Traditional Indigenous Foods and Farming in Southern California

For thousands of years, the Indigenous people of the lands known today as California developed a relationship with the land, plants, and animal life that enabled Native communities not only to survive but thrive. This symbiotic relationship was undoubtedly developed through keen observation, generations of experimentation, and the passing down of empirical knowledge.

Most historians and anthropologists mark the development of agriculture as the trigger that ended the hunter-gatherer way of life for some cultures and ushered in the dawn of civilization. Yet hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist in the world today. One aspect of such societies that has been generally ignored until recently is the modification of “nature” to encourage beneficial outcomes for human survival. These cultivating practices served to ensure the survival of these societies, but also benefited the environments in which they lived. One only needs to look up the definition of “farm” to see why anthropologists and historians did not recognize these practices as agriculture when they encountered the Indigenous peoples of California.

Farm: an area of land and its buildings used for growing crops and rearing animals, typically under the control of one owner or manager.

This definition reflects a couple of key differences in the views of agriculture between Native Californians and their European counterparts. First, “growing crops and rearing animals” implies a great deal of control over the “product,” whether plant or animal. The farmer actively directs what, how, when, and where these products are produced, from sprout or birth until harvest or death. Second, “under the control of one owner or manager” implies the idea of land or resource ownership. For the early European explorers, landownership was a centuries-old concept that they used to justify claiming land even when Indigenous people were living on it.

This perspective kept the Europeans from understanding that California’s Native people did create cultivated areas that one could recognize as “farms.” In fact, if we were to adopt a more liberal understanding of the definition of a farm, we could easily conclude that California’s Native people not only developed agriculture, but possibly developed a more efficient and sustainable system than that of the Europe model. If we can understand that “growing crops and rearing animals” could include the pruning of oak trees to benefit acorn production, the burning of meadowlands to produce grassy pastures that support animal populations, and the selective harvesting of plants to encourage plant production, then we can conclude that California was indeed one big farm. And while the tribes of California had no concept of legal landownership, tribal territories, clan areas, and familial gathering sites did exist and continue to exist today. With this understanding, we can assert that the traditional clan or familial gathering areas cultivated by Indigenous people could be considered farms.

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While the geography and the available flora and fauna of the area were important, so too was what anthropologist Lowell Bean characterized as a “reciprocal obligation” belief system he found among the Cahuilla.[1] Reciprocal obligation stemmed from a belief that humans were only a part of a larger interactive system composed of cooperating entities that shared responsibility in the workings of the universe. These beliefs fostered an ecological ethic of gathering only what one needs and always leaving some for the other beings. These actions, combined with the performance of appropriate ceremonies and rituals, ensured that the universe would remain in balance and that humans along with other entities could continue to sustain life.

For many tribes in California, a belief in the interconnectedness of various life forms and the shared responsibility of these beings formed the basis for their resource management. The concepts of competition and subjugation of nature were mostly absent from traditional beliefs about the world and a human’s place within it. For generations, a system of best practices was passed down, tested, and added to for the benefit of all interconnected entities.

Today, these beliefs are commonly referred to as “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK), referring to ecological management practices formed over generations and based on observation, experimentation, and long-term relationships with plants, animals, climate, and environment. The results of these management practices were extensive. For example, the promotion of grasslands not only provided seeds for human consumption, but also provided key species of wildlife (quail, rabbit, deer, antelope, elk) with a food supply that sustained healthy and available animal populations. From those healthy animal populations, in turn, Native people gained meat for nourishment, furs for clothing, and bone and sinew for tools, regalia, and other ceremonial and utilitarian objects. In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson describes the relationship between Indigenous people and the environment as “a knowledge built on a history, gained through many generations of learning passed down by elders about practical as well as spiritual practices.”[2]

European explorers themselves commented positively in their journals on the condition of the land they encountered. In the sixteenth century, the English explorer Sir Francis Drake sailed up the Pacific coast of North America, searching for the Northwest Passage, a water route thought to cross the North American continent. While historians do not agree on the extent of Drake’s exploration of California, while sailing along the California coast he wrote in his journal “infinite was the company of very large and fat deere, which there we sawe by thousands, as we supposed, in a heard.”[3]

During 1769, Gaspar de Portolá led an expedition of soldiers up from Mexico through southern California on their way to San Francisco Bay. Also on the journey was Franciscan missionary Fray Juan Crespi. On Tuesday, July 18, 1769, near the San Luis Rey River just north of present-day San Diego, Crespi wrote,

A little after three in the afternoon we set out to the north. We climbed a hill of good soil, all covered with grass, and then went on over hills of the same kind of land and pasture. We must have traveled about two short leagues, when we descended to a large and beautiful valley, so green that it seemed to us that it had been planted…. There are, indeed, pools of good water, with tules [bulrushes] on the banks. The valley is all green with good grass, and has many wild grapes, and one sees some spots that resemble vineyards.[4]

The observations of Fray Crespi hint at one of the most prominent misconceptions that Europeans had about the lands in California. To them, this fertile land was their reward from God for the risks they had taken, for spreading the word of Christianity, for the hunger and hardships they experienced. They were being rewarded with a pristine, Garden of Eden-like landscape to claim as their own.

What these early explorers were actually witnessing was centuries of careful ecological management that involved the coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting of plants to maximize each species’ productivity, usefulness, and contribution to the interconnected interests that made up the ecological system: plants, animals, climate, weather patterns, soil, humans.

Through careful management, the Natives of California were able to harness the full potential of their available resources. The full extent of plants utilized by these communities may never be known. I include here descriptions of just a few that are in use today as part of the effort to reclaim Indigenous health and sovereignty.

Acorns and other food staples

Much has been written regarding California Indians’ utilization of the acorn as a major food staple. It is easy to see why. California is home to eighteen species of oak that occur throughout most of the state. After gathering acorns in the fall, tribes had various ways to dry and store them until needed. The fact that they could be stored for later use made acorns a reliable staple that could be utilized year-round. By some estimates, unshelled acorns could be stored for up to ten or twelve years.

Nutritionally, acorns provide much of what was needed for humans not only to survive, but to flourish. One researcher on the subject has suggested that oaks could have supported population densities fifty to sixty-five times higher than those estimated at the time of contact. Additionally, modern nutritional analysis of acorns shows that some species contain up to 18 percent fat, 6 percent protein, and 68 percent carbohydrate, with the remainder being water, minerals, and fiber. By comparison, modern varieties of corn and wheat have about 2 percent fat, 10 percent protein, and 75 percent carbohydrate. Acorns are also a good source of vitamins A and C and many essential amino acids.[5]

Acorns were typically gathered in late September and October. Groups would camp among the oak groves, and it has been said that various clans would claim specific hereditary gathering areas. Today, bedrock mortars or grinding holes can be found near these sites. Many of the tribes in southern California preferred the acorn of the black oak (Quercus kelloggii), but other varieties were also utilized. Black oak trees, sometimes as tall as one hundred feet, drop their ripened acorns with help from the Santa Ana winds that occur at that time of year. Acorns that did not fall naturally were knocked down with long sticks and gathered from the ground.

The gathering and grinding of the acorns was only the beginning of the process. Unprocessed acorn meal is bitter and unpalatable to humans due to a high tannic acid content, and substantial leaching or washing is required to remove it. Some tribes leached the tannic acid from the pulverized acorn meal in sandy basins pressed into shallow stream beds. Water from the stream would cover and lightly flow over the acorn meal, washing away its bitterness. Over time, some tribes in California developed basket-weaving traditions that produced some of the finest examples of basketry in the world. They developed a technique of filling finely and tightly woven baskets with acorn meal and placing them in lightly running water for leaching. Some tribes in northern California adopted a subterranean leaching process. Whole, shelled acorns were buried in sand, and water was periodically poured over the area until the acorns were judged palatable and ready to be dug up. Sometimes acorns were boiled or roasted prior to burial.[6]

The leached acorn meal might be cooked until it thickened to a gelled consistency, incorporated into a soup, or formed into small cakes. At tribal gatherings today, attendees judge acorn mush (wii’wish in the Cahuilla language, shaw’ii in the Kumeyaay language) on its smoothness of texture, nutty flavor, and absence of any bitter taste. At a tribal gathering I attended on the Morongo Reservation recently, I was served roasted turkey with acorn gravy.

Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who studied California tribes extensively, estimated that more than 75 percent of Native Californians relied on acorns for food on a daily basis. However, Willie Pink, a Cupeño/Payómkawichum descendant and Indigenous plant expert, thinks anthropologists have placed too great an emphasis on acorns as a food source. He stresses the importance of the holly leaf cherry as equally important to tribal communities in central and southern California. Pink points out that ancient village sites in southern California tended to be situated near stands of wild cherry trees as opposed to oak groves. The cherry tree he refers to is Prunus ilicifolia, commonly referred to as the holly leaf cherry or simply wild cherry.

Holly leaf cherry

Prunus ilicifolia is a drought-resistant, evergreen plant that produces fruit which, unlike its domesticated cousins, has very thin flesh but a large, prominent pit that contains a large seed. The flesh of the cherry is sweet when ripe and was certainly eaten. Today, it is not uncommon for tribal people to make jelly from the wild cherry, although its thin flesh provides little juice. A small jar of jelly requires many cherries and quite a bit of effort.

For California’s early tribal communities, however, it was the seed within the large pit that was of greater importance. The cherries were gathered in late summer or early fall when they ripened. Once dried and shelled, the seeds could be stored for long periods to provide for year-round use. Wild cherry is not a large tree but a modest-sized bush, which made harvesting cherries easier than harvesting acorns.

 The seed, like acorn, can be ground into a meal, but also requires leaching in order to eliminate naturally occurring hydrocyanic acid (cyanide). While some people simply leach or wash the seeds, others roast them prior to leaching in order to rid them of the cyanide. Willie Pink roasts cherry pits in a modern oven, but the same could be done in a clay pot near a campfire. Once leaching and grinding are completed, the meal is cooked until it thickens to a pudding-like consistency. In my experience, the prepared cherry-seed mush looks similar to cooked acorn mush and has a subtle, nutty taste with a slightly fruity flavor.

In addition to using holly leaf cherry as a food source, Kumeyaays and Cahuillas were among the tribes that treated colds and coughs with infusions made from the roots or bark of the tree. This infusion was typically ingested as a type of cough medicine. During the spring and summer, while the sap of the tree was running, the infusion was made from the bark. During the winter, while the tree was dormant, the roots were used to make the infusion.[7]

It should be noted that both acorns and wild cherry seeds were widely traded throughout California and beyond. Both could be dried and preserved, allowing communities with excess supplies to transport and trade them with tribes that had little access to the growing areas of these foods. Jan Timbrook, an anthropologist and ethnobiologist who specializes in the Chumash culture, states that cherry kernels were an important trade item for Chumashes and “were measured with women’s basketry hats; one hat full of cherry seeds worth two of acorn.”[8]

Pine nuts

Many of the varieties of pines that grow in California produce edible pine nuts. Some examples include the Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi), gray pine (P. sabiniana), the four-leaf pinyon pine (P. quadrifolia), and the single-leaf pinyon pine (P. monophylla). While pine nuts from these species were important to the tribal communities, so too was the pine pitch or sap. Pitch was used as an adhesive and waterproofing agent on various utilitarian objects, such as to waterproof baskets or adhere gourds for rattles.

For the tribes of eastern and southern California, the four-leaf or single-leaf pinyon pine were accessible varieties that could be found growing in the Mojave Desert, eastern Sierra Nevada, and Tehachapi Mountain Range, as well as in southern California’s coastal mountain ranges. These varieties typically grow at elevations between 4,000 and 7,500 feet above sea level. The single-leaf pinyon pine will generally begin bearing cones at about 35 years of age, begins producing good seed crops at about 75 to 100 years, and reaches maximum production at about 160 to 200 years.[9]

Like the wild cherry seeds and acorns, pinyon pine nuts are a good source of protein, unsaturated fats, and carbohydrates. They can be dried and stored for long periods, allowing use throughout the year. However, pinyon pine nut production varies from year to year due to climatic conditions and is not as consistent or predictable as the holly leaf cherry. Yet despite its inconsistent availability, the pinyon pine nut has been important to many Native communities of California. From ancient times, archaeological evidence points to its utilization as a food source, and it is mentioned in some tribes’ traditional songs and stories.

Newcomers to California observed the importance of pine nuts to the local tribes. In the mid-1800s, John Charles Frémont – a lieutenant in the Army Topographical Corps – was commissioned by the US government to explore and map the Pacific Northwest. Returning from this expedition through the eastern Sierras, Frémont recorded the Indigenous people’s utilization of pine nuts in his journal: “These [pine nuts] seem now to be the staple of the country; and whenever we meet an Indian, his friendly salutation consisted in offering a few nuts to eat and trade.”[10]

Yucca

Various types of yucca grow in southern California as well as Baja California, Mexico, at elevations from sea level up to eight thousand feet. Yuccas provided the tribal communities of these areas with both food to eat and fibers for utilitarian use. The late Cahuilla elder Alvino Siva stated that the Cahuilla preferred the fibers of the Mojave yucca (Yucca schidigera) for making rope and cordage, but found the chaparral yucca (Hesperoyucca whipplei), also called our Lord’s candle or panu’ul in the Cahuilla language, preferable for food. This spiny green yucca typically grows in rocky soils and produces a stemless cluster of long, rigid leaves that end in sharp points. The leaf edges are finely saw-toothed and, along with the sharp points, can easily draw blood from a person untrained in its proper harvesting.

When it matures after five to seven years of growth, the chaparral yucca shoots up a large stalk from the center of the plant that can attain twelve feet in height. Toward the top of this large stalk grow clusters of flowers that may be white, off-white, or white edged with violet. After the flowers are pollinated, the petals drop and the plant develops seedpods that eventually dry and open up, spreading seeds around the area for future plant propagation.

The chaparral yucca offers a few different opportunities for food gathering. First, the young stalk can be harvested before it flowers. Eaten raw it tastes like a cross between an apple and celery. If cooked, it can be eaten by itself or puréed and used in breads or cakes. Today, a number of tribal families also gather the flower petals (se’ish in the Cahuilla language). After being cleaned, then parboiled two or three times, with the water poured off and replaced each time, the petals can be eaten, usually with a little added salt. To me, the cooked petals taste like a “floral cabbage.” Nowadays, people also often sauté the cooked petals in olive oil with onion, minced garlic, and even bacon! While not entirely traditional, this dish eaten with wild cherry or acorn mush and roasted wild rabbit serves as a healthy alternative to your local fast-food supersized meal.

Finally, once the yucca petals have naturally dried up and fallen off, the plant produces edible seedpods. The seedpods resemble mini-cucumbers and have a similar texture and consistency. They can be bitter if allowed to grow too large, so the smaller ones are preferable for eating raw. Some people have even begun to pickle the pods and are canning jars of “yucca pickles.”

However, the yucca is vulnerable to overharvesting. Harvesting the stalk or petals means little or no seed would be produced and could lead to the plant’s eradication from an area. I have come across yucca stalks that had been cut down in order to gain access to their blossoms. This approach to gathering is unsustainable. I have taught my own children to limit the number of yucca stalks they harvest per year and not to take more than one-quarter of the blossoms from any one yucca plant.

Elderberry

Elderberry (Sambucus mexicana) is a fast-growing large shrub or small tree that grows throughout California. It is drought tolerant, grows to heights between eight and twenty-five feet, and features bright green foliage and yellowish flowers that mature into clusters of small, dark blue, almost black, berries.

Elderberry is important to wildlife and numerous bird species. Its dense, multistemmed structure provides cover for numerous small mammals, birds, and reptiles. The flowers and berries also serve as an important food source for wildlife, especially in the dry months of late summer.

For California’s Indigenous people, elderberry has multiple uses for food, medicine, and utilitarian or ceremonial objects. In excavations of ancient village sites, archaeologists have found evidence that California’s earliest inhabitants used elderberry. The archaeologist Paul Schumacher reported that he often found elderberries growing near ancient Native American settlements and gravesites.[11]

Among elderberry’s utilitarian uses, the young shoots were used for arrow shafts and larger branches for bows. Fibers from the inner bark were also used in making women’s skirts or aprons, and the leaves rendered a black dye for basket-making fibers, which was the source of the bold designs often found in California Native basketry. The woody portions of the elderberry were used to make pipes for smoking Indigenous tobacco, as well as to make flutes and clapper sticks. Elderberry branches feature a soft and pithy center that made hollowing out the branch for these uses easier.

Medicinally, Indigenous people brewed a tea from elderberry blossoms that is said to reduce fever and help fight off colds. Contemporary herbalists proclaim that elderberry tea boosts the immune system, alleviates allergies, lowers blood sugar levels and blood pressure, moderates the digestive process, and even slows down the spread of cancer. While these claims have not been proven by medical science, California Native people’s centuries-old use of elderberry as a medicine points to its effectiveness as a remedy for some illnesses.

Elderberry fruit is high in antioxidants and numerous vitamins, including 60 percent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. The berries are also a good source of essential nutrients like calcium, potassium, manganese, iron, and phosphorus. Historically, the berries were eaten raw, cooked, or made into a cider.[12] Drying the berries allowed them to be stored, transported, and used at a later time, allowing tribes to benefit from their nutritional content throughout the year.

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Our schools, books, and movies all tend to feature Indigenous cultures as “roughing it” in an unforgiving wilderness. But these were not the conditions that met the eighteenth-century Spanish explorers. In their diaries they mention the ease with which they were able to make their way through the meadows, forests, and chaparral of the California landscape. It was the ecological practices of the Native population that fostered the European idea of California as a “pristine” wilderness!

Yet, now, fences, permits, private property, overgrowth, habitat loss, and loss of the ancestral land base have made the gathering of plants highly challenging for California’s Native people. Daniel McCarthy understands firsthand the difficulties imposed on Native people by the federal government. As a former archaeologist and tribal liaison to the San Bernardino National Forest, he worked for several years on obtaining “administrative passes” for tribal people who wanted access to forest lands for traditional gathering purposes. Just as non-Native people can purchase recreational permits for hiking or camping, Daniel advocated for Native access to forest resources and for a new category of acceptable activity: cultural gathering. In 2006, he began working to educate Forest Service officials about the need for such a permit and in 2007, the regional forester and the state director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved the policy.

Why were National Forest administrators resistant? Clearly, there exists a fundamental misunderstanding of what traditional gathering practice is. No doubt fears of overharvesting, selling of resources, and negative environmental consequences were major concerns. However, these factors are not evident in historic accounts of California’s Indigenous plant-gathering practices, pointing to the need to educate government agency employees.

In their journal article “Native American Land-Use Practices and Ecological Impacts,” M. Kat Anderson and Michael J. Moratto assert that the wild plant management practices of California’s Indigenous populations involved “the human manipulation of native plants, plant populations, and habitats, in accordance with ecological principles and concepts, that effects a change (either beneficial or negative) in plant abundance, diversity, growth, longevity, yield, and quality to meet cultural needs.”[13] How was this knowledge derived? Anderson and Moratto contend that these practices were and are “based upon traditional knowledge of natural processes gained over the millennia, [and] were applied to increase the quantity and improve select qualities of focal plant species…. This traditional knowledge, which permitted the adaptive success of large human populations and the maintenance of Sierran [Sierra Nevada Range] environments for more than a hundred centuries, must not be dismissed.”[14] This perspective is mirrored in the beliefs and practices of those California Indigenous people today who carry traditional plant knowledge and continue to gather plants and promote environmental stewardship within their respective communities. While tribal people within California’s borders encounter the same life challenges as many other Americans – careers and employment, getting their kids to school, sitting in traffic, paying bills, and so on – today there are tribal people making efforts to preserve traditional plant knowledge and practice ecological stewardship.

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Access [to traditional gathering sites] was one of the issues that led to the formation of the Chia Café Collective, a grassroots organization of southern California tribal members and collaborators committed to the revitalization of Native culture with an emphasis on plants, foods, and medicines. The members of the collective come from a variety of tribal and nontribal communities. They conduct educational workshops about edible and medicinal plant use, advocate for the protection and restoration of California native plant environments, and provide opportunities for mentoring and apprenticeships for interested tribal youth. The Chia Café Collective has presented to high schools, universities, and nontribal community organizations, as well as tribal gatherings throughout southern California.

Each spring, the Malki Museum, located on the Morongo Reservation near Banning, California, holds its annual Agave Harvest and Roast. This event offers an opportunity to harvest, prepare, and taste agave hearts as they have been harvested and cooked for thousands of years by southern California’s Indigenous peoples. In addition to roasted agave hearts, cholla cactus buds, stinging nettles, acorn mush, and elderberry tea are typically on the menu. Members of the Chia Café Collective participate in the Malki agave roast and similar events that promote awareness of a traditional Indigenous plant diet, emphasize the health benefits of eating traditional foods, and advocate for a return to such a diet.

In working with tribes directly, the collective has cooperated with tribally run Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programs to promote cultural revitalization and in support of healthy nutrition initiatives to fight rising obesity and diabetes rates among Indigenous people. Craig Torres, a cofounder of the collective, speaks of “decolonizing the diet.” “Our palates have become so desensitized because of a lot of the processing that [modern] foods contain with the added white sugar and flour,” he says. The late Cahuilla elder Alvino Siva echoed Torres’s belief about modern foods. He believed that processed foods have ruined our sense of taste. In a discussion we had a few years ago, Siva stated that salt and sugar are so prevalent in modern food that we can no longer taste the subtle flavors of our traditional foods.

One approach Indigenous foods advocates have taken to the reintroduction of traditional foods is to create contemporary dishes that incorporate traditional Indigenous ingredients. These Indigenous “fusions” are a way to get people accustomed to the tastes and textures of Indigenous ingredients. The hope is that over time people will gradually incorporate more Indigenous ingredients into their diets.

In addition to returning to traditional foods, Barbara Drake, Tongva descendant and cofounder of the Chia Café Collective, advocates for a return to using native plants for teas and medicines. “Native plant gardens are popular now because of the droughts,” she asserts, “and people are learning that they can have [grow] medicines right in front of them. We encourage people to grow their own,” says Drake. However, members of the collective are clear on their message to novice plant enthusiasts. They do not encourage wild plant gathering and caution against their use as food or medicines except under the guidance of a knowledgeable person.

In The Ethnobotany Project: Contemporary Uses of Native Plants; Southern California and Northern Baja California, members of the collective warn of the federal, state, county, and city laws that govern the gathering of wild plants, but also caution readers about the plants themselves: “Some [plants] are toxic or have toxic parts and require knowledge that is not provided in this book—knowledge that was handed down through countless generations of Native people.”[15]

California Native plant expert Nicholas Hummingbird (Cahuilla/Apache) is founder and manager of Hahamongna Nursery in Pasadena, California. The nursery has under cultivation four dozen species of plants that are native to the Los Angeles Basin and surrounding hills. The nursery provides low-cost native plants for restoration, conservation, and park uses. Hummingbird warns that people should not take native plants for granted. “In our culture, we earn our knowledge, we earn our relationships … because then it’s valued more,” he stresses. “When you see our Indigenous people gathering, they’re doing so with a knowledge and a relationship of a thousand years. What we do enhances the very environment that we’re interacting with.” Hummingbird’s views are shared among many Native communities today. This contemporary belief is a reflection of the traditional concept of reciprocal obligation that was cited earlier, the ecological ethic that one gathers only what one needs but always leaves some for other beings.

Material originally published in Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover. Copyright © 2019 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

About the Author

Gerald Clarke is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and currently lives on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation. Clarke, an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, is a frequent lecturer on Native art, culture, and issues. He serves on the Cahuilla Tribal Council and participates in Bird Singing, a traditional form of singing that tells the cosmology of the Cahuilla people. Clarke is a visual artist whose work can be seen in numerous exhibitions as well as major museum collections. See his painting “Our Lady of San Jacinto” on the front cover of this issue and learn more about his work at www.geraldclarke.net.

NOTES

1. Lowell J. Bean, Mukat’s People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California, (University of California Press, 1972), 165.
2. M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4.
3. James Miller Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs (Los Angeles: Historic Record Co. 1915), 39.
4. Pacifica Historical Society, Portola Expedition, July 18, 1769, Diaries, 2017, https://pacificahistory.wikispaces.com/Portola+Expedition+July+18%2C+1769+Diaries.
5. “Past and Present Acorn Use in Native California,” Anthropology Museum, California State University, Sacramento, https://www.csus.edu/anth/museum/pdfs/Past%20and%20Present%20Acorn%20Use%20in%20Native%20California.pdf.
6. R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple, eds., The California Indians: A Source Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 239.
7. USDA NRCS National Plant Data Center, “USDA NRCS Plant Guide: Holly Leaf Cherry,” 2002-3, https://plants.usda.gov/plantguide/pdf/cs_pril.pdf.
8. Jan Timbrook, “Use of Wild Cherry Pits as Food by the California Indians,”Journal of Ethnobiology 2, no. 2 (1982), 172.
9. Kristin L. Zouhar, Pinus monophylla, in Fire Effects Information System (Missoula, MT: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory, 2001), http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/pinmon/all.html.
10. John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California; To Which Is Added a Description of the Physical Geography of California, with Recent Notices of the Gold Region from the Latest and Most Authentic Sources, Project Gutenberg, http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/gutenberg.org/9/2/9/9294/9294-h/9294-h.htm.
11. Anderson, Tending the Wild, 162.
12. Kent Lightfoot and Otis Parrish, California Indians and Their Environment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 225.
13. M. Kat Anderson and Michael J. Moratto, “Native American Land-Use Practices and Ecological Impacts,” in Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project: Final Report to Congress, vol. 2, Assessments and Scientific Basis for Management Options (Davis: University of California Centers for Water and Wildland Resources, 1996), 187.
14. Anderson and Moratto, “Native American Land-Use Practices,” 187.
15. Rose Ramirez and Deborah Small, The Ethnobotany Project: Contemporary Uses of Native Plants; Southern California and Northern Baja California (Self-published, 2015).

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Published in the Price-Pottenger Journal of Health and Healing
Winter 2020 – 2021 | Volume 44, Number 4
Copyright © 2021 Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, Inc.®
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