Harvesting a Bountiful Desert

Michael Chiago artwork, part of the wayside image

Commissioned art with restricted use

For centuries, people have harvested plants for food, for medicine, and to make useful items for everyday living. Despite temperatures that can climb to 120º F, there is a diversity of plant species to be found in the Sonoran Desert. Many plants here have adapted to receiving only nine inches of rainfall a year. The rains peak twice: once in winter, and again in late summer.

Today Native Americans follow traditions of collecting desert resources passed down for centuries. Women still gather desert willow shoots, cattail, devils claw, yucca, and bear grass to make baskets.

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PDF of the wayside (16, 948 KB) is available.

 

• Community Harvest

  
  

  Joseph Joaquin of the Tohono O’odham Nation describes how everyone would help with planting and harvests.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS, movie outtakes, thanks to volunteer editor Jenise Cook

  Date created:

  10/14/2020

  Audio Transcript

  [Joseph Joaquin] We used to do that. The whole community would come together and help plant the fields from one end to the other. When it was harvest time they would come down again and harvest all the way down to the end of the community. Cause each one had their fields and that’s how people lived together. Shared many things. And those were taught to us way back then when our ancestors were doing these things. And it carried on to us.