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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
  • Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 12:11:41 -0600


Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
by Gary Paul Nabhan, University of Arizona Press, 2002
http://www.ecobooks.com/books/endure.htm

In a series of beautifully written essays about Native American agriculture
and wild plant conservation, Gary Paul Nabhan addresses the importance of
conserving wild plants, the difficulties Native American peoples have had
in preserving their agricultural traditions and current wild plant
conservation efforts in North America.
Praise for Enduring Seeds

"A rich, complex book--wise, personal, and beautifully written." --Sierra.

"A gem of a book: scientifically sound, ethical, full of interesting and
timely information about one of the paramount yet neglected environmental
issues of our time." -- Garden.

"Gary Nabhan . . . is a seer and celebrant of the cultivated plant world
before its defilement by modern agriculture. His interests and insights are
as diverse as the wild seeds he gathers. Not only does he write beautifully
about what he knows, he also goes out into the fields of native peoples
collecting and conserving indigenous seeds, returning them to communities
from which they have been lost. In words and actions, Nabhan aims to
preserve no less than the 'remaining riches of the living world' ."
--Gretel Ehrlich.
Quotes from Enduring Seeds

"In the oldest, most stable of the Native American farming villages, plant
species that are otherwise rare or at the limits of their ranges have
gradually accumulated. Mixed crop fields or fallow ones, hedges, ditches,
dooryard gardens, and pastures as well as ungrazed scrublands--all offer
habitats to an astonishing variety of plants and animals. As Jan Alcorn has
shown among the Huastec Maya, the spatial heterogeneity of habitats created
by native land management fosters both intraspecific and interspecific
diversity."

"[E]cologist [David] Ehrenfeld argues that . . .'the presence of people may
enhance the species richness of the area, rather than exert the negative
effect that is more familiar to us.' "

"Some native farmers don't necessarily plant the same kind of corn every
season, but vary their selection depending upon the weather. By having
caches of other seedstocks for particular weather conditions, farmers can
hedge their bets. Anthropologist Tim Dunnigan has told me of this kind of
crop switching among Mexico's Mountain Pima. They keep several varieties of
maize on hand, including a quick-maturing corn in case spring drought
should delay planting, thus shortening the growing season. Other Mountain
Pima maize varieties can be planted earlier in cool, wet springs, but need
five months to mature."
. . .

" 'The green of those Pima fields spread along the river for many miles in
the old days,' recalled the River Pima leader, George Webb. But that was in
the time 'when there was plenty of water. Now the river is an empty bed
full of sand. . . . Where everything used to be green, there were acres of
dust, miles of dust, and the Pima Indians were suddenly, desperately poor.'
"

" During [the last] three centuries, the Pima have lost at least seven crop
species that were introduced to the Southwest prehistorically. Seven native
varieties of five New World species survive precariously today in the
dooryard gardens and small fields of the River Pima: sixty-day corn, white
and brown teparies, mottled limas, narrow-seeded bottlegourds, and striped
cushaw squash."

" In Once a River, Amadeo Rea has recorded twenty-nine species of birds
that were extirpated in Pima country over the last century, and he counts
another dozen bird species that dramatically declined because of habitat
deterioration there. Fish, like the humpbacks, and river-loving mammals
were left high and dry."

" Without these resources, the life of the [River Pima] changed radically
over the last one hundred twenty years."

" [I]n 1867 . . . Jack Swilling . . . organized his Anglo neighbors to
divert water out of the Salt River above the Pima villages. . . .
Ethnohistorian Edward Spicer wrote that 'By 1887 the irrigation canal
constructed to take water out of the Gila River utilized the whole flow. No
water reached any of the Pima fields downstream."

" In 1901, Frank Russell claimed that there was so little cotton that there
was not enough in Pima villages to finish making even one piece of cloth on
a small loom. He added that 'the Pimas no longer spin and weave; the art is
dying with the passing of the older generation.' "

" The last remaining grain amaranth apparently perished between 1870 and
1890. Varieties of common beans, squashes, and a small grain called
kof--perhaps a relic goosefoot surviving from prehistoric times--ceased to
exist even in hand- watered kitchen gardens. Foods that had been mentioned
in the Pima creation myth were never again grown, prepared, or eaten after
1900."

" From 1898 to 1904, droughts and upstream diversion of water by Anglos
kept the Pima from producing any crops at all. Groundwater pumping was soon
initiated. It quickly depleted remaining springs and seeps near farmlands.
Mesquite and cottonwood forests died as the water table dropped below the
reach of their roots."

" Men such as George Webb were forced out of farming in the 1930s due to
lack of irrigation water, even though the San Carlos Irrigation Project
promised them a return to better days. 'When the dam was completed there
would be plenty of water,' Webb remembered. ' And there was. For about five
years. Then the water began to run short again. After another five years,
it stopped altogether.' "
. . .

"How much of [the USDA's] 'Native American farming' effort draws upon crop
resources traditionally utilized by the cultures involved? Neither the USDA
nor the BIA bureaucrats track the actual use of native crops. To be sure,
these agencies have hardly ever promoted those resources either."

" In a meeting with USDA officials, Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange
pointed out why so many of our plant genetic resources are indeed imported
from developing countries: 'There has never been a systematic, large- scale
search for [crop] plants within the United States; the USDA has always done
its explorations outside the U.S.' Further, USDA policy claims that in situ
conservation of crops--which could be done by providing incentives to
native farmers to keep growing their remaining traditional varieties-- is
too unstable, risky, and ineffective, and therefore beyond the scope of its
plant preservation concerns.

" The only real policy that our Department of Agriculture has for the
native crop legacy of our country is a policy of neglect. Fortunately,
tribal governments no longer believe fatalistically that this must be their
policy as well. Among the Iroquois, the Sioux, the Mississippi band of the
Anishabey, San Juan Pueblo, the Winnebago, the Tohono O'odham, the Navajo,
and other tribes, there have emerged community or tribal projects to
conserve and revive native crops as cottage industries for their
rural-based tribal members."
Table of Contents of Enduring Seeds

1. The Flowering of Diversity
2. Diversity Lost: The Wet and the Dry Tropics
3. Fields Infused with Wildness
4. Invisible Erosion: The Rise and Fall of Native Farming
5. A Spirit Earthly Enough: Locally Adapted Crops and Persistent
Cultures
6. New and Old Ways of Saving: Botanical Gardens, Seed Banks, Heritage
Farms, and Biosphere Reserves
7. Wild-Rice: The Endangered, the Sacred, and the Tamed
8. The Exile and the Holy Anomaly: Wild American Sunflowers
9. Lost Gourds and Spend Soils on the Shores of Okeechobee
10. Drowning in a Shallow Gene Pool: The Factory Turkey
11. Harvest Time: Northern Plains Agricultural Change
12. Turning Foxholes into Compost Heaps, Shooting Ranges into
Shelterbelts





  • [Livingontheland] Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation, TradingPostPaul, 08/04/2006

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