Papago Harvest

PAPAGO HARVEST by Karen Fisher Photographs by P. K. Weis

Long ago, in Juanita Ahill's Papago childhood, the women wore long skirts and high leather shoes and they came with horse and wagon to the annual harvest of the saguaro. It was a tradition. Each year whole families came.

They cooked the red fruit in huge ollas, placed them in pits and covered them with branches of mesquite and greasewood, before the hole was covered over with dirt. And there they would remain until the next season.

Now, many of the families no longer come to the harvest, and there are no more ollas, only one old woman in Ali Chukson, Juanita's village near Sells, knows how to make them and few Papago young people are interested in these old ways, anyway.

But nothing can keep Juanita from the harvest. Last year, my small son and I met her there to do a story on the harvesting of the giant saguaro. It was her sixtieth season.

She recognized us as we drove up to her camp in the Saguaro National Monument, on the west edge of Tuc-son, and offered us a wire milk crate and an overturned oil can, with cush-ions, to sit on. Small tails of grey smoke drifted our way from the mesquite ashes of her fire, but her huge cooking kettle had been covered and moved to one side.

The qui paD, that 15-foot-long pole with which the Papago dislodge the fruit from the tops of the giant saguaros, we saw was the same as always. They were made in the traditional manner, with two dry saguaro ribs the "bones" from the skeleton of a cactus lashed together end to end, and two smaller sticks fastened upon one of them as crosspieces. As harvesters had done for centuries, one reached up with the qui paD, tugged at the pods and brought them toppling down.

It was a quiet time in the camp. The mountain ranges 30 miles to the south were pale grey ridges. An occasional bird fluttered high above our heads. Juanita's dog, resting with one eye open, shifted his position under the nearest tree. Nothing else moved. For a while we just sat and listened.

Finally, we asked Juanita what she was cooking. It was syrup, she said, and she rose to go over to the kettle to get us a taste in a ladle. She brought it back, and in the other hand held a small cloth flour sack. It had sticks hemmed to the top edges of the opening to form handles. "A strainer," she told us, and made the motions for dipping it into an enormous cauldron.

"I am going to make jam," she added, "next week." She had also sent home to her village a large and a small box of fruit. These would be dried and kept through the year, and prepared when the stores of cooked fruit were depleted.The last few buckets of fruit she and her son, Warren, would pick this season would be set aside for wine for the August rain dance. Each family contributed its share to the communal kettle.

The wine, made from saguaro fruit syrup by the men of the village, takes two days and two nights to ferment. "It is very strong," she told us.

Juanita is the matriarch of the harvest. Gentle, softspoken and sentimental. She is a link to the past, continuing the old ways: sleeping outdoors, getting up at first light; walking, gathering, carrying a load of fruit and returning to the camp by 9 a.m. to do the cooking. And then watching, stirring and straining the mixture in the pot for at least five hours.

The fruit of the cactus is naturally sweet. Indians often use it as candy. Yet there is no constant flow of customers, no commercial market. It is less and less important or familiar part of the Papago diet. There are fewer jars of syrup or jam found on the shelves in the relatively modern reservation homes. For the last few years Juanita has been sharing her knowledge with students enrolled in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's summer classes. Every Tuesday and Thursday, for the six weeks that constitute the harvest season, they arrive in the late morning for her demonstrations. They are fascinated to find her using a stick of ocotillo for a spoon, the many points along its ridges catching the stringy fibers, which are then thrown out upon newspapers spread on the ground. When they dry, the seeds are shaken loose and saved for cakes to be made later, or they are fed to the village chickens.

The students bring baby food jars and 50 cents for their syrup or jam samples. Sometimes they return with their parents and larger containers and contributions.

Always the classes go back to the museum to make qui pads. They pick a few of the fruits, but, rather than cook them, count the seeds in one pod. They average the number of pods on each saguaro. They multiply this by the productive years of the plant. The total number of seeds produced in a saguaro's lifetime is around 12 million and maybe one will take root, and in 50 or more years hence be a fully-grown cactus.

The saguaro fruit, however, isn't the only natural gift the Papago harvest.

Juanita spoke of nipping off the buds from the rangy cholla plant with two notched pieces of wood that work something like chopsticks; rubbing the thorns off prickly pear by pushing the cactus back and forth against a screen with a broom, and picking up the long beans of the mesquite and later grind-ing them to flour in matates. There are seeds which can be popped like corn in a basket over hot stones, and seeds which are sprinkled with water, placed in thin layers and sun-dried to form a cake.

(Left) After a long day spent picking the saguaro fruit, the task of processing begins. The end product will be jam or jelly. But the last fruit to be picked will be put aside to make wine for the August Rain Dance.

(Right) Camped out in the Saguaro National Monument, a brush ramada serves as hearth and home for the Papago until the end of the harvest.

Over the open fire, Juanita had finished making some golden, fluffy popovers in a heavy iron skillet. She gave one to each of us, on paper nap-kins, and apologized for not having any honey. Then she told us about the Papago baskets.

Her son, Warren, had been tending to some bundles of white gråsses, which had been laid out neatly on the ground. "What are those?" we asked, finally. Warren brought a bunch over for us to examine. "They are yucca," Juanita said, for baskets which she worked on in the afternoon. After all the fruit was harvested she said she would try to get a ride north toward Florence where she had permission to pick native plants.

The white grass grows in a tight clump at the center of the tall, sharp-leafed plant. Juanita pantomimed her fight with nature, wearing long sleeves and gloves. It is easier, she said, to simply buy beargrass and devil's claw, which are used to make the more common white and black patterns.

Then she brought out of a box some fine roots which she handled carefully, as though they were precious. She explained that the thin outer skins had been peeled off to reveal the reddish color sometimes but not often found in baskets. She called it "Spanish tiger."

When she finished the sky was beginning to look threatening, a few drops sent Warren scurrying after the basket materials to get them under cover. We said we were glad to see the rain. Juanita looked fearful and shook her head. Warren said it would be bad for the cactus, the fruit would be ruined.

A friend with a truck arrived to take Juanita and two other women to a place a mile or two up the road, where there was a last chance to harvest some fruit.

We followed them in our car until they stopped, got out, and drifted over the hill with their poles and buckets. Then we took the long way home, driv-

ing through the saguaro "forest," past

As we emerged from the pass near Picture Rocks and saw the city of Tucson sprawled before us, we remembered asking Juanita how many jars of syrup or jam she would have from the harvest, and she said she didn't count them. They were a range of sizes, and she sold most of them as soon as she could. The money was usually enough to buy their groceries while they camped, and to pay someone to pick them up at the end of the season and drive them home.

Two buckets of fruit, with half as much water added, make about a quart of syrup, she had said, or a little more jam. It could make more than that. She hadn't measured.Of all our senses, it is said smell is the most powerfully enduring. We have already forgotten how the thunder sounded that day in Juanita's harvest camp. But whenever a summer rain is in the air over the Sonoran desert, and pungent scents rise from the plants and earth, we remember Juanita and the old saguaro fruit smells and wonder if there will be even fewer Papago build-ing their mesquite camp fires at the saguaro harvest this year. ☐ ☐