Members of the Amah Mutsun tribe will be identifying and quantifying food, medicine and basketry plants as part of a research initiative with Japanese and University of California, Berkeley partners.
The project, recently announced by the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, will focus on restoring natural landscapes at the Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve in Año Nuevo State Park and will study how native people burned landscapes to manage vegetation, enhance biodiversity and sustain a resilient indigenous community.
“It’s the first time that we know of anywhere on state land that state parks have been working with a tribe to restore it,” said Rob Cuthrell, a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility. “The key point is they’re collaborating with the tribe and they’re trying to take an approach that focuses more on traditional techniques.”
The collaboration between the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, Berkeley and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Japan will explore local small-scale food production as a possible alternative to the larger monoculture agriculture, which can contaminate soil and water and cause long-ranging damage to ecosystems. For Valentin Lopez, the president of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, the project work is personal.
“We’re also looking at how to bring back the food plants,” Lopez said. “Whenever the Spaniards came in, they thought the Native Americans had nothing to offer… but they didn’t realize we had over 1,000 years of studying plants and how to grow and propagate and manage the land.”
Lopez hopes to bring back food plants such as the “Indian” garlic, onion and various varieties of potatoes, so they can be used in recipes that will regain popularity not just within the tribe, but within the local community.
“We want to bring those back and introduce them to our diets,” he said.
The study will compare landscape management practices on the West Coast of North America with ones on the coast of Japan. The two regions share similar climates, vegetation, fauna and high levels of seismic activity, according to the research initiative’s project summary.
As part of the study, researchers will be looking at how Native Americans managed landscapes to keep the plants they needed growing. Researchers such as Cuthrell believe Native Americans periodically burned landscapes to remove woody vegetation and allow other grassland plants to flourish.
“The main thing that we’re focusing on is the types of plant and animal foods that people ate and how those plants and animals are connected to their landscape practices,” Cuthrell said.
In California, grass fires would have been caused by lightening and might have occurred naturally every 50 to 100 years, Cuthrell said. But native people likely burned the grasslands once every two to five years to clear out woody vegetation that might shade out some of the grassland plants that supported large populations of game animals or provided resources for basketry and food.
Since the landscape restoration work will occur at the Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve in Año Nuevo State Park, which is near houses, the traditional burning methods Native Americans used to maintain grasslands won’t be practical, Cuthrell said. Those participating in the research initiative will remove woody vegetation by hand, to imitate the effects of a grassland fire. They’ll also remove non-native plants, leaving wild bulbs such as garlic, onions and potatoes more places to grow.
“We’re not trying to bring back prescribed burning around there,” Cuthrell said.
The members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band are the living descendants of Mutsun and Awaswas speaking peoples who have continually occupied the greater Monterey Bay region, thriving for thousands of years and countless generations prior to European contact.
Archaeologists such as Cuthrell and Kent Lightfoot have been working with the tribe since 2007 to recover and analyze the remains of plants and animals used for food, crafting and construction up to 1,000 years ago, according to a press release from the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.
“We’re taking the archeological work that we’ve been doing and now were also trying to explore how that can affect the contemporary world,” Cuthrell said.
