Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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O'odham encouraged to grow crops rooted in their traditions
By Anne Minard ARIZONA DAILY STAR July 5, 2005
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/allheadlines/82682.php


In the Tohono O'odham tradition, the Milky Way, or to:mog (toe'-oe-mawg),
is made of tepary beans, scattered across the sky by Coyote. Coyote wasn't
a farmer. He stole the beans from the people and spilled them as he ran
away.
 
Terrol Johnson, an O'odham tribal member, doesn't mind sharing this taste
of his normally secret cultural heritage because it reminds his people of
their desert farming roots. It also lends credence to the efforts of his
non-tribal organization, Tohono O'odham Community Action, to revitalize
that farming tradition by growing tepary beans and other traditional crops.
 
The Tohono O'odham Tribe was one of the few that was not forced off its
aboriginal lands when white cultures began settling the United States.
Census records show the tribe produced nearly 2 million pounds of tepary
beans a year well into the 1930s.
 
That began to change early in the 20th century as children went to boarding
schools and men were spirited off to war. The traditional farms were too
much work for the women who remained, Johnson says. When the men returned,
there were new distractions; instead of returning to their own farms, many
opted to work in the new settlers' cotton fields.
 
For the better part of the 20th century, mesquite trees crowded out the
traditional rows. The old berms, ditches and well-tended contours, which
once guided summer storms to food crops, crumbled.
 
Traditions lost and found
 
By the time Johnson was growing up, the native fare like brown and white
tepary beans, O'odham squash and O'odham 60-day corn were special treats
prepared by the elders for holiday feasts. But as staples, the foods had
all but winked out of existence.
 
Tribal Chairwoman Vivian Juan-Saunders says she realized that when she
taught at the Tohono O'odham Community College and couldn't give away a
dozen large squash.
 
After a week of seeing few takers, she figured it out. "People didn't know
how to cook them. We've relied on fast foods and foods you buy in the
store."
 
In response, she introduced a class at the college to teach students how to
prepare squash and other traditional foods.
 
That class is no longer offered. But Johnson, his co-director Tristan
Reader and his brother Noland - a Tucson surveyor turned farm manager -
have their own solution.
 
In 2002, on 4 acres of traditional farmland once owned by the Johnson
brothers' grandfather near the remote village of Cowlic, the group began
growing traditional low-water-use crops using a historic method called
ak-chin, which relies entirely on water from the summer rains.
 
Because their grandfather had died, the brothers took their grandmother to
the old farm and she pointed out where the fields used to be. They knew
they were on the right track when they started seeing old pieces of farm
equipment. Then, when Noland Johnson started digging one of his first
irrigation ditches, he found the dirt was soft there - because he was
following one of his grandfather's old canals.
 
Noland Johnson says that first year was more trial than error, as he tried
to apply his theoretical knowledge to the practical demands of the land. He
taught himself how to dam the washes with brush when the rains came, and he
learned how to guide the seasonal floods across the subtle contours.
 
Regrowing a market
 
In addition to the Cowlic farm, Community Action leased 18 acres the next
year from the tribal Farming Authority at Papago Farms. Last year that
tract expanded to 48 acres, which produced 100,000 pounds of native tepary
beans, traditional melons, and squash. This year, with 91 acres, they hope
to double that yield.
 
At Papago Farms, they augment nature's rains with a decades-old diesel
pump. It sends water gushing into a concrete channel as the needle on an
output gauge swings wildly between 800 and 950 gallons a minute. The water
spills into the farm's furrows, mimicking the monsoonal downpours that
would saturate the land and then vanish. Three, four times a year is all
this agriculture needs.
 
"It can survive in the desert," Terrol Johnson says, "because it was meant
to."
 
For him, the farming efforts are about much more than making things grow.
 
The native foods are touted as healthful alternatives to the fatty, starchy
staples that have earned the Tohono O'odham the distinction of being the
most diabetes-afflicted culture in the world, according to statistics
frequently cited by Johnson's group.
 
The foods are packaged and met with healthy demand in the local grocery
store, where Community Action offers them at low prices to tribal members.
The group is also working to make them available through the Nation's WIC
and Food Stamp programs. Meanwhile, they're marketing the foods at higher
prices through Heritage Foods, a brand name with a presence in the
country's trendiest health-food stores.
 
Johnson hopes the tribe will continue to embrace the native foods for their
health values as well as their long-standing roles in Tohono O'odham
culture.
 
"With all the foods we're growing," he says, "there's a connection with the
language, and the stories, and the songs."
 
? Contact reporter Anne Minard at 434-4086 or at aminard@azstarnet.com.
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Relevant Link:

Tohono O'odham Community Action - http://www.tocaonline.org