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6. Small Fields for Large Impacts on the Colorado Plateau
- University of Arizona Press
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85 6 Small Fields for Large Impacts on the Colorado Plateau “there’s nothing out there,” she said. One of my students from the East Coast was leaning her head against the warm window of the fifteen-passenger van as we traversed the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. She also wondered out loud how anyone could survive in this place. I believe that she was equally concerned about how she and her fellow students would survive should the group experience some misfortune. From most vantage points, the Colorado Plateau appears dry and desolate, and we were on our way to spend two weeks in the field camping for an Ethnobotany Field School. At first glance, the student’s concern and wonder seemed appropriate . The landscape appears very much like the scenes of desolate landscape marked by sandstone cliffs showcased in innumerable Hollywood movies and in nature programs. However, unlike the fantasies encouraged by Hollywood, the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, the southernmost segment of Utah, the southwest corner of Colorado, and the northwest portion of New Mexico house an incredible array of biocultural diversity stewarded today by resilient Native farmers, young Native activists, and dedicated individuals that think of this place as home. 86 eating the landscape On the surface of things, water is as scarce as the vegetation, although huge aquifers lie underneath most of the Plateau. During normal years, the land receives less than 10 inches of precipitation annually; and this comes in a bimodal pattern, meaning it comes in torrents during the summer monsoon season when washes temporarily become rivers and once dusty and washboarded roads transform into red-brown mud bogs. The other rainy period is during the winter when the female rain comes, as Navajo people refer to it, softly touching the thirsty land. Today, due to climate shifts, the Plateau is even drier. Somehow, despite the aridity, peoples have flourished and continue to flourish on this landscape. Over 10,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians, as anthropologists call these early ancestors , began to hunt, camp, and gather in the area. They camped around springs and followed the few watercourses, leaving their mark as chiseled and painted art on cliffs and large boulders. Later, beginning about 8,000 years ago, some people began to cultivate crops and were settling on the land, again in locations where water was present. By the time the first Spanish conquistadores were Figure 6.1 Navajo cornfield on an Ancestral Puebloan agricultural site; north of Winslow, Arizona. Small Fields for Large Impacts on the Colorado Plateau 87 scouting the region for possible gold in 1540, the Colorado Plateau had become a cultural and linguistic hot spot. Seven linguistic families were represented on the Plateau. Among these families, ten distinct languages are spoken, including Hopi, Navajo, Pai, Southern Paiute, Zuni, Keresan, Tewa, Towa, Apache, and Ute. The region has significance for linguistic diversity as well as being a beacon for American Indian linguistic survival. There remain approx imately 361,978 speakers of Native languages in the United States, and 51 percent of these speakers speak languages unique to the Colorado Plateau. The Plateau is also home to numerous plant and animal species, some of which are endemic only to the region. The current landscape differs from what it was when early Spanish explorers described grasses high enough to tickle the bellies of their horses. When one reads early accounts written by explorers such as those in the scouting parties of Coronado or the exploring expeditions of John Wesley Powell and James Ohio Pattie, one feels that these men experienced the land much like the ancestors of today ’s indigenous inhabitants did. They felt the land with their noses to the ground and recognized the abundance that can seem to be hidden. The late writer and activist Edward Abbey once suggested that the only way for a person to really experience the land is to move about it on hands and knees, getting it in one’s nostrils, under one’s fingernails, and in one’s food. My students and I managed to experience the Colorado Plateau much as Abbey suggested. After two weeks of camping on the sandy red soils, getting it in their food and in their eyes, and crushing sagebrush leaves between their fingers in order to inhale the pungent scent, the students were sad that the trip was over. There exist a diversity of biota and a heterogeneity on the Plateau that cannot be seen through a van window...