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Published in Winter 2000-2001
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Making a living on the land
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NAFEC helps link cultural survival, environmental health and the market
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Baja California's Paipai and Kumiai Indians find that traditional knowledge passed on from their ancestors can help them meet the challenges of survival in a rapidly changing world. Growing interest and emerging markets for their wares are fueling a remarkable revival of their native arts and crafts, providing them jobs while conserving culture and the environment.
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By Michael Wilken
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Photo: Mike Wilken
Gloria Castañeda gathers willow to make a traditional granary. | Less than fifty miles from bustling Tijuana, Mexico, and the busiest border crossing in North America, a Kumiai basket weaver reaches over the bank of a quiet stream, gently tugging on the slender, round leaves of a juncos plant. Like countless Native Baja Californians before her, she carefully removes only a few of the long, flexible leaves of the native rush before moving on to the next plant. With this handful of leaves she will spend much of the next month weaving an intricate expression of her Kumiai culture.
"Our ancestors didn’t leave us great stone houses or monuments," comments Kumiai artisan Gloria Castañeda, "but they left us something even better: the knowledge that has enabled us to survive through all the changes in our world. They taught us how to gather willow and juncus and weave them into beautiful baskets. They gave us this way to make a living on our land."
Castañeda and a growing group of native artisans from Baja California find that much of the knowledge passed on from their ancestors can help them meet the challenges of survival in a rapidly changing world. Through an innovative partnership with the Native Cultures Institute of Baja California (Cuna) native weavers and potters have launched a revival of traditional arts that provides jobs while conserving culture and the environment. This project, supported by the North American Fund for Environmental Cooperation (NAFEC), has resulted in the establishment of NATIVA EcoArt for the promotion of sustainably produced indigenous goods and ecotourism services.
This effort is a grassroots expression of work being done by CEC's Green Goods and Services project in exploring ways to harness the power of the vast North American market, created under NAFTA, to the task of improving the environment.
New meaning for ancient arts
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Photo: Mike Wilken
Don Benito Peralta and his traditional Paipai house. | Baja California’s native Paipai, Kumiai, Kiliwa and Cucapá communities are among the poorest populations of the US-Mexico border region. Living in remote rural settlements, these groups struggle for daily survival, eking out a living raising cattle, farming, occasionally harvesting some of their natural resources such as yucca, acorns, pine nuts, herbs and flower seeds and recently, through the sales of traditional crafts.
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Photo: Mike Wilken
Kumiai Silva weaving a traditional willow basket. | A remarkable revival in the production of handcrafts is helping native artisans preserve, practice and reinterpret the knowledge passed on from their ancestors,while at the same time strengthening and diversifying their tribal economy. Traditional ceramics, basketry, agave fiber nets, bows and arrows, brooms and other tools—originally indispensable utilitarian components of indigenous material culture—were rapidly falling from use by the middle of the twentieth century due to the introduction of metal, plastic and glass. Twenty years ago, only a few elders occasionally made pottery or basketry, mostly for sale to infrequent tourists. Younger women rarely took the time to learn the skills for what seemed to be a dying art.
Today, however, this trend has been entirely reversed. Growing interest and emerging markets for their wares has allowed many of the artisans to dedicate all their productive hours to traditional handcraft production. Daughters and granddaughters have learned the skills and become recognized artisans; older and younger men have become specialists in the making of bows and arrows, wooden ladders, gathering buckets, rabbit sticks and leather goods, or providing raw materials for the artisans. New forms such as pine needle and palm baskets have been introduced and quickly perfected, while traditional wares also continue to evolve in dynamic directions.
These developments have been greatly enhanced by the ability of artisans to access markets throughout the original territory of their aboriginal ancestors: California, Arizona and Baja California. Over the last decade, artisans have been invited to participate in events and gatherings in museums, schools, historic sites, state parks and conventions. They are often asked to teach classes to students in related native communities of the United States, reinforcing transmission and preservation of aboriginal skills in areas where these ancient traditions had been lost.
Fortunately, most handcraft manufacture involves sustainable environmental management practices and even at significantly higher commercial levels can continue to provide important economic benefits without sacrificing the integrity of the environment. This is especially useful as these and other culturally based activities allow the Paipai to replace environmentally degrading activities such as poorly managed cattle and goat ranching with better paying, environmentally friendly jobs.
Nativa: Restoring ancient links of trade
In order to penetrate the growing North America markets for traditional, environmentally friendly, fairly traded products, indigenous artisans and Cuna team members identified the basic challenges: the need for wider and more consistent markets for their products; the need for improved infrastructure for promotion and distribution; the lack of legal permits for harvesting natural resources used in manufacture; and the lack of long-term environmental management plans for resources used. To create the appropriate mechanisms, Cuna combined the forces of an interdisciplinary, cross-sector team, including native artisans, volunteers, university graduate students and faculty as well as ecotourism, business and design consultants.
The team established a cooperatively run retail outlet at the historic Bodegas de Santo Tomás Cultural Center in Ensenada, Baja California. The consultants created business plans, promotional material, and supporting infrastructure including a web site.
Graduate students from the master’s degree program in Ecosystems Management of the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) in collaboration with researchers from the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy (SCERP) and a local ecotourism operator worked to create management plans for sustainable handcraft production and ecotourism in Kumiai and Paipai indigenous communities of Baja California.
Cuna also carried out a series of promotional visits to the United States in which indigenous artisans gained valuable experience and established contacts at museums, state parks, and reservations. In San Miguel, Baja California, an international trade fair was held as part of the Kuri Kuri 2000 gathering of native peoples, with over 22 local artisans exhibiting their wares to over 1600 visitors, many of them from related tribal groups north of the border.
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Photo: Mike Wilken
Papai Margarita building a traditional pot. | One of the satisfied customers was Katherine Marquez of the Yavapai-Apache Nation Camp Verde Arizona. "We’re so glad to get to know our relatives the Paipai and Kumiai," she commented as she watched basket maker Gloria Castañeda coil different colors of split juncus leaf to create a star design on a plate-sized basket. Holding several bags of recently purchased pottery and basketry she added, "We know that buying things really helps these artisans, but it helps us just as much. Our ancestors also traded these long ago, and it’s good to have them again."
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Michael Wilken