Native Foodways

Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods

Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Michael J. Zogry, Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Michael J. Zogry

• Verlag: SUNY Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482637
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Native American Studies

Native Foodways is the first scholarly collection of essays devoted exclusively to the interplay of Indigenous religious traditions and foodways in North America. Drawing on diverse methodologies, the essays discuss significant confluences in selected examples of these religious traditions and foodways, providing rich individual case studies informed by relevant historical, ethnographic, and comparative data. Many of the essays demonstrate how narrative and active elements of selected Indigenous North American religious traditions have provided templates for interactive relationships with particular animals and plants, rooted in detailed information about their local environments. In return, these animals and plants have provided these Native American communities with sustenance. Other essays provide analyses of additional contemporary and historical North American Indigenous foodways while also addressing issues of tradition and cultural change. Scholars and other readers interested in ecology, climate change, world hunger, colonization, religious studies, and cultural studies will find this book to be a valuable resource.

1

Balance and a Bean

Revitalizing Himdag through Traditional Farming and Sacred Knowledge

ANDREA MCCOMB SANCHEZ

In the summer of 2013, Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) released the inaugural issue of its magazine, Native Foodways. TOCA was formed in 1996 as an independent grassroots organization, “dedicated to creating a healthy, culturally vital and sustainable community on the Tohono O’odham Nation.”1 This magazine, one of the many projects TOCA was involved in, was about creating “a tool for sharing between and among all people committed to the revitalization of Native food, culture, and community.”2 Among those who contributed to this groundbreaking issue were author, activist, and environmentalist, Winona LaDuke; chef and founder of the Native American Culinary Association (NACA), Nephi Craig; and chef, author, and Native foods historian, Lois Ellen Frank. It contains articles on Hopi and Coast Salish food traditions, food sovereignty, prickly pear harvesting, and basketry. This magazine, writes Terrol Dew Johnson, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the magazine’s publisher and editor-at-large, “is about more than what we eat.”3 That is because food itself is about more than just eating. Food is connected to and in many cases central to songs, dances, ceremonies, and sacred narratives. It is about personal and communal wellness, family, strength, economics, and Native sovereignty and is inextricably linked to traditional culture, worldviews, and religious beliefs and practices. Food is sacred. The term foodways is used to incorporate these interconnected elements that are involved in the production and consumption of food.

The Tohono O’odham, the People of the Desert (Tohono is “Desert” and O’odham is “People”), call their traditional life ways the O’odham Himdag, loosely translated as “The People’s Way,” and elements of himdag such as ceremonies, sacred narratives, stories, songs, and the language itself “are directly rooted in the systems of food production.”4 The knowledge needed for food production is part of environmental knowledge more broadly and the Tohono O’odham’s collective knowledge of their environment makes up what can be labeled Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Indigenous Knowledge, or Native Science (hereafter referred to as TEK), which is an important part of the O’odham Himdag.5 This chapter will discuss Tohono O’odham foodways with particular attention paid to the tepary bean. It will also briefly address some of the ways these food systems were and continue to be threatened by colonialism and environmental change and some revitalization efforts within the Tohono O’odham Nation.

TEK refers to the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of communities that developed from direct experience and long-term observation of the local environment. According to Fikret Berkes, TEK is “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment.”6 This local, relational, and situational knowledge is a process rather than a collected body of content.7 Further, it is part of a way of life that has developed and is tied to a particular place, and where human beings are acknowledged as just one part of the greater whole; thus human beings need to be cognizant of the responsibilities that come with being human and work toward maintaining proper relationships not only within their own smaller human communities but with other-than-human animals, ancestors, spiritual beings, plant beings, water, and the land itself. Among indigenous people this has been passed on through songs, sacred narratives (also called myths), oral histories and stories, ceremonies, community laws, the structure of language, as well as through hunting, gathering, and agricultural practices. This demonstrates the interconnection of community identity, worldviews, religious beliefs and practices, and ecological values.

The Tohono O’odham Himdag, or Desert People’s Way, “consists of the culture, way of life, and values that are uniquely held and displayed by the Tohono O’odham people.”8 Himdag incorporates everything that makes the Tohono O’odham who they are as a distinct people; it refers to their individual and collective life’s journey and emphasizes living in balance and interacting correctly with the world. The people credit I’itoi with teaching them himdag; he is called Elder Brother and people look to him in times of need. According to one version of a sacred narrative I’itoi was one of the first three beings to be created along with Buzzard and Coyote, and in ancient times he called the Tohono O’odham from the underworld into the Sonoran desert.9 The stories of his life and exploits make up an important part of O’odham sacred narratives, as do the teachings found within. The O’odham Himdag, as taught by I’itoi, includes knowledge about the land and how to have correct relationships with the land, knowledge about medicinal plants, the seasons, basketry, correct community relations, games, language, the past and the future, songs, stories, healing, ceremonies, and foodways. All of these and more are integrated and interconnected and tied to the Sonoran desert, the Tohono O’odham traditional homeland.10 As Ruth Underhill wrote in her famous book Papago Woman, “it is the land that possesses the people. Its influence, in time, shapes their bodies, their language, even, a little, their religion.”11

The Tohono O’odham have lived in the Sonoran desert for countless generations, or as many would say since time immemorial, in a region that averages five to ten inches of rainfall per year. Throughout this time knowledge, practices, and belief systems emerged out of their experiences and relationships with this land, with water, with all the different beings that share the desert, and with each other. One example of this, and an example of TEK, is the traditional calendar that is based around descriptions of temperature, rainfall, and the activities of plants and animals. This calendar is not fixed and the Tohono O’odham New Year begins roughly in late June or July with the ripening and harvest of bahidaj, red saguaro fruit located at the top of the tall cactus, and the arrival of the monsoon rains. The end of the previous year is marked by the ripening of the bahidaj and is called Ha:ṣañ Ba:k Maṣad, Saguaro Fruit Ripening Moon. Once the bahidaj is harvested, the new year begins with the coming of the monsoon rains, which start the next phase called Jukiabig Maṣad or Big Rains Moon. Jukiabig Maṣad is followed by Sopol’ Eṣabig Maṣad (Short Planting Moon), Wasai Gakidag Maṣad (Dry Grass Moon), I’al Ju:pig Maṣad (Small Rains Moon), S-ke:g S-he:pijig Maṣad (Pleasant Cold Moon), Ge’e S-he:pijig Maṣad (Big Cold Moon), Gakimdag Maṣad (Animals Loose Their Fat Moon), U:walig Maṣad (Deer Mating Moon), Ce:dagi Maṣad (Green Moon), Uam Maṣad (Yellow Moon), U’us Wihogdag Maṣad (Mesquite Bean Harvest Moon), and finally back to Ha:ṣañ Ba:k Maṣad (Saguaro Fruit Ripening Moon).12 As will be discussed later, the ceremonial activities of the people during Saguaro Fruit Ripening Moon and into Big Rains Moon are thought to be responsible for bringing the rains; and rain is essential for agriculture within the Tohono O’odham homelands.

Like many indigenous people of the southwest the Tohono O’odham traditionally relied on a combination of harvesting wild foods, hunting, and farming. The Tohono O’odham are typically distinguished historically from their O’odham neighbors, the Akimel O’odham and the Hia C-ed O’odham, by their two-village system with winter villages located near mountains and springs where people relied on hunting and gathering, and their summer villages located near the flood plains for planting.13 And like many other Native American groups the most important of their crops were the three sisters: maize, beans, and squash. While corn or maize was one of their most important crops, it was rivaled by a bean commonly called the tepary bean. This name refers to Phaseolus acutifolius, little brown, white, red, yellow, and black colored beans grown throughout the southwestern United States and northern Mexico since pre-Columbian times. The tepary bean is especially important to the Tohono O’odham because of its unique tolerance to drought.14 In fact, the tepary bean is one of the most heat- and drought-tolerant crops in the world, along with having the highest protein content of any bean. The name “tepary” is thought by some to come from the Opata word tepar.15 Other scholars argue that the word “tepary” comes from the Tohono O’odham phrase t’bawĭ (or t’pawi) “it’s a bean.”16 The tepary bean, originally a wild plant, is particularly suited to the Sonoran Desert not only because of its tolerance to drought, in fact too much water will actually inhibit the production of the beans, but because of its ability to produce both pods and pollen in heat that consistently averages above 105 degrees during the growing season.17 Whether the word tepary derives from the Opata or the Tohono O’odham language, since before Spanish colonial times the bean itself has been most closely linked to the Tohono O’odham, who call the bean bawĭ (also spelled pawi). The two main varieties cultivated by the Tohono O’odham were and continue to be the brown wepegi bawĭ, and the white tota bawĭ.

Further connecting the tepary bean to the Tohono O’odham is its link to the name given them by the Spanish, “Papago.” The designation Papago is thought to be derived from the Pima language, and could be the Spanish transliteration of the phrase papawi o’otam, “tepary bean people,” or from a condensation of papavi kuadam, “tepary bean eaters,” or from the phrase papawi’koa, which means “eating tepary beans.”18 Whatever the origination of the name “Papago,” which was officially rejected and replaced by their name for themselves in 1986, the association between the Tohono O’odham and the tepary bean is insinuated within this moniker.

Because of the aridity of the region tepary beans were historically planted only during monsoon season, which is approximately late June through September. For the remainder of the year the people gathered cholla buds and prickly pear fruit, mesquite bean pods a...