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The Desert People: Arizona's Tohono O'odham Harvest the Giant Cactus
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10726 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
2,832 Words |
| Author
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Carle Hodge
Carle Hodge, a veteran science writer who lives in Phoenix,
has written extensively about both prehistoric and modern
Native Americans. |
Stones turn into hot plates as the white-hot southern Arizona sun sends the temperature sizzling past 90 degrees early on a June morning. Only the scampering of the occasional lizard and the harsh squeal of a black-backed Harris' hawk pierce the stillness of the summer desert. Undaunted, a small band of women and children gingerly thread their way through a rugged terrain dotted by huge saguaros, giant cacti that soar forty feet or more into the air. The people have lashed together two strips of saguaro rib to form a long pole with which they nudge juicy, red fruit from the plants' trunks and "arms." They drop their bounty into tin buckets.
For generations, the Tohno O'odham Indians have harvested the yield of Carnegiea gigantean. Even today they continue an annual custom t hat blends into the shadows of antiquity. Stella Tucker, forty-five, cannot remember when her grandmother, Juanita Ahill, now eighty-one, first took her along. Nor can Ahill recall her first such foray. But each June, they return to this expanse of desert near Tucson now known as Saguaro National Monument.
A bone-dry domain
Saguaros (pronounced suh-WAR-ohs), hallmark of the sun-dried Southwest, stand tall across northwestern Mexico and the Arizona lowlands. A scant few stands are found across the Colorado River in California. They survive 150 years in a land where rainfall averages less than ten inches a year. The saguaro's shallow roots capture even modest amounts of moisture, and its green, waxen skin inhibits loss by evaporation. During the summer rains, accordionlike pleats in the plant's spiny skin permit it to expand and thus store more water.
In late May or early June, saguaros burst forth with creamy white, chalicelike blooms. Pollination by birds, bats, and bees transforms the flowers into scarlet fruits the size of small plums. Just as vegetation adjusted to this challenging environment, so did early humans. The Tohono O'odham learned by necessity to abide in symbiosis with the flora at hand and long ago realized that the fruiting presages the advent of summer rains.
The first inhabitants to exploit the saguaro were the Hohokam, a prehistoric people who ruled this region from about the time of Jesus until approximately A.D. 1400. They constructed great cities and an elaborate system of irrigation canals that spider webbed across hundreds of miles. They also turned saguaro wine into an acid they used to etch figures onto seashells, a technique European
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