BY CARRIE CALISAY CANNON
During the Hualapai Wars, from 1866 to 1869, the U.S. Cavalry struggled to track down Hualapai fighters. Hualapai Chief Cherum was aware that the cavalry greatly outnumbered the Hualapai, were better mounted, and supplied with far greater munitions.
With skill and ingenuity, he traded goods acquired from the Pueblos to the Mojave in exchange for horses, which were then traded to the Southern Paiute in exchange for guns and ammunition that the Paiute had attained from Mormon settlers.
Cherum’s strategic approach helped the Hualapai fight intelligently and effectively, until the cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel Price, took aim at the Hualapai’s food reserves.
One might consider what bison were to the Great Plains tribes, piñon pines were to the Colorado Plateau tribes. In the Hualapai origin narrative, as recorded by anthropologists in 1929, Judaba:h, known as Younger Brother, instructs the peoples of the Earth on the foods they are to have and how they are to be prepared. The first four plants given to the Hualapai in order of significance include: piñon and juniper trees, banana yucca, mescal agave, and prickly pear. The piñon and juniper are treated as one, highlighting the Indigenous understanding of this important and interconnected natural resource.
Piñon and juniper forests cover about 15% of the Southwestern states and include many understory shrubs, bushes, cacti, wildflowers, and annual and perennial grasses that provide habitat for mammals, birds, insects, and humans.
Species of juniper typically live to be 350 to 700 years old, though some junipers live much longer. Piñons, which can take up to 100 years before ever producing high nut yields for good seed crops, typically live 350 to 450 years but can survive up to 1,000 years in some cases.
Cattle grazing, fire suppression, persistent drought, climate change, and habitat loss due to clearing for homes as cities continue to expand and sprawl in the West, have all changed the piñon and juniper forests we see today.
Savanna-like piñon and juniper forests are popular with ranchers, since their understory supports good forage for cattle. But overgrazing can change these forests, with shrubs and trees edging out grasses. To reverse this trend, land managers sometimes resort to destructive measures, including clearcutting piñon and juniper and even mulching and spiking trees, in an attempt to open up space for grasslands to better feed cattle.
Suppressing natural, low-intensity wildfires that thin forests has also negatively impacted piñon and juniper forests, leading to crown fires burning at higher intensity due to the buildup and density of fuels. These devastating fires so severely scar the landscape that they make regeneration and recovery hard. Light-burning ground fires were historically a natural process on the landscape and benefited forest health, clearing out undergrowth and making space for more grasses. When high-intensity fires burn, exotic species like tansy mustard, horehound, knapweed, cheat grass, various non-native thistles, and spreading wallflower often are the first plants to get a foothold in the aftermath.
Persistent drought along with climate change also strain these forests. Just as stress can weaken the human immune system, climate stress can weaken trees, making them more susceptible to die-offs from beetle invasions, which trees might normally be able to survive if they were not dealing with the compounded stress of drought.
But it’s not just the trees that are in trouble. When Hualapai tribal elders share their knowledge of piñon and juniper forests with tribal youth, they say, "Look to the forest in the fall, and if the piñon jays are in abundance, it will be a good year to harvest."
Yet piñon jay numbers have been declining over the past 50 years. Prolonged drought, wildfires that burn hotter, climate change, and land management practices, which eliminate forest cover to feed cattle, can mean less habitat for birds like the piñon jay that rely on these forests for nesting, food, and habitat. The forests need this social blue bird, whose nut-stashing is essentially responsible for planting the next generation of trees that will become future forests.
A piñon jay in flight. CHRISTINA M. SELBY
Recent research indicates piñon jays have declined as much as 80% and are one of the most rapidly declining birds in North America. This has led to a petition for review to try to get the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the piñon jay as a threatened or endangered species. When considering that piñon and juniper forests encompass as many as 75,000 square miles across the Western states, losing a species that is intimately tied to that forest’s regeneration is no small concern.
Hualapai tribal members gather piñon-nut-filled cones in September. Piñon nuts are eaten raw or roasted, or made into nut butter, soup, or formed into cakes, just like they were in Chief Cherum’s time. In 1871 after years of war with the U.S. Cavalry, the Hualapai were defeated and rounded up on a temporary reservation. By 1883 an official reservation was established for the tribe, one seventh the size of the ancestral land base. In 1901, an Indian boarding school was opened on the reservation. At that time in American history, assimilation was a policy adopted by the U.S. government which intended to absorb Native Americans into mainstream American life.
During this era, the federal government’s approach to education was to strip Indian children of their culture and heritage in an attempt to acculturate them into white society. English was therefore mandatory, and speaking the Hualapai language was forbidden. Three-quarters of a century later, in the fall of 1975, work to reverse this assimilation and reintegrate Hualapai children back into their Hualapai culture and language began in a school setting.
Children who attended the Peach Springs Bilingual/Bicultural School from 1975 to 2000 were taught Hualapai language, culture, ethnobotany, zoology, and ethnogeography. The curriculum and instructional content were presented in both English and Hualapai. In addition to instituting the Hualapai language in the school setting, this nationally acclaimed program developed bilingual curriculum books to be culturally relevant and taught about the local flora, fauna, geography, land, and the meanings of petroglyphs and pictographs within ancestral tribal lands. When the bilingual school was founded, the Hualapai team of teachers that developed the curriculum had the forethought to teach what was relevant from the Hualapai perspective. In large part, this involved teaching ethnobotanical knowledge, and of course that included the importance and significance of piñon for its many uses.
Piñon pitch has been used for gluing arrows and cradleboards, chewed as gum, and applied as a topical healing agent for cuts and wounds. The melted pitch can be used to waterproof baskets.
Piñon pine cones cycle and, on average, ripen approximately once in four years, but trees may produce nuts once every three to seven years. In traditional times among the Hualapai, the cones were gathered from the trees using a seven- or eight-foot-long hooked stick called a digatu’. It is best to gather the cones early in the morning before the sap warms up and becomes very sticky. After the cones are pulled down, they can be rolled in the dirt to cover the sticky sap.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, piñon roasts were a regular event. Many cones were gathered in sacks and roasted in a shallow pit a few inches deep. After being roasted among hot coals produced from juniper wood, the cones were taken out and laid out to air and dry out. After two days of drying the cones were beaten with a long stick to knock loose the nuts so they could be gleaned in a winnowing basket.
After cones are harvested, and, later in the season as winds knock down more cones, piñon nuts drop to the forest floor. Historically, harvesting these fallen nuts was considered a more time-consuming task. But in today’s busy world, harvesting nuts from the forest floor has become the preferred method since it requires less effort than gathering and roasting cones, though it also yields smaller hauls.
Up until 1975, Hualapai remained an unwritten language. That year, the Hualapai launched their language-revitalization program, and, after a decade of exceptional achievements, received national recognition for accomplishments in Native language literacy and curriculum development. Languages are considered “severely endangered” when they are mostly spoken only by the grandparent generation and older, according to the criteria established by UNESCO, and are thus one generation away from being lost.
Similar to languages, forests face endangerment if their next generation doesn’t sprout and thrive. The seemingly dire situation of the piñon jay population begs the question of how piñon and juniper forests will be able to regenerate if these seed-dispersing birds continue to decline. Without piñon jays, we run the risk of losing these quintessential forest landscapes that have coevolved together with animals, peoples, cultures, and traditional lifeways.
It is easy to travel throughout vast regions of the Southwest and see miles of piñon and juniper as far as the eye can see. To a passive observer this makes it hard to fathom that such habitats and the species contained within are in fact in danger.
When early Euro-Americans began settling the North American continent, passenger pigeons ranged in great abundance across the entire eastern half of the continent, from Canada to Florida all the way through the Midwest down to Texas. Although Native Americans engaged in subsistence hunting, passenger pigeons were soon avidly hunted by early Euro-American settlers for food and sport. Simultaneously, the pigeons’ habitat began disappearing to deforestation.
This bird was once so widespread and plentiful that early settlers didn’t believe it could be brought to extinction. However, a slow decline from 1800 to 1870 was followed by a rapid decline between 1870 and 1890. In 1900, the last confirmed wild passenger pigeon was shot in southern Ohio. Although stories such as this can leave a sadness about the historical past, they also offer a special gift. This gift is a reminder that we have the opportunity to avoid repeating history. Many of the losses that have taken place on our continent resulted from a combination of greed and ignorance. By paying attention to the dynamic natural world that surrounds us, we can better understand and protect it for our future generations. It starts with realizing that these seemingly abundant regions actually exist in a delicate balance and with doing our part to advocate for their protection.
With the piñon jay undergoing a review process for potential listing under the Endangered Species Act, wildlife biologists are studying and assessing this species and its habitat. If the species does get listed, it may undergo a review of critical habitat — specific areas that contain features essential to its conservation and therefore in need of special management protections. Unlike the passenger pigeon, the piñon jay and its habitat persist in a time when society has a more widespread awareness of ecology and laws exist to prevent extinctions.
Back on the Hualapai Reservation, when tribal elder Jorigine Paya takes the Hualapai Ethnobotany Youth Project students out on the harvest, she begins the morning with a blessing: “Ha nyi gacha, wi nyi gacha, wil nyi gacha, nyi nya gacha.” She addresses the waters, the land, the plants, and the sun as her relatives. This simple prayer serves as a reminder to the next generation of Hualapai that as much of a technological society as we have become, nature is still and always our relative.
Carrie Calisay Cannon is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe and an ethnobotanist employed by the Hualapai Tribe, for whom she has worked for the last 19 years.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
We need volunteers to gather information about pinyon jays in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and beyond.
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