Just like a research library, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, had its stacks. In the back rooms, behind the colorful, perfectly illuminated exhibits were fluorescent-lighted, floor-to-ceiling battleship-gray industrial shelves filled not with books but with almost every kind of thing that the California Indians ever made. Each artifact was numbered and, in fact, a photograph and data on each could be accessed online. But there was nothing like standing there among them. There were baskets, ropes, stirring sticks, poles, traps, bows and arrows, wooden pillows, hoop and lance games, snowshoes, boats, skirts, and coil after coil of the stems that the Indians used to fashion them all. It was a treasure house. It was clear at a glance that their lives had been every bit as rich as ours, only their home in the world had almost entirely been made of wood.
In one aisle, we came on some odd ceramic cones. “What are these?” I asked the curator, Natasha Johnson.
“Pots,” she said matter-of-factly.
I stopped short. They look like ceramic top hats, minus the brims. They were perhaps the ugliest pots I had ever seen.
She guessed what I was thinking. “Most of the California Indians were not very good at pots,” she said. “In fact, many didn’t even try them.”
“Why not?” I asked. “What did they use for storage? What did they cook in?”
“Baskets,” she replied, with a tone that suggested how woefully ignorant I was.
“Baskets!?” I exclaimed. I thought that with my heavy wheezing and my chest cold I must have misheard her. “For cooking?”
“Of course,” she answered. “They were watertight. They’d put in the finely ground acorn, add water, and throw in hot rocks or ceramic boiling ‘stones.’ The acorn boiled and could be cooked into a thick soup or a porridge, or rolled into biscuits.”
She smiled gently, as though to encourage this knowledge to sink in.
The museum was located in Kroeber Hall, named for the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who had been responsible for the rescue of much of the material in the museum and who with his students and his acolytes had collected every bit of information they could about the indigenous cultures. But not an acorn biscuit toss away was the Bancroft Library, named for the noted historian George Bancroft, who had opined that the California Indians—who were derisively known even among us 1950s California kids as Digger Indians—had been stupid and lazy, “sunk almost to the darkness of the brute.”
What was I to make of the fact that they had little or no pottery? (A friend of mine, when I mentioned this, asked, “I wonder what got in their way? Not enough clay?”) And indeed what were generations of historians to make of the fact that they had no agriculture, nor when the white man first arrived did they show even the stirrings of a wish to grow crops? For many, these facts were prime exhibits to prove the Indians’ stupidity and backwardness. They simply lived off the land, with no inkling of tomorrow. Pottery and agriculture would have been signs of advancement.
But there was another school of thought: What if the tribes had had no agriculture, because they hadn’t needed one? Each small tribe had lived intentionally in a vertical economy—that is, a place where the people had at least two different landscapes to harvest, each with its own community of plants and animals. One was usually higher than the other, hence the name. It might be a seacoast and a hill range, a valley and uplands, low hills backed by higher ones. This stack of ecosystems yielded each group an unusually large variety of seasonally available plant and animal foods, medicines, and craft resources. This was true even in the deserts, where a spring of water harboring the native Washington palm tree centered a culture that branched out in the surrounding high desert hills. Who needs corn, beans, and squash? Early in his career, Kroeber had thought so, before Carl Ortwin Sauer convinced him that it was California’s summer dry climate that kept Indians from growing corn. That California now annually harvests more than 700,000 acres of corn should put that notion to rest. Though the Indians might not have grown that quantity, they could easily have irrigated riverside fields.
The fact is that the California Indians created the most affluent hunter-gatherer culture that the world has even known. They did it over the course of twelve thousand years, and it was only a little long in the tooth when it was wantonly destroyed by the incoming Europeans. Kroeber counted one hundred Indian languages in California, 20 percent of all the languages then in North America, and on less than 2 percent of the land. There were no great cities and no great warlords. The average tribe numbered less than a thousand people, and there were more than 275,000 Indians living in California, a greater population density than anywhere else north of Mexico. There were indeed elites, who gave the feasts and directed the larger projects and were certainly not altruists and were often self-serving and corrupt; but in general, this enormous number of polities lived well with one another and with the world they inhabited. Their diet came from more than five hundred animals and plants. Acorns were a staple for many, and for coastal tribes, so were mussels and salmon. Deer was an important resource, but so was roasted grasshopper. Clover was their favorite fresh salad herb, but they harvested dozens of seeds, bulbs, and corms. In the desert, they had mesquite beans, yucca, Washington palm. If one food source failed, there were half a dozen more to back it up.
Baskets made the house a home. A photograph taken in 1930 by B. F. White shows a Karuk woman with her family’s baskets. There are forty-one of them: some are small enough to twirl on the end of your finger, others are big enough to sit in, and none are the immoveable granary storage baskets that could fit a grown person inside. (They would have been very hard to bring to the photo site.) There were baskets for burden, to carry your nut or bulb or seed harvest or your family’s goods. There were baskets to haul water, baskets for cooking, baskets to store food and medicine, baby baskets—two for each baby, one for newborns and one for later—and basket cradles. There were basket seed beaters to sweep the ripe seeds off the tidytips, the red maids, the wild oats, the popcorn flowers, the balsam root, owl’s clover, goldfields, and fireweed; baskets to collect them in; and baskets to parch the seeds over the fire. There were baskets to winnow the fine-ground acorn, catching the good flour in its ribs and leaving the hunks to be swept back into the bedrock-pounding mortar with a soap-root brush. There were sifting baskets. There were basket trays and baskets to serve supper on, feast baskets for when the guests came. There were scoop baskets to measure out ingredients, and dipper baskets to get a drink of water. There were baskets to place on a sand bed to let the acorn meal leach, bottomless baskets to pen the flour and keep it from blowing away. There were baskets for storing foods in the house and large baskets, often protected on stands under trees, for long-term storage. There were baskets for hats, baskets for cages, baskets for traps, baskets for fish weirs, and even basketlike sandals. Of course, there were also baskets to hold presents and baskets that were gifts themselves. A woman’s bride price—paid to her family—was doubled if she was a good basket maker.
A Karuk woman with a selection of the baskets she had made for her household.
The women used shrub and tree shoots, herbaceous stems, flower stalks, and roots to make the baskets: sourberry and redbud, hazel, deer brush and manzanita, blue brush and willow, black oak and big-leaf maple, bear grass, tule reed and bracken fern, spruce and redwood roots. Seventy-eight different plants went into the making of baskets in California. This work—a deft and often intricately patterned weave of warp and weft that Kat Anderson in her wonderful Tending the Wild compared to the playing of a concert pianist—required an astronomical number of long straight stems, or “sticks.”
Today, when an Indian woman goes out to gather materials, she says she is going “to pick sticks.” It takes between 500 and 700 sourberry sticks to make a cradle board, 188 sticks of buckbrush to make a seed beater, 3750 deer grass stalks to make a medium-sized cooking basket, and 35,000 stalks to weave a forty-foot-long deer net. It could take 10,000 sticks to make half a dozen average baskets, and if there were twenty-five basket weavers in a given village, they would likely use more than 250,000 sticks each year. And this count does not even reckon with the sticks for other daily uses: for arrows, spears, harpoons, game pieces, fishnets, flutes, clapper sticks, cooking tongs, fire drills, hot-rock-lifting sticks, and stirring sticks.
Each stem, whether it was woody or herbaceous, had to be long, straight, unbranched, and flexible. A naturally growing, undisturbed plant produces almost none of these. Where were the weavers going to get enough such sticks for a single year, never mind for a thousand? Obviously, they would have coppiced them. Cutting low, they would have got back the next year exactly the sort of stems they needed. This was true for herbaceous stems too, since cutting back removed all the dead, diseased, and dying stems, leaving a clean base from which to sprout again. But how much labor would it have taken to cut the number of plants required? They found a better way.
The very first European visitors noticed it right away, though they had no idea what it was for. In October 1542, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, commander of the first European fleet to reach Alta California, saw what appeared to be wild fires burning up and down the coast near present-day Santa Monica. He named the place Bahía de los Fumos, or Smokes Bay. More than half a century later, once more in October, Sebastián Vizcaíno, sailing coastwise on a mission to locate safe harbors on the California coast, observed continual burning in the vicinity of what is now San Diego. He reported that “the Indians made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that at night it looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky was overcast.” Later land expeditions often found themselves short of fodder because as Father Juan Crespi repeatedly noted during the 1772 Portolá trek to what is now San Francisco, the Indians had recently burned the landscape, leaving nothing for miles that a horse or pack mule could nibble on.
A century later, naturalists suspected that the landscape they crossed had been formed by fire. John Muir commented on the parklike quality of Sierra woodlands: “The inviting openness . . . is one of their most distinguishing characteristics. The trees of all the species stand more or less apart in groves, or in small irregular groups, enabling one to find a way nearly everywhere, along sunny colonnades and through openings that have a smooth, parklike surface.” The great California botanist Willis Jepson observed the same thing about the valley oaks in the Central Valley. Widely spaced, magnificently tall and wide, and of strong bearing, the valley oaks were so regularly spaced and the ground below them so clear that he called them “oak orchards.” He despaired of ever detailing the history of their formation, but he wrote, “it is clear that the singular spacing of the trees is a result of the annual firing of the country.”
Fire coppice. Who knows in what deep of time it was begun by the California Indians, and it stopped only when the white man prohibited it. It is now estimated that the Indians burned annually an average of 7,000 to 18,000 square miles, or about 6 to 16 percent of the state. These were not large, intense conflagrations, but slow and steady ground fires, and they likely comprised selected patches of the country, not wholesale swathes. The fires probably were set on the same patch every one to five years. Fire needs something to work on. Often, people had to wait a little longer than they might have liked to, because not enough plant material had grown back to support the burn. Usually, the fires were set in autumn, just after the harvest of coppice shoots, though they might be set in spring, if the intention were to suppress shrubs in favor of herbaceous plants. They might be set in open country, in chaparral, or even in oak or conifer woodlands.
The Indians were skillful fire managers. Not only did they consider wind, temperature, rainfall, and time of year, but they were also good at turning the fire in the direction they wanted, by piling brush along the desired path. They aimed their fires, often so that they would eventually reach another patch that had burned the previous year. When the fire reached that place, it found too little fuel and so burned itself out. Sometimes, they would burn from the edges into a center. When they did so, they were often not only opening the country and coppicing their basket plants, but also driving deer or rabbits, or roasting a few thousand grasshoppers. Lois Conner Bohna, a fine Chukchansi-Mono basket maker, visited the Martu in the Australian outback, an aboriginal people who still burn. “Seen from the air,” she recalled, “their land looked like a patchwork quilt.” She thought that her own Sierra foothills once looked much the same.
Getting long, straight, slender, and flexible fresh bear grass shoots, tule reeds, sourberry sprouts, and redbud sticks was not the only benefit of burning. It also killed unwanted plants in forest areas, stimulated mature trees to sprout from the base, caused a fresh crop of edible herbaceous plants like clover, stimulated the seeds of fire followers like redbud to bring new plants, increased the fruiting of nut plants like hazel, renewed the growth of berry plants, killed ticks and other pests, and attracted large numbers of game animals to feed in the tender resprouting land. Before burning, a place might show fourteen species growing as ground covers; after burning, the number jumped to eighty.
Early visitors to the Indian territories often noted the smoke and the burning. The second thing they almost always commented upon was the abundance of game animals. In fact, when I studied history in the 1960s, we were taught that the Europeans had come from country so exhausted that they wildly exaggerated the richness of the New World flora and fauna. When he stopped in San Diego Bay, Cabrillo reported, “There are large savannahs, and the grass is like that of Spain. . . . They saw some herds of animals like cattle [likely, in fact, pronghorn antelopes], which went in droves of a hundred or more, and which from their appearance, from their gait, and the long wool, looked like Peruvian sheep.” Thirty years later, Sir Francis Drake agreed: “Infinite was the company of very large and fat Deere, which wee saw by thousands, as wee supposed in a heard; besides a multitude of Conies, by farre exceeding them in number.” The French Comte de La Perouse thought the land of “inexpressible fertility,” and a young boy who had come to live among the Yokuts wrote of “thousands of band-tailed pigeons in fights that would sometimes block out the sun.” Otto von Kotzebue, the captain of a Russian ship in the far north of California, remarked, “An abundance of deer large and small, are to be met with all over the country, and geese, ducks and cranes on the banks of the rivers. There was such a superfluity of game, that even those among us who had never been sportsmen before, when once they took the gun into their hands, became as eager as the rest.”
In fact, these accounts were not exaggerated, but misattributed. The abundance was real, not imagined. It was not, however, the fruit of a virgin land, but of a country that had been skillfully managed and maintained through the work of its human inhabitants for at least 2500 years. (I choose that number because it is the current estimate for the antiquity of intensive oak culture in California, though tending of the whole spectrum of plants and animal resources is far older than that.) The burning made a constantly changing succession of ecotones—edges between habitats—where a procession of different species lived and thrived. It took the already diverse resources offered by a tribe’s vertical economy and increased them by an order of magnitude. It made the hunter-gatherer life as secure, healthful, and affluent as it has ever been. It was the opposite of current First World urban life. We get the smallest number of staple foods from a worldwide array of suppliers, with little concern for how those suppliers treat the land, and as cheaply as we can. The California Indians got as many products as they could from as near as they could whenever they were ripe, and spent their time (their kind of money) keeping their sources in good order and preparing to use them. Indeed, every tribelet had at least one legend that told how when the people stopped caring for and giving thanks for what they had, the human race was destroyed.
“Plants want to be used,” said Bohna’s aunt. “If you don’t use them, they disappear.” That did not mean you had to plant them yourself. A larger community was in charge of that. A Mono woman was asked if she ever planted oaks. “I’d be dead before they were grown,” she answered. “Let the blue jays do the planting. It’s their job.” That said, every tribe that had acorns paid great attention to the care of their oaks. When a group of foresters and a Forest Service botanist went with Bohna to look at a thirty-acre grove of black oaks in the foothills, the botanist said, “If I didn’t know better, I would have said this was an orchard.”
“You hit the nail on the head,” answered Bohna.
“Well, this can’t be man-made,” the botanist retorted.
“My mother, her mother, and her mother’s mother lived here, and acorn was their main food,” said Bohna. “The oak trees have been nurtured, have been cultivated since they were little. This was my great-grandmother’s orchard.”
Burning was key to the care of oaks, and it happened in the autumn of the year, just before the harvest. The fire had many purposes. Acorns infested with weevils and other pests usually fall before the main crop does, and the pests overwinter as pupae in the ground. The fire was an effective pesticide, turning the infested acorns to ash and heating the ground enough to kill the pupae. As a Shasta named Klamath Jack put it, “Fire burn up old acorn that fall on ground. Old acorn on ground have lots worms; no burn old acorn, no burn old bark, old leaves, bugs and worms come more every year. . . . Indian burn every year just same, so keep all ground clean, no bark, no dead leaf.”
The burn did many other things. It culled the seedlings of unwanted competitor plants, like the bull pines that in the foothills now drive the oaks to grow too high, fighting for the light. It made more water available to the oak roots, just as happens in an apple orchard floor. It gave a small fertilizer boost to the roots. The burn had to be carefully controlled so it didn’t damage the oaks—particularly if the grove was of the sensitive tan oak—but it was a good thing if the flames caused a few sprouts at the base of the tree. Basal black oak sprouts in particular tolerated rapid heating and so were prized as stirring sticks and rock pickers, for putting the hot rocks into the basket and taking them out.
Finally, fire cleared the ground for the harvest. Then came the knocking. From the ground or from a perch in each tree, someone would hit the oaks’ branches with a stick, dislodging the almost ripe acorns and breaking the smallest branches. It was a form of rough pollarding, because the small broken stems would ramify and sprout back the following year, spreading the tree’s crown and in theory increasing the harvest. (You had to be careful if you were knocking trees in the red oak group, since they mature their acorns in two years, not one, and you did not want to destroy the coming crop.) The acorns fell on the clear ground, where they could be harvested quickly. This was not just a matter of efficiency but of protecting the crop. Blue jays, woodpeckers, and pigeons also had a strong interest in acorns. An industrious scrub jay can grab four hundred acorns in an hour. The knocking also lightened the stems, making them less liable to break under winter snows. If you asked a participant why they were doing it, however, they may well have answered with what they had been taught: “Knocking wakes the tree.” It was a way to keep up the community formed by the people and the oaks. In almost every place, before the new crop was eaten, a sample was offered ceremonially in thanksgiving.
Many living California Indians—Bohna included—claim that their forebears got a reliable harvest almost every year from their oak groves. “They call me a liar when I say that,” she remarked with a frown. For one thing, the Indians often had more than one species of oak, so a poor year for one might be a mast year for another, but the important thing was the care. Untended, apples too are alternate bearers, with a heavy crop one year and little or no fruit the next, but with clean culture, pruning, fertilizing, water, and care to keep the sun coming into the bearing branches, most apples can be coaxed into annual bearing. The Indians treated their oaks in the same way. It would not be that surprising if they had had the same result.
For more than half a century, the Mono, the Chukchansi, and all the other surviving tribes have not been allowed to burn. Even after the white man came, for a time, it was still common to burn in the autumn. Cattle and sheep men, who summered their beasts in the high country and who often hired Indians to cowboy, burned the meadows and surrounding hills when they brought the animals down in the fall. That way, they were assured of new grass for the coming year. Then, it all stopped. Fire suppression became and remained the ruling creed.
The land began to change. In the Indian view, it began to die. Without the active relationship between people and plants, both suffered. The meadows—even big ones like Jackass and Beasore in the high country near where Bohna lives—have begun to fill in with lodgepole pines and with other pioneer trees and scrub. Hillside grasslands have turned to forest. Oak groves have been invaded by bull pine and other tall fast growers, forcing them to grow higher to compete and so making the acorns less reachable. Acorn weevil and acorn worm now take a large proportion of the acorn crop—since they are not controlled by burning—and the trees have returned to alternate bearing. The sourberry, the redbud, and the other stick makers no longer offer a fresh crop of sticks every year or two. They have become, said Bohna, a useless mess, full of deadwood, lateral branches, cankers, and gray and colorless wood. Without burning, the soap root—a bulb that had wiry hairs, and made a fine household brush—no longer gets hairy. “They are as bald as a cue ball,” she sighed. The deer grass is moldy, and a whole plant yields only one or two useful stems. The tall stems of blue and black oaks are pockmarked with knots of parasitic mistletoe. It is not an invasive, not a new problem. It is becoming a serious issue now only because it is not controlled by fire.
We went for a walk on land that had belonged to Bohna’s grandparents. She and her husband had just fenced it and were building a house and barn there. She took me out looking for a stick of redbud long enough for her to demonstrate how to split it. First we passed a sourberry, a lump of shrub in the landscape with small light green oak-lobed leaves. She had cut it several years ago with a chain saw to get sticks for a baby basket, but since then it had grown into a rat’s nest of branching, intersecting stems, some living and some dead. She broke off a stem and held it toward my nose. “Smell that,” she said. The other name for the plant is skunkbush, and it is a name well given. When you work with sourberry, the first thing you have to do is peel the bark off it. She uses a piece of obsidian or a sharp knife. You have to reach out and draw the tool toward you along the stick, again and again. If you go back and forth, you scar the stick.
“I saw a friend last week in Coarsegold,” she said. “ ‘Boy, have you been peeling sourberry!’ I told her.
“ ‘No I haven’t!’ she answered. She paused and reddened. ‘Or maybe I have . . . but I took a bath after.’
“ ‘Honey, you’ve still got some on you somewhere.’ ”
Bohna was not only rich in knowledge and experience. She was also a born tale teller. Every time we thought we had finished talking, she started up again. A village life materialized around us as we walked through a landscape now long disused. You could see how, absent conquest, it might have persisted. “It used to be so open here,” she said. “My aunt Rosie said it was so open you couldn’t find a place to pee without somebody seeing you.”
She pointed to three tall dead digger pines among a thick grove of tall trees. “All those trees are dying,” she said, “hundreds of thousands of them.” Like so many pines in North America, they are dying from infestations of boring beetles. “What would your people have done about those beetles?” I asked.
“They never would have been there in the first place,” she responded. “They don’t belong.” Fire would have kept them down. (It would likely also have prevented the recent outbreak of boring beetles that has killed millions of conifers in the West and in Canada.) “Those trees are overgrowth,” she continued, “like parasites on the land.”
Bohna thinks that the uncontrolled growth of the pines is one cause of the droughts that trouble the foothills. “Fire and water go together,” she said. “If you don’t have fire, you don’t have a lot of water.” The roots of the big pines compete for water, drying the ground. In winter, the closed canopy catches falling snow, and a lot of it evaporates instead of reaching the dirt. When snow or rain does get to the bottom, it hangs up in a deep layer of duff. Again, a proportion evaporates before it gets into the ground. “Water’s not going into the soil where it belongs,” she said. The same thing happens in the big meadows higher in hills, so they no longer soak up the water like a sponge and trickle it downhill.
She showed me a dry creek near which a small patch of bracken fern grew. “This fern grows higher up in the hills,” she remarked. “I think my aunties may have brought it and planted it here.” Why? “The black threads in the acorn-sifting basket I showed you, that’s bracken fern,” she said. “But the roots are rust color when you dig them. You have to dye them black.” She had a favorite method, she said. She put acorn shells and rusty nails in a pot and boiled them together. Then she sat the pot on the back of the stove for a week. “It gets blacker every day,” she said with pleasure. “Dip the coils of bracken in, and they go jet black. Permanently. That’s my white-man way to dye fern root.” Many plants are endemic to California. Not bracken fern. It is one of the five most common plants in the world. The rhizomes can spread over an area larger than a football field. If it is regularly burned, a single clone can live for a thousand years.
When she was a child, Bohna ate acorn almost every week, but her mother had eaten it every day. Her mother’s mother, Hazel Helen Harris, was born in a cedar bark house in 1910. For most of her adult life, she would spend a whole day pounding and sifting acorn to a fine powder, then another day leaching and cooking it. She cooked it in a basket that held about five gallons, enough to feed her family of six for a week. She put in the ground meal and added water. Then she put one hot rock in the basket at a time. “It’s a volcanic explosion when the first rock goes in,” said Bohna. “The acorn boils right in the basket.” She might make yumana, a thin mush about the consistency of chocolate milk. More rocks and more boiling turned it into ikiba, a mush more like a pudding. With a little more cooking, the paste got thick enough to make water biscuits, conowoy. She used a small basket to dip out a dollop of mush at a time, then ladled on cold water and rolled the mass into ready-to-eat biscuits. “That way, you could clean the big basket right away,” Bohna said. “It didn’t stay nasty with acorn the whole week.” When someone was sick or too old to make their own, Bohna’s grandma would sometimes double up, making ten gallons instead of five.
Bohna showed me where soap root grew. “I can still get good soap root if I try,” she said in passing. “Anybody who has any in their garden and uses a weed eater on it will do. For some reason, the cutting helps the hair grow on the bulbs.” She showed me a patch of sedge, an important warp material in almost every basket. “If you don’t cut it down every year,” she explained, “you lose it.” We walked by some thorny buckbrush, with pale green leaves the shape of mouse ears: it was good for the warp of baby baskets, if it was well burned.
We passed some poor-looking redbud and made for the new fence that marked the edge of the property. It had been built in the spring. She suddenly sped up and her boots clacked on the rocks. “Look at that!” she exclaimed. “This is beautiful! I mean, look at this thing! Fine and straight!” Where they had cut down redbud with a chain saw to make room for the fence, it had sprouted back with incredible vigor. There were wonderful rust red stems six or even seven feet long, with no branching or only one branch. “I’ve got to tell my friends about this,” she breathed. “The thing about a baby basket is you can’t splice in the middle of the basket. If you’re doing an arrow design, you start in the middle, and you’ve gotta have a stick long enough to go clear out to the edge and wrap around!” These were just long enough. She was delighted.
Now, as the year wound to its end, was the time to cut redbud. It would hold its color if you did. If you waited until January to cut it, you might find the red bark sloughed right off. “Usually, I’d cut these and cover them up with a tarp and let them sit for a few days before I split them,” she said. She cut off a six-foot piece and whittled the fat end flat with her knife. Then, to my complete surprise. she put the cut end in her mouth.
Kat Anderson had compared a basket maker to a concert pianist; Bohna was an orchestra conductor. She held her head up high—one-third of the stick’s fat end between her four front teeth. Bringing her two hands to her mouth, she took two more thirds of the stick’s butt, one between each forefinger and thumb. Then, precisely like the conductor calling the orchestra to attention, she slowly spread her hands in what looked like a gesture of welcome. As she did so, the stick split into three nearly equal pieces, their lengths extending as she pulled her hands apart. At one point, she tucked the end of one of the three split stems beneath one arm. The other dangled free. She brought her hands back to the center of the stick, just at the point where it was splitting, and pulled gently and evenly again, the third end still in her mouth.
As she was pulling one stick into three basket fibers, she kept telling me what she was doing. I had trouble keeping up, because she was speaking through clenched teeth. “You wan the budts on the outsie,” she mumbled, “ ’cause you’re gonna split dow through the muddle of thm.” She closed her eyes. “The truck is ta pall evnly,” she continued. “When you git dow hur, you gotta be reayiy caful. You want it exacly in holf.”
As she neared the thin end of the stick, she said that she usually did this with her eyes closed, or while watching a movie. It was easier to concentrate if you didn’t focus on the visuals. The idea was to make each strand of precisely the same width, no fat spots, no skinny spots. You never took a knife to it until you were ready to weave. Then you could cut off the buds. She reached the end, and the stick came apart into three nearly equal threads. “Once, you know how to do this,” she went on, “you’re better off not looking at it. ’Cause my thumb tells me. It’ll tell me if I’m pulling too much.” Once she was done, she had to go back and split each thread again the same way, until she had pieces of the thickness the basket needed. When they died, the women of California often had a notch in their front teeth, where they had held sticks to split them.
How much intelligent work went just into making the strands for a basket. And then she had to weave it, into different shapes and sizes, some flat, some cupped, some deep, some shallow, some waterproof, some sifters, some taller than a standing child, some with straps to carry, some hooded and cradled to hold a baby, some to catch a salmon, some to snare a rabbit, some to ladle water. If there was patterning on the basket—a repeating pattern of circles, or lightning bolts, or rattlesnakes, or people—she had to figure out ahead of time how many stitches went between each figure, so the pattern worked out right. “My grandmas were mathematicians,” said Bohna. “Say they wanted a pattern of people around the bowl. They had to see how many stitches the widest part would take, then count the couple thousand stitches in the first whorl beneath where they were going to go. They divided one into the other, and so found out how many people would fit. I use a calculator. They did it in their heads.”
But it must have been so much work. So must it have been to grind acorn with a stone that weighed twelve pounds. Their pounding stone was usually buried with them, and some of their baskets. The rest were ritually burned.
Was this a hard life that we should be glad to be done with? Fire needs something to work on. So does love. The baskets and the life they made could be ill done, haphazardly finished. The makers were doubtless often competitive, trying to do outdo one another, or sloughing off, doing perfunctory work. But here in the making and the working with one another were the opportunities for love. And the love made its own sign: a meal that might be quickly eaten but with lasting thanks, or a basket that lived as long as its maker.
And they worked less hard than we do. They worked fewer hours, and were not often worried about where the food or the rent would come from. They had time for festival, time to sit around the fire, time to tell stories, time to play games, time to give thanks. One remarkable thing about the Hearst Museum stacks is how many toys and games are among the artifacts. Maybe the California Indians were smarter than we are. Their regular burning avoided the destructive wildfires that plague the state today. Belatedly, in the twenty-first century, even the Forest Service has come round to the notion that a regular burn is good not only for preventing wildfires but also for creating the most diverse and healthy landscapes. The Karuk have begun to burn again, and they are teaching others. The increasing number of prescribed burns—not just in California but across North America—is homage to the way of fire coppice. Maybe these hundred-plus cultures were not backward, but beckoning.