The Ohlone Way

The wee folk were once beaten by iron-using people, which made them detest this powerful metal, and the people who used it.  Consequently, when the Iron People conquered Europe, they were very careful to protect themselves.  They sewed bits of iron into their children’s clothing, and hung horseshoes on their doors.  They used the dark energy of forged iron to repel the bright spirits.

Malcolm Margolin’s book, The Ohlone Way, is a magnificent collection of bright knowledge that is powerfully repellent to the dark energy of misanthropes — those cynics who insist that all humans everywhere have always been self-centered, materialistic, and aggressively warlike by nature — fatally flawed, and rotten to the core.  If you carefully absorb the knowledge in this book, misanthropes will skedaddle whenever they see you coming.  Bye-bye!

Humans simply aren’t the problem.  The problem is crazy cultures.  It is cleansing and healing to comprehend this important distinction.  It implies no quick or easy remedies, but it negates the notion that the only effective solution to the Earth Crisis is human extinction.  We possess adequate intelligence to do what needs to be done, but whether we will ever do so remains a potent and prickly mystery.

The Ohlone were an assortment of tribes that lived in the region around San Francisco Bay for thousands of years prior to European conquest.  Margolin does a lovely job of describing the various aspects of their way of life, and Michael Harney’s drawings are intriguing — many show skies darkened with millions of seabirds.  The Ohlone were blessed to inhabit a land that provided an abundance of plant and animal foods. 

It’s so hard for us to imagine what a magical treasure this planet was prior to farmers.  Ohlone country, like much of the western region, was lucky to have a climate that was poorly suited for growing corn, so the tribes were able to avoid that dangerous and highly unstable way of life.  They didn’t farm, nor did they enslave animals, yet they were able to enjoy a complex culture and a stable way of life. 

Occasional armed conflicts were usually low-intensity ritual warfare, good for blowing off steam.  Sometimes conflicts were intense, wiping out whole villages.  But this was not a war-oriented culture.  There were no wooden palisades surrounding villages.  The men did not have shields, war clubs, tomahawks, or body armor.  The culture did not enshrine heroic war chiefs, nor did it create a sprawling empire.  They were really into dancing.

The Ohlone lost few people to disease, famine, and war.  But their culture was successful at maintaining a stable population.  Taboos and restrictions on sex kept a leash on the birth rate.  Sex was forbidden during the two years that a mother was nursing, as it was prior to hunts, or during menstruation.  Deformed babies and twins were not kept.  Women understood how to terminate unwanted pregnancies.  They were careful to avoid the horrors of population growth.  Smart!

Stability was the core of their success, and time-proven wisdom was carefully preserved.  “To be different was to be wrong, the best ways were the old ways.”  Innovators and rebels were scorned, as were freedom and individualism.  The Ohlone valued belonging — having strong social bonds to family, clan, and tribe.  A man without his family was nothing.  It was a society built on a foundation of cooperation, sharing, and generosity.  Greedy and aggressive people were banished, because they toxic.  Respectable people learned well, and then passed the ancient knowledge on to the next generation.

Stability is hard for us to comprehend.  The Ohlone could live in the same place for a thousand years and not destroy the soils or forests.  The hills were still filled with antelope, elk, and deer.  The rivers were still thrashing with salmon.  The nut trees continued producing sacred acorns.  Stability did not diminish the seals, sea lions, sea birds, or shellfish.  Fast forward a thousand years into the future, and it’s the same culture, the same stories, songs, and dances.

They did not live like a hurricane.  They lived like reverend guests in a sacred land.  “Everything was alive, everything had character, power, and magic, and consequently everything had to be dealt with properly.”  “It was a world in which thousands of living, feeling, magical things, all operating in dream logic, carried out their individual actions.”  “Power was everywhere, in everything, and therefore every act was religious.”

All of us have wild ancestors who enjoyed a similar manner of living.  The Ohlone were not fascinating freaks.  Five hundred years ago, the tribes of western North America were among the most stable, successful, and sustainable human societies on the planet.  The secret of their success was that their cultures were, in almost every way, the direct opposite of our own.  Sadly, the Iron People arrived in 1770, and hurricanes of progress and ecocide soon followed.

Margolin worked on this book for three years, and he often dreamed about the Ohlone.  “It produced in me a sense of victory to know that such a way of life is part of the human potential, part of the human history.” 

Yes, indeed!  The daily news in our world regularly fills us with awe and amazement at the stunning achievements of human foolishness.  It’s difficult not to feel like inmates at an insane asylum because, in many ways, we are.  On the bright side, we all have front row seats as our insane civilization crumbles before our eyes, creating thrilling opportunities for new experiments in living.  And Margolin reminds us of the important fact that our genes are not diseased, just our culture.  Victory over civilization is not impossible, it’s a matter of time and love and healing.

Tending the Wild

“Nature really misses us,” laments M. Kat Anderson.  “We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that’s the reason why they’re going away.”  Anderson is the author of Tending the Wild, in which she describes the relationships that California Indians have with the plants and animals, the rocks and streams, the sacred land which is their ancient home.  It’s an essential book for pilgrims who strive to envision the long and rugged path back home to wildness, freedom, and sustainability.

In medieval Europe, hungry dirty peasant farmers succeeded in painstakingly perfecting a miserable, laborious, backbreaking form of agriculture that depleted the soil, and produced minimal yields with erratic inconsistency.  They were malnourished, unhealthy, and most of them died young — whilst the lords and ladies, who claimed to own the land, wallowed in a rich sludge of glitter and gluttony.

When European explorers arrived in California, they discovered half-naked heathen barbarians who were exceedingly healthy, and enjoyed an abundance of nourishing wild foods that they acquired without sweat or toil.  Clearly, these savages were people who suffered from a lack of civilization’s elevated refinements: agriculture, smallpox, uncomfortable ugly clothing, brutal enslavement, and religious enlightenment from priests who preached the virtues of love, but practiced exploitive racist cruelty.

In 1868, Titus Fey Cronise wrote that when whites arrived, the land of California was “filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; the rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds, and berries.” 

The greed-crazed Europeans went absolutely berserk, rapidly destroying whatever could be converted into money:  forests, waterfowl, whales, deer, elk, salmon, gold nuggets.  Grizzly bear meat was offered at most restaurants.  There were fortunes to be made, the supply of valuable resources was “inexhaustible,” and the foolish Indians were so lazy that they let all of this wealth go to waste. 

There were 500 to 600 different tribes in California, speaking many different languages.  In North America, the population density of California Indians was second only to the Aztec capitol of Mexico City.  They lived quite successfully by hunting, fishing, and foraging — without domesticated plants or animals, without plowing or herding, without fortified cities, authoritarian rulers, perpetual warfare, horrid sanitation, or epidemics of contagious disease.  The Indians found the Europeans to be incredibly peculiar.  The Pit River people called them enellaaduwi — wanderers — homeless people with no attachment to the land or its creatures.   

The bulk of Tending the Wild describes how the California Indians tended the land.  They did not merely wander across the countryside in hopes of randomly discovering plant and animal foods.  They had an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, and they tended it in order to encourage the health of their closest relatives — the plant and animal communities upon which they depended. 

Fires were periodically set to clear away brush, promote the growth of grasses and herbs, and increase the numbers of larger game animals.  Burning significantly altered the ecosystem on a massive scale, but it didn’t lead to the creation of barren wastelands over time, like agriculture continues to do, at an ever-accelerating rate.  California has a long dry season, and wildfires sparked by lightening are a normal occurrence in this ecosystem.

Nuts, grains, and seeds are a very useful source of food.  They’re rich in oils, calories, and protein.  They can be stored for long periods, enabling survival through lean seasons and lean years.  The quantity of acorns foraged each year was not regular and dependable, but many were gathered in years of abundance.  A diverse variety of wildflowers and grasses can provide a dependable supply of seeds and grains. 

The Indians tended the growth of important plants in a number of ways — pruning, weeding, burning, watering, replanting bulbs, sowing seeds.  Communities of cherished plants were deliberately expanded.  The Indians were blessed with a complete lack of advanced Old World technology.  They luckily had no draft animals or plows, so their soil-disturbing activities were mostly limited to digging bulbs, corms, and tubers, and planting small tobacco gardens. 

Today, countless ecosystems are being ravaged by agriculture.  A few visionaries, like Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, are working to develop a far less destructive mode of farming, based on mechanically harvesting the grain from perennial plants.  This research is a slow process, and success is not expected any time soon. 

California Indians developed a brilliant, time-proven, sustainable system for producing seeds and grain without degrading the ecosystem.  So did the wild rice gatherers of the Great Lakes region.  They built no cities, and they did not suffer from the misery and monotony of civilization.  They had no powerful leaders, ruling classes, or legions of exploited slaves.  They were not warlike societies.  Their ecosystems were clean and healthy.  They lived like real human beings — wild, free, and happy.

Tending the Wild is an important book.  It presents us with stories of a way of life that worked, and worked remarkably well.  This is precious knowledge for us to contemplate, as our own society is rapidly circling the drain, and our need for remembering healthy old ideas has never been greater.

M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild — Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.