Vegetable Harvest
Art by Michael Chiago
This depiction of a vegetable harvest is by Michael Chiago, a Tohono O’odham artist, who was asked to create this art for the Tohno Chul Park.
A note from the gallery:
Two women and a boy carry beautiful baskets full of corn, squash, melons and devil’s claw, the bounty of cultivated foods that came as a result of summer rains. Summer rain brings the harvest season for the tepary beans, squash and corn. Traditional Tohono O’odham fields were located at the mouths of arroyos where floodwaters deposited fertile silt from the foothills and mountains. Crops were planted in soil made rich by previous seasons of flooding and were irrigated with water from the current season’s rainfall. The Tohono O’odham honored the desert’s rhythms and the desert rewarded their wisdom and hard work with successful harvests. Tohono O’odham farmers grew devil’s claw for making baskets, including those used in the saguaro wine ceremony to summon rain back to the desert year after year.
This image is a reminder of our shared responsibilities and relationship with the earth. We must be caretakers of the land we live on. Everything on this planet is an ecosystem, full of different connections that live in symbiosis. The bees pollinate the mesquite that provide nutrients in the soil that grow our food. There are natural resources all around us, if we know where to look.
Unfortunately a lot of our land has been paved over. The nature has been removed and replaced with “comforts”. But these comforts have shifted the balance making the world less livable. Phoenix is just over 100 miles from Tucson but the weather feels so different. The desert is supposed to cool down at night. In the summer in Tucson, it can drop by over 30 degrees at nightfall. When the sun is gone we get relief from the heat. Animals come out at night to hunt without being overwhelmed by the sun. However, when I lived in Phoenix I noticed the temperature doesn’t drop like it does in Tucson. A lot of Phoenix has been paved over. It’s a city of concrete that holds the heat over night. There is no reprieve from the heat and it changes the way we live in that environment.
We can feel the heat difference between cities, but also between neighborhoods. Does your street have trees? In the desert, especially during the summer, we stay in the shade as much as possible. But there are lots of neighborhoods that don’t have trees to provide that shade. The shade is gone, which means everything is that much hotter. A friend told me a story of their neighborhood growing up that was a “shade desert”. The lack of trees meant that life was harder. He would walk to the store to buy milk but the lack of shade meant that the milk could curdle by the time he got home. That’s how hot it was.
Don’t get me wrong, the desert is meant to be hot. But there are checks and balances to it that we lose when we don’t pay attention to nature and disregard it as a resource rather than a relationship that needs to be maintained. The Tohono O’odham people cared for this land for generations, but so much of that land was taken and paved over.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to pick back up that caretaking. If we learn more about the land, we can build that relationship again. If we take care of it. It will take care of us.
Check out local resources to learn more about your area and what you can to do help support nature. Start in your own back yard or a local park. Maybe plant a tree. Nature makes this world more livable. In Tucson, TEP provides trees for free as part of this program: https://www.tep.com/trees-for-you/