in return. But if the people came back in the flesh today who lived here
100 years ago, they would be totally lost. They would not know where
they were, and the land would look trashy and uncared for, a wasteland.
Yet their spirits are still here, and they are tired of waiting.  Dennis
Martinez, Chicano and O'odham, is an ecosystem restorationist, contract
seed collector, vegetation surveyor and the founder of the
Indigenous Peoples' Restoration Network (IPRN).  Contact the IPRN at 785
Barton Rd., Glendale, OR 97442; (541) 832-2273.