We’re never too old for day camp
VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY
Last Friday, I drove in the rain to O’Neill Regional Park to attend a
wonderful workshop on Acjachemen (Juaneno) life. I hope that someday
the children of Huntington Beach will be able to attend a local
summer camp and experience what local Native American life was like
two hundred years ago.
The course, taught by Jacque Tahuka-Nunez, was designed to educate
park interpretive staff and environmental educators about the customs
of local Native Americans. But the workshop did much more than that.
As we wove baskets, played ancient games, made musical instruments
and sang Native American songs, the old Acjachemen way of life became
real for us. We were transported back to a time before the arrival of
the Spaniards. We became Indians for the day as Jacque initiated us
into the old ways of her people.
For the rite of passage into manhood, boys went on a deer hunt. To
demonstrate, Jacque picked four male “volunteers” from the audience
of 50 and told us that these men would be 13-year-old boys on their
first deer hunt. She said that they would already know how to make
bows, arrows and spears. Now they were ready to become men.
Jacque dressed one ranger in a coyote skin headdress. She handed
another one a knife made of a chipped flint point attached to a deer
leg bone. The third initiate was handed a rattle made of deer hooves.
By clicking the hooves occasionally, he was to mask their sound as
they skulked through the woods. The fourth man carried an abalone
shell to act as the shaman for the group.
After a successful hunt, the “boys” returned to us, their
villagers. But historically, boys who had killed a deer were not
permitted to eat it. Instead, they offered it to the tribe. To eat
their first kill would be bad luck and not in keeping with the Native
American way, which is to share and give away what they have.
Next, Jacque passed out 14-inch long sticks of bamboo, split most
of the way down the shaft. These would become clappers, a percussion
musical instrument. In the old days, the people would have used
elderberry branches. They would hollow out the elderberry branch,
which has a pithy interior. Bamboo makes a good alternative because
it is already hollow. The old way was to sand the stick smooth with
sharkskin, which is surprisingly abrasive. We used sandpaper.
Next, we decorated our clapper sticks with bands of red and black.
The Acjachemen would have used black walnut shells for black stain
and cochineal for red stain. Cochineal dye comes from fuzzy white
scale insects that grow on prickly pear cactus. If you smash them,
you get a brilliant red dye. This scarlet dye was used by the Aztecs
and was one of the first economically important products to be
shipped from the New World to Europe.
Cochineal dye was used to color the red robes of Roman Catholic
cardinals and was used until as recently as 1956 to dye the red coats
of British soldiers and palace guards. But we didn’t use cochineal or
black walnut to decorate our clapper sticks. We used Sharpie pens.
There was much more to learn. We went out into the rain to
retrieve basketry material that was soaking in tubs. Local Native
Americans would have used reeds from Juncus, a local rush, or split
willow branches. We used Chinese round rush. With less than an hour
of weaving, we each had a serviceable basket.
After lunch, we each picked out a large gourd from the tubs of
water in which they were soaking. The gourds were shaped like
butternut squash. They were hard and covered with black mold. Our
first task was to scrub them clean with scouring pads. Then we
decorated them with red and black bands and dots, using our Sharpie
pens.
As we worked, we sang Acjachemen songs, accompanied by our new
gourd rattles and clapper sticks.
The last major task was to make cordage from plant fibers. Jacque
gave each of us a long yucca leaf. We banged on it endlessly with a
small rock, pounding out the juicy green pulp until only white fibers
remained. Then we twisted the fibers together in a special way that
Jacque showed us. Magically, we had string. Traditionally, only men
made cordage. Maybe that’s because hitting leaf with a rock on a leaf
for 30 minutes to get 10 inches of string was hard work.
Finally, Jacque showed us how to use a pump drill, a clever device
with a drill bit embedded in an upright rod, powered by hand using
two twisted strings on a crossbar to rotate the drill. By pushing
down on the crossbar only six to eight times, we drilled a hole in a
small shell. We strung the shell on the string we had just made and
tied it to the decorated clapper stick.
When I brought back my crafts from “day camp,” Vic was amazed at
the basket, gourd rattle, and clapper stick with its hand-made
string. The next day, I showed off the crafts at a docent training
session at Shipley Nature Center.
Some day we hope to pass on these skills to schoolchildren in a
summer camp program at the nature center. Being an Indian for a day
is a wonderful experience that everyone should have.
* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and
environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.
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