Harvesting Southern California's Plants

Wild plant foods provided the primary nutritional basis of Southern California's traditional native cultures. The numerous microhabitats of the Southern California floristic provence offered a wide variety of native food plants, maturing at different times throughout the year.

Staples included nuts, such as the pinyon and acorn, seeds, such as buckwheat and chia, flowers, buds, berries, such as the wild grape, manzanita and blackberry, greens, such as amaranth and redmaid, cactus pads, fruit, such as yucca and palm, roots, and bulbs.

Many wild plant foods required lengthy preparation before being consumed. Some, such as the acorn and elderberry are actually harmful to humans in their raw form. Preparation techniques removed or neutralized harmful ingredients. Others, such as agave, offer little human nutritional value until cooked.

Food preparation techniques included leaching, drying, grinding, pounding, boiling, parboiling, roasting, flailing, singing (to remove cactus spines), and infusion. This highly developed system of native plant food processing appeared simple to the incoming Europeans only because it was so thoroughly mastered.

Indian peoples of Southern California were acutely aware of ecological interactions affecting native plant foods. One of the most important shamanistic functions was rain control. Throughout the year, rainmaking rituals were held to invoke precipitation in the proper season, ensuring an abundant harvest. As gathering time drew near, however, rain-prevention rituals were carried out so that the crop would not be ruined before it could be harvested.

Before harvesting major food crops such as mesquite, pinyon, or acorns, a first-fruits ceremony was held. A small quantity of the ripened crop was combined with stored reserves from the previous year's harvest and ritually consumed.

These ceremonies helped ensure that food gathering was carried out in an orderly fashion. They protected the native crops from a premature and hasty harvest which might damage the plants and reduce their future productivity.

In addition, conservation principals were applied. A plant was never stripped of all its seeds or flowers, and when gathering plants from a particular area, some were always left behind to repropagate.

It was also common practice to thank the plants for offering themselves as food, reinforcing mindfulness of human dependency on a healthy and productive ecosystem.

The annual plant food cycle began in February when the first agave were ready for harvest. Later in the spring, buds and greens appeared in quantity, providing much-needed vitamins after winter's scarcity.

By June or July, mesquite was beginning to ripen. Roots were harvested at this time, and fruits of various sorts became available. In August and September, grass seeds were ripe for harvesting; dates and pinyon cones were gathered. October and November was acorn season, when large groups of people gathered in the oak groves.

In December and January, when plant foods were scarce, the people relied on stored food and on the skill of hunters. This was a difficult time, and food shortages were not uncommon. It was the season for mourning the dead, for recounting stories of the creation, and for reflecting upon mankind's place in the universe.

Ritual exchanges of food during the winter ceremonies helped ensure that everyone received a portion and, at the same time, mirrored ecological interactions, reminding the people of their reciprocal relationship with the natural environment.

Robin Hewitt, 1989