Featured image is an illustration of the Camas plant by Steph Littlebird (artist, curator, writer, & registered member of Oregon’s Grand Ronde Confederated Tribes) for High Country News.
Mid-Quarter Self-Evaluation
To hold myself more accountable to my work, I’ll share my mid-quarter self-evaluation here. I find myself desperately wanting to share my goals and aspirations, but strangely embarrassed of aiming too far or seeming like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Perhaps this summary will serve more nicely than these long weekly posts.
Slowing down, catching up
Halfway through the quarter, I find my momentum slowing, as it often seems to. It seems absurd that this quarter is less stressful than the last two, but my days are so incredibly busy that I feel like I’m losing myself to work (whether it’s this internship, working in the library, working for the City, or research in Carri’s lab). I know that I only have a few weeks left, which is anxiety-inducing, bittersweet, and thrilling. Looking forward to the spring prairie blooms, this week’s Pasture Plant ID Walk, and Prairie Appreciation Day, which truly feels like a culmination of my Evergreen experience after missing out on the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly research I was supposed to assist with spring quarter 2020, I wanted to return to learning about Salish Sea prairies as Coast Salish cultural landscapes.
When I first began working with JBLM Fish and Wildlife two years ago, I learned that the Salish Sea prairies exist because of thousands of years of rotational cultural burning practices. The primary reason for clearing out fire-prone trees like Douglas fir was to leave open spaces for cultivating edible foods that thrived in sunlight and were easier to harvest without digging around dense forest understory and conifer roots. Garry oak savannas remained as oaks are much more fire-tolerant, especially when the flames in a prescribed burn don’t reach the crown of the tree. Since Camas is one of the most stunning prairie flowers, and a major Indigenous food staple (in some cultures secondary only to salmon), I focused on reading about Camas prairie cultivation and the culinary preparation of their bulbs. Other prairie foods include chocolate lily bulbs, bracken fern rhizomes, acorns from oak trees, and berries. Medicinal prairie plants include yarrow, kinnikinnick, and balsamroot.
- Common camas: Camassia quamash
- Giant camas: Camassia leichtlinii
- Whulshootseed: ReAufel
- Twana: Quamash or Qa’?w3b
- Lushootseed: cabidac
- Klallam: Ktoi
- Upper Chehalis: quwm or quwam“
There is ample proof from the records of early settlers and explorers themselves that Coast Salish people (as well as other Indigenous groups throughout the Pacific and Inland Northwest) were engaging in seasonal agricultural production in Camas gardens. Aside from setting regular low-intensity fires to clear the plots, Coast Salish harvesters aerated the soil with digging sticks, weeded, selectively harvested the largest bulbs, and pruned. Harvest happened during April-June, when the flowers are in bloom, to avoid mistaking the crop for the aptly named “death camas”, which is almost identical without the blossoms to tell them apart, and often grows interspersed with the edible Camas. Native Peoples also perfected a technique of roasting the bulbs in pits for at least an entire day (usually longer), as raw Camas bulbs are inedible due to their high concentration of the indigestible complex sugar inulin–which becomes flavorful, sweet, simple sugar fructose when broken down by heat. What does Camas taste like when cooked over low heat for a long period of time? I’ve read that it has flavors similiar to carmelized onion, baked pear, roasted garlic, prune, fig, or sweet chestnut. The texture is soft, somewhat potato-like. After the necessary initial slow cooking process, Camas can be mashed and blended with other ingredients, cut into chunks and pan-fried, dried for later re-hydration and consumption, made into a sweet spread, and probably almost anything else you could do with cooked yams or other sweet root vegetables. Here is a Camas cookbook from Kwiáht: Center for the Historical Ecology of the Salish Sea.
It’s important to note that despite the European and Euro-American settlers’ own observations of these practices, they were invested in building the narrative that Coast Salish tribes were hunter-gatherers only, as agricultural practices would indicate a cultured and advanced people in their eyes, and weaken the argument that Indigenous people were lesser. Ethnographers like Wayne Suttles have recorded the accounts of Native elders discussing intentional cultivation of Camas and other edible roots, and horticultural experiments have shown that the large Camas bulb yields observed by the likes of Vancouver and Lewis & Clark would not be possible without selective breeding for strains that divide and produce more edible biomass than their wild relatives. Despite this robust evidence for a distinctive, thriving Indigenous agroecological system, colonial land management practices like plowing, livestock agriculture, and suppression of fire spelled doom for the vast majority of Salish Sea prairie landscapes.
Although the physical evidence goes back only 200 years, [Madrona] Murphy suspects that Native Americans cultivated camas for over 2,000. “The Coast Salish are frustrating to archaeologists,” she says. “A lot of their culture was very compostable, so there aren’t many beautiful artifacts.” Instead, there is a rich biological record of their diet: middens stippled with shell and bone that sit under picnic tables at state parks, or meadows of wild onion growing beneath young pear trees, or relic camas gardens, tucked in shadow.
from “In search of camas, a Native American food staple” by Eric Wagner in High Country News
Despite the loss of traditional lands and 150 years of Euro-American cultural suppression, Coast Salish peoples are maintaining and revitalizing First Foods cultivation, harvest, and culinary traditions alongside cultural prescribed fire practices. There is a rich diversity of efforts within Indigenous communities, as well as in collaboration with non-Native community partners. From cultural exchange events with traditional pit cooks (as seen in the photo above), to non-profit collaborations like GRuB’s Tend Gather and Grow curriculum, Kwiáht’s Camas garden research, and Ecostudies Institute’s prescribed fire training program, to Indigenous symposiums such as The Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ: Indigenous Foods and Ecological Knowledge at University of Washington, one can hope that tending Camas can become a practice and way of life which all current-day Salish Sea residents can respect, take part in, and celebrate.
A long time ago in a village on the other side of the mountains, there was a time of great hunger. There was no food to be found – no game to hunt, no plants to gather. The People were very hungry. The elders and the children were crying from the hunger, but there was nothing to give them.
There was a grandmother who heard her grandchildren crying because they were hungry. She was so sad that she had nothing to give them. She was so sad she left the village and went up a hill nearby. She went to the top of the hill and sat down.
She began to cry. She cried and she cried for her grandchildren. As she cried, she began to sink into the ground. She kept crying and was sinking deeper into the earth. After a while she was gone. She was under the earth.
Her grandchildren, a boy and a girl, missed their grandmother. They wondered where she was. They began to look for her. They climbed the hill.
As they reached he top of the hill, the granddaughter said, “Grandma is under the ground! I can feel her!”
The children dug into the ground. They dug and dug and they found camas bulbs. Grandmother had become camas and now the children and the people had food to eat.
Camas is a main food of the Native people of the Plateau region. And that is all.
Camas: A Plateau Native Story, as told by Roger Fernandes, Lower Elwha S’Klallam Tribe
Tuesday 4/26 & Wednesday 4/27
Tuesday I worked remotely, mostly reviewing the South Sound FarmLink database. On Wednesday I talked with Nora about what would be most useful in making it an effective reference system. I think that eventually, a relational database will be very helpful for ease of matching (especially if there are more participants in the program), but for now, the Excel database needs to be easily searchable and sortable, with common categories that link to detailed forms. There also needs to be a more legible tracking system for acreage preserved, acreage matched, total matches sent, and total matches made.
Nora showed me a custom form that a couple seeking land sent her a few weeks ago, and it seems like a great template to replicate moving forward. It is relatively simple, and more flexible and realistic in terms of making matches between landowners and land seekers. For example, rather than simply asking “How much land are you looking for?” and an answer being “20 acres”, which may leave a land seeker without potential matches for longer than they’re willing to wait, this new form could ask the same question with answers under “dream scenario” (20 acres), “acceptable” (10-19 acres) and “deal breakers” (less than 10 acres). Using this kind of questionnaire will ensure that land seekers can be sent potential matches that would still be a good fit, if not their most ideal, and help them identify where they’re willing to compromise and where they can’t. I plan to design a similar form for landowners as well.
I’m hoping that someone applies soon for the open Veterans Conservation Corps position that will take on FarmLink enhancement and expansion work. If I were eligible I’d apply in a heartbeat! This initial planning may make their job a little easier, and I hope the program grows in size and success with their work.
On Wednesday I was able to join friends in the campus community garden for volunteer hours in the relatively short time between leaving the TCD office and working my shift at the library. We prepared and planted a bed in the co-curricular plot with onion and carrot seeds and nasturtium starts. It was great to finally make time to get back into the garden and get my hands into the muddy soil!
Thursday 4/28
Today I got to join a plant identification pasture walk at Violet Prairie Preserve near Tenino, lead by Sarah Hamman, Director of Science at Ecostudies Institute! Many of the people who attended are affiliated with the newly formed SW WA Grazing Association (see my Week 1 post to learn more about the association in my notes from the meeting). It was a fun event where I really got to stretch my rudimentary botany knowledge beyond its limits. Grass identification is incredibly challenging but interesting. The preserve itself is right next to Center for Natural Land Management’s Violet Prairie Seed Farm, and was recently purchased by The Conservation Fund to be held until Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife has the funding to permanently establish the Violet Prairie Wildlife Area Unit.
These kinds of events are my favorite because we get to build and find connections with each other–my roommate did an internship through Evergreen working with Sarah on prairie plant conservation, and Sarah and the other Ecostudies Institute folks remembered them fondly, all but making me promise to bring Lou along to Prairie Appreciation Day. I also was happy to meet Cassie from US Fish & Wildlife Partners Program again (check out the TCD podcast episode “Frogs on Farms” featuring an interview with her), and make some new friends including a former Greener who recently started a sheep farm in Nisqually. More and more I’m growing to appreciate how small, interconnected, and welcoming this community is even to someone like me who spends my time in the background listening and learning. Of course, getting to see behind the scenes the challenges of working between and across organizations, and the disparities between beginning and older farmers, for example, shows that all is not perfect, but events like this remind us all of common goals and interests. It’s important to join together and learn more about the land that we all care for.
Bibliography
Barsh, R., & Murphy, M. (2016, April 26). Coast Salish Camas Cultivation. HistoryLink. https://www.historylink.org/file/11220
Carney, M., Tushingham, S., McLaughlin, T., & D’Alpoim Guedes, J. (2021). Harvesting strategies as evidence for 4000 years of camas (Camassia quamash) management in the North American Columbia Plateau. Royal Society Open Science, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202213
Krohn, E., & Harvey, M. (2020, July 22). Camas – Teachings in reciprocity. Prairie Appreciation Day. https://www.prairieappreciationday.org/2020/07/22/camas-teachings-in-reciprocity/
KWIÁHT – Ancient Gardens and Camas. (2021). Kwiáht: Center for the Historical Ecology of the Salish Sea. http://www.kwiaht.org/gardens-camas.htm
Wagner, E. (2012, August 15). In search of camas, a Native American food staple. High Country News. https://www.hcn.org/issues/44.13/in-search-of-camas-a-native-american-food-staple
1 Pingback