A
43 A Acorn Complex. Forests of Quercus, Latin for the genus oak, are found in the western, southern, and eastern mountains of the Great Basin, but the acorn, the seed of this conifer, was a staple food only for the Washoe. According to their tribal history (Nevers 1976, 12–13), the Washoe obtained mah lung, “acorn,” on the ground in the Sierra Nevada in the fall. Intensive labor was required to process acorn, a hard nut transported in large conical-shaped baskets through relay teams to settlements in Washoe country. First, the outer shell had to be cracked open—on flat stone anvils with hammer stones. Next, to render acorn edible, they removed the reddish skin covering by sprinkling it with water, and then acorns were winnowed in another basket. When they finally dried, acorns were pulverized into fine flour in large bedrock mortars with pestles. With sifting baskets and “a special soaproot brush,” the Washoe then pulverized the coarse flour further. They also spent additional hours pouring fresh water through the (pulverized) acorn flour either on cedar boughs or while it was placed in clean sand near streams—a necessary step to remove the bitter-tasting tannic acid. The results were “acorn biscuits” obtained by ladling the gruel into tightly woven baskets containing cold water, where spoonfuls immediately congealed into desired nutritious, gelatinous dumplings. J. W. Haney (1992) argues that the spread eastward of what Catherine Fowler (1986b, 65–67) calls the “acorn complex” into the Great Basin across the Sierra Nevada from California was in effect a process of cultural change that anthropologists used to call “stimulus diffusion.” Indeed, Haney also suggests this food complex served as a template for the more widespread subsistence food complex once thought to have been older in (if not widely spread throughout) the Great Basin and reported by non-Indians in the “ethnographic present,” but which was recently shown to have (literally) taken root among diverse Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples only several hundred years ago (see Pinyon Complex; Grayson 2008, 11). Haney, in any event, hypothesizes that the “acorn food complex” originating in California and proliferating in the San Francisco Bay region three thousand years ago took root in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada two thousand years ago before it spread eastward into the Great Basin, arguably vis-à-vis the Washoe: “It is proposed here that use of acorns in subsistence systems of groups living in the Mono Basin–Long Valley region was similar to the role of pinion among most Great Basin populations. Acorns may have enhanced this procurement system since the acorn is a more dependable resource” (1992, 104). According to the Washoe history (Nevers et al. 1976, 12), there was a trail running from Squaw Valley to Sacramento Valley, then onto the “black oak groves” near the Tuolumne, Calaveras, and American Rivers , where the Washoe would gather acorns near Colfax and Auburn on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California. Along with the fact that the Washoe and Northern Paiute are known to have regularly exchanged the acorn in the recent past (see Trade; see also Downs 1966, 21–22; 44 a l l o t m e n t s Price 1980, 47; d’Azevedo 1986b, 474–75), Haney (1992) relates an account from a Long Valley Paiute in California (see Owens Valley Paiute) discussing their monthlong annual trek to gather this traditional food in the San Joaquin Valley, California. At the same time, Christopher Morgan would write about the Western Mono, a Great Basin people originating from the Owens Valley area, who abandoned their former reliance on pine nuts for the “California acorn economy” following their move and further changed “nearly every aspect of their economic, social, political, and even ideological structures” in the direction of that neighboring culture area (2010, 169). “Like the seeds of the Great Basin and the maize of the Southwest and Fremont land, acorns could take the population to new levels and brought fundamental change in life and place,” writes Steven Simms, despite the “high cost” that nevertheless had to be paid for reliance on acorns, a nutritious and storable albeit difficult to process staple food, which was “a major food for deer and elk, [hence] . . . as humans harvested more acorns, it [also] put great pressure on the dwindling herds” (2008a, 246; see Numic Spread). Allotments. The General Allotment Act was enacted by Congress in 1887. It called for the privatization of Native American lands on federal reservations. Individualized...
OR
Buy This Book in Print