Volume 3 Number 3
May 1964

Robert Hackenberg

The Indian population which we have among us in Arizona at the present time represents the group of direct descendants from those tribes which originally occupied this area before the Americans first came over a hundred years ago. A great deal could be said about their ceremonial patterns, about their patterns of warfare and their native villages, but I am going to discuss only the way in which they made their living, and especially the foods they grew and gathered. This is a peculiar area in that respect. We think of most of Arizona as a desert, and we generally are accustomed to thinking of a desert as a very barren area. But this territory is an arboreal desert as ecologists and botanists tend to think about it. By an arboreal desert they mean one that supports a great many shrubs and plants of all kinds. We find, to our surprise, that there are very few of them that don’t produce something that somebody can eat.

In terms of its capacity to produce wild food products, this Arizona desert is a rich food resource. Consequently, even though we had and still have farming Indians throughout most of Arizona, we find that they combine their pattern of farming with hunting and gathering of wild food products. We don’t hear much about the deer or the mountain sheep in Arizona anymore, and the antelope has ceased to exist. Yet, 60 to 70 years ago you could not drive ten miles in any direction from the center of downtown Tucson without encountering herds of hundreds and perhaps even thousands, of antelope running in the Santa Cruz Valley. The same is true of the abundant deer and mountain sheep that occupied this area. These animals were largely killed between 1880-1900 because there was a market for meat in the American settlements that were growing at that time.

The food resources have changed, and one of the major changes has been in the variety of wild animal life which has practically vanished at the present time. Certainly the only major game animal that survived is the jackrabbit. I think this is partly true because cultivating hundreds of thousands of Arizona acres has provided a food resource which has contributed to the increase in the rabbit population. Rabbits were always considered to be less desirable by the Indians than other sources of meat, although some groups probably ate more rabbit meat than other wild game. The Pimas and Papagos organized drives annually in which they would kill a great number of rabbits. They would surround them and beat the bushes with sticks over a large area and drive the rabbits toward the center.

Now, I have not differentiated among the Indian groups in describing the game animals which they hunted. I am not going to differentiate among them in describing contribution of agriculture and gathering to their diets. We think of the Apaches as wild, roaming and raiding Indians who covered a great territory from the Arizona-Sonora border up to Central Arizona. The Apaches were also corn planters, they were gardeners, they had fields, they grew crops and even irrigation was known to them. During the part of the year that they were not raiding they were peaceful cultivators, digging irrigation ditches, building fences, repairing their canals, and planting corn crops just like the more sedentary people who occupied the lower elevations.

Southern Arizona, historically and archeologically is one of the great centers of aboriginal cultivation in North America. The prehistoric peoples farmed in the Gila Salt River Valleys. The historic Indian populations have farmed in these same areas. The crops that they cultivated have considerable similarity. This is the crop complex known as the maize, squash, bean complex. The maize is the Indian corn. The beans in our part of the state are tepari beans, a native Arizona plant found no where else in the world. We also have a number of varieties of squash and pumpkin which were cultivated by the Indian populations.

In addition, since Spanish times, a greatly augmented inventory of cultivated foods have been grown. The most important introduced crop was wheat. This was the one which took hold and was grown most widely by Indian people after the appearance of the Spanish. Watermelons and peas, especially chick pea or the garbonzo which is treated exactly as a bean by the Indians, and a great range of other introduced food plants which did not diffuse as widely, were the result of the appearance of the Spanish in this area.

However, among none of the Indian groups in this state did agriculture provide 100 per cent of the dietary base. Quite the contrary, there are varying estimates as to what part agriculture did play in providing a native food supply to our Indian people. I would follow Castetter and Bell when they say that it provided as little as 20 per cent to some people and probably not more than 60 per cent to any particular group. The appearance of the white man provided a great stimulus to many of the Indians to increase the area which they had in cultivation and to grow more food crops because markets were provided for them. The earlier records of the stage lines across Arizona, the early mine camps and military garrisons, give evidence of Indians providing cultivated foods for sale when the motivation of a market was provided to them.

In addition to the foods which were cultivated, a very substantial part of the Indian diet was provided by gathering wild foods. Now there are some very rich and abundant wild food plants which appear in various parts of the state. In the northern part of the occupied area the major wild food resources were the pinion nut and the acorn. In the southern part of Arizona, we had and still have, resources of saguaro cactus, the prickly pear cactus, the cholla cactus, the mesquite bean and the various types of sharp pointed leafy plants with those big towering central stalks that are called agaves or mescals, sometimes "Spanish bayonet." Then plants were all utilized throughout Southern Arizona by the groups occupying the region but not to the same degree. The Pima and Papago were primarily interested in the saguaro with its large juicy sweet fruit that can be eaten raw or reduced to a very palatable syrup or jelly. Fruits of the prickly pear were collected by them and treated the same way. The cholla produces both an edible bud and also fruit which can be treated the same way. Mesquite beans were gathered primarily by the Pima and Papago.

Until 30 or 40 years ago, the agave which has an edible central stalk, crown and root was a very favorite food of the Apaches. It has to be dug out and a stone chisel was used to strip the leaves from it and get at the central core which was then baked in a pit and eaten. The Apaches depended to a lesser degree on saguaro although they liked it, but were in an area where it was possible to gather acorns and pinion nuts instead. The Pima and Papago used very few acorns and no pinion nuts to my knowledge.

In this southern Arizona area there were a number of root plants which could also be collected. Both wild onions and wild potatoes were found in considerable variety on mountain sides at low elevation. In dry washes after the summer rains a great number of greens were produced which were a very important food resource to the Indians. They had both wild spinach and wild rhubarb and a number of other leafy plants such as the lamb’s quarter. These were eaten as greens, in vegetable stews and in a sort of salad.

Most of the main ingredients in a balanced diet were available to the Indians 100 years ago. They did have meat resources, they had cereal crops, they had vegetables, they had greens, and they also had sugars which they extracted by the manufacture of syrups. The thing that they were perhaps the most deficient in was fats. There was very little supply of animal fats because the game that was hunted tended to be rather lean. The way in which game was prepared was to dry it, and use as an ingredient in the stews which were prepared throughout the year. In preparation, the animal fat was mostly lost. None of the plants that the Indians were eating is a source of vegetable oil, except cotton seeds. The saguaro seeds are also a source of oil. I am sure that there are some more seeds that also yield vegetable oil of which I am not aware. But the mesquite bean has a very low oil content and the kernel which would contain the oil is not eaten. Saguaro seeds, although they were eaten in considerable numbers, are extremely small. They look like grains of pepper. Consequently there was little fat consumption from plant food resources in the Indian diet of a hundred years ago. Sugars were greatly desired. They were obtained in the fruits which were prepared into jams and jellies, but if you have ever eaten any of these you will agree that the sugar content is not too high.

Now I have sketched in the native subsistence pattern at the time the Indians were first encountered. Much has taken place to change the basis of the Indian way of life since the appearance of Americans in this area and since the Americans assumed political jurisdiction and control over the Indian population. We like to think sometimes of a native culture as a system which provides for the needs of its members and perpetuates the system itself. When I try to make a minimal description of an Indian society or culture, as a system, I come up with something like this. I say that it is a system composed of four simple ingredients: The first is the basic physiological needs, the second is a majority of members, the third is social and cultural equipment, and the fourth is a level of efficiency which the people will accept as adequate. Now a cultural system continues to operate so long as the basic needs are met for a majority of members, by using the social and cultural equipment to provide for their needs, at a level of efficiency that the system defines as adequate. That is really all that a culture is. It consists of these four elements, and each of them is very important.

The social and cultural equipment is, of course, the technolog—the tools and the knowledge which people have at their disposal in order to make a living in their environment. Using these tools, using this knowledge, all people everywhere, certainly not just in this area, provide for their needs sufficiently well to sustain life and keep the system going. But they provide for their needs only at a level of efficiency which the system defines as adequate. Now differerent systems define "adequacy" in very different ways. The food getting techniques of the Papagos were such that people tended to run out of food every spring of every year. There was a very lean period for them in the months of February and March, in which there was so little food available that it was impossible for the people to get one meal a day. They were so sick with hunger that they vividly remember being dizzy most of the time and frequently incapable of standing erect for large parts of the day. Now they experienced extreme malnutrition during this part of the year, and yet this was an expected thing among the Papago a 100 years ago. They even had a name for this time of the year. They called it the thin moon because it was the time of the year when everybody lost weight. This situation would continue until the wild food plants were available to them in the spring. Now, to our way of thinking, this is an inadequate system. But the Papagos expected it—I would not say that they accepted it gladly, but they regarded it as one of the conditions of life. They did not resist it, nor did they consider that because of it their system did not provide for them. When they did have food surpluses there was no attempt to preserve them among many of the Indian tribes. Instead there was a great expansion of consumption. There were feasts; there were ceremonials; there was a gathering together and a great consumption of the excess which was temporarily available.

Now into the many cultural systems that existed among the different Indian tribes there were some major kinds of change introduced as a result of the appearance of whites, and of the transition of the Indian people from the majority population of Arizona to minority status. The changes affected all four of the parts of the system. First, the basic needs—we don’t ordinarily think of the basic needs as changing—and yet, it is possible for the needs of the group to change considerably. We all have the same fundamental drives: food, clothing and shelter. But the ways in which we satisfy these drives differ considerably and the tools, techniques, and materials which we use to satisfy them must be considered as variables.

Now the Indians were meeting their needs in the past in the way which I have been describing, but when the Americans appeared in this area they found that there were a great many other ways of meeting these needs. They found that it was possible to keep domestic animals, for instance. They found that it was possible to obtain fresh meat supplies through the herding of cattle and through the systematic slaughter of them. They discovered canned goods, and a great liking for canned goods immediately developed. In psychological terms we say that they acquired drives which they did not previously possess. Their basis needs were augmented or increased by the drives they acquired through contact with non-Indians. One of the major difficulties in dealing with the problem of Indian adjustment is that the Indians are no longer content to continue living like they always did. They have new needs with respect to food, recreation, education, transportation and health sanitation. They have seen what other people have. They have been taught the advantages, or at least the presumed advantages, of this other way of living and they want them. So, one of the ingredients of the system—the ingredient of basic needs has been changed through contact with non-Indians.

The Indian population has changed greatly also. Since 1860, for example, the Navaho population has increased from 8,000 members to over 100,000 members. Now this is perhaps the most extreme case of population explosion that we could find in a minority group within the United States, but it is indicative of the population increase that has taken place among most of the Indian groups in the Southwest. The Papagos, for example, have increased from a population of 5,000 in 1900 to over 10,000 today. Other groups have experienced increases which are proportionate. Resources which produce an adequate food supply for 8,000 Indians, in the Navaho case, can hardly be expanded to provide for 100,000 without great modifications in the means of production, without going into industrialized farming, without going into soil conservation measures, without adapting machinery, without means of production that would require great capital investment and considerable technological knowledge which greatly exceeds what Indians had at their disposal.

Now, I said the third ingredient in a system is the capacity of individuals to provide for their needs by the use of the social and cultural equipment provided to them by the system. I defined that as the tools and the knowledge which the people had at their disposal for making a living. What we find throughout Arizona is that the environment has changed. Streams have dried up, drought has taken place, large scale introduction of livestock, cattle and especially sheep have changed the nature of the open range. We are very disturbed at the great reduction which has taken place in the desert grass land. On the western side of the Baboquivari mountains, there were 38 miles of desert grass land which has completely disappeared into mesquite and shrub growth. There is invasion of other grass land areas by mesquite and shrub growth which tends to choke out the grass. These affect, not only the range in its capacity to support animal life, but also the water retention capacity of the soil. This change in the plant cover has lowered the ground water supply drastically. It has killed the living streams which were found in this area 100 years ago. These factors of changing ground erosion have greatly reduced the area available for Indian agriculture. It would have been impossible for Indians to have provided for the food needs of their expanding population, and for the new way of life to which they aspire using the old land base that was available to them. But we find that the environment has changed in such a way as to eliminate a large part of their old fields from cultivation.

So we find that Indian people today are trying to satisfy the new needs of a larger population on much less land than they had available before. The land that they have left is greatly deteriorated. In view of these three things, there is an effect on the fourth point in the Indian cultural system. The system itself has been judged inadequate by the Indian participants. Now what happens when an Indian system becomes inadequate? Obviously, if the people are to preserve their lives, they must abandon the system, or else the system must be greatly transformed in order to provide for them. Since this great transformation has not taken place, the increased Indian population has left the reservations and we find them now mostly in agricultural areas and in urban areas. They are laborers and slum dwellers, inadequately educated to compete in the economic system of the larger American culture, beyond their native land.

Nonetheless, they are making a living and they are dealing with the requirements imposed on them by life off of the reservation. One of the conclusions from these sweeping changes in Indian life has to do with nutrition. Their basic nutritional balance has changed by satisfying their new food needs and by moving from a subsistence economy into a cash economy buying their food instead of growing it. The balance of their diet has changed. We find that they tend to consume excesses of those commodities which were very limited in their native diet-fats and sugars. The cereal base perhaps remains the same, but no longer consists of corn flour and wheat flour, stone ground, retaining all of the nutritional ingredients of grain cereals prepared in this way. We find them buying white flour, bleached flour, and in increasing amounts the least nutritious varieties of commercial bread.

In addition, there is great consumption of canned goods. The Indians, traditionally, place a very high value on preserved fruits in their native system. Now this has increased and expanded. Their consumption of meat is restricted since it is expensive and since so few of them have refrigeration. But meat was never really a major element in their diet throughout a large part of the year.

Now I could not close without a reference to a few of the other types of changes in addition to the nutritional base which we find among the thousands of Indians who are living off reservation in the agriculture and urban areas of Arizona. First of all, the way in which they are living as a society has changed. Most of the Indians as we found them under tribal conditions were living in small reservation villages which operated in terms of a kinship network of relatives who exchanged goods, exchanged services, exchanged friendship, and through marriage also exchanged people. There was very little formal political leadership among most of the Indian groups in Arizona. Tribal organization was very weakly developed and chieftanship was practically unknown.

Since they did not operate in terms of formal social structure they don’t form committees and immediately organize to solve their own problems. This is a pattern of organization which we know because in the non-Indian world we are accustomed to dealing on the basis of secondary relationships with persons we don’t know. Indians have dealt through primary relationships with kinsmen and largely on informal kinds of relationships which are difficult to transfer to the new areas in which these people find themselves. There does not seem to be any leadership which is available, through whom the members of the community can be contacted. This is in fact the case.

I wouldn’t say that leadership is not there. Here in Tucson we have 1,100 Papago Indians living in South Tucson. This group, to my knowledge, is the first one that has voluntarily taken steps to organize itself as the American Indian Association of Tucson. It does have officers, holds conferences and discussion meetings, invites speakers and is trying to attack many of the common community problems which the Indians face. Indian minorities now and in the future, require this type of leadership and organization to cope with the problems of their changing world.