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About Spilyay tymoo. (Warm Springs, Or.) 1976-current | View Entire Issue (May 29, 2024)
3,500 years of Native stewardship of camas An Oregon State Univer- sity study has found evidence that Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest were in- tentionally harvesting edible camas bulbs at optimal stages of the plant’s maturation as far back as 3,500 years ago. The findings contribute to the growing body of research around traditional ecological knowledge and practices, demonstrating the care and specificity with which Indig- enous groups have been stewarding and cultivating natural resources for millen- nia. Camas is an ecological and cultural keystone, meaning it is a species that many other organisms depend on, and that features prominently within many cultural prac- tices. “If you think about salmon as being a charismatic species that people are very familiar with, camas is kind of the plant equivalent,” said Molly Carney, an assistant professor of anthropology in OSU’s College of Liberal Arts, and lead author on the study. “It is one of those species that really holds up greater ecosystems, a fundamental species which everything is related to.” An eye-catching blue flower that grows widely throughout the Pacific North- west, camas is referred to in Indigenous calendars across the region, with the plant’s growth stages used as a sort of seasonal benchmark. It is often included in traditional First Food ceremonies, in which tribal communities mark the coming of spring with the first salmon run or the first edible roots after a long winter, Carney said. Camas bulbs must be baked for two to three days to render them edible. Once soft, the bulbs taste a bit like sweet potato, Carney said. Traditional baking was done in underground ovens using heated rocks. The archaeological record Carney examined included the remains of these large pit ovens. After cooking the bulbs, Indigenous peoples had many ways to process camas and were able to store it for many months at a time. (Even Lewis and Clark’s dia- ries mention eating camas they were given by Nez Perce tribal members.) In the recent study, pub- lished in the Holocene, Carney looked at camas bulbs from the Willamette Valley in Or- egon dating back 8,000 years to determine when in their life cycle they were harvested. Similar to how tree rings help to estimate how old a tree is, counting the interior leaf scales of a camas bulb lets you estimate its age. Camas grows to harvestable size in three to five years, depend- ing on soil conditions. Camas baking ovens from 4,400 years ago have been recorded at a Long Tom River archaeological site near Veneta, Oregon, but for sev- eral thousand years, the bulbs appeared to have been har- vested somewhat indiscrimi- nately. Carney found that around 3,500 years ago, the bulbs started being harvested more selectively at the point when the plants were four or five years old and had reached sexual maturity. This timing in the Late Holocene period lines up with broader climatic shifts in the region, the researchers noted, coming around the same time as low-magnitude fires be- came more commonplace in the landscape. Carney also studied lake-core evidence from the floor of Beaver Lake, collected by Central Washington University re- searcher Megan Walsh, that gives credence to the theory that controlled burns were used intentionally to create optimal conditions for camas and other plants starting 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Based on her research, Carney says it’s clear that Native communities at the time were not selectively har- vesting for the biggest pos- sible bulbs, but rather stew- arding camas to be sustain- able over time. “They were trying to main- tain the age structure of these camas populations within a pretty narrow window,” she said. “When I had the oppor- tunity to harvest alongside tribal communities, as they har vest, they replant the smaller bulbs as they go.” The shift from haphazard harvesting to selective stew- ardship among tribal commu- nities appears to have oc- curred at approximately the same time throughout the Pacific Northwest, Carney said. Co-author on the study was Thomas Connolly from the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the Uni- versity of Oregon.
