Tohono O'odham: The Desert People and the Saguaro New Year

Every June, when the desert heat reaches its peak and the air smells of dust and coming rain, something happens in the Tohono O'odham Nation that has been happening for longer than any European account can measure. The saguaro cactus ripens. And with the ripening, the new year begins.

The Tohono O'odham, whose name means Desert People, have inhabited the Sonoran Desert for thousands of years. Their territory once stretched from what is now central Arizona south into Sonora, Mexico, west to the Gulf of California, and east to the San Pedro River. The United States-Mexico border, drawn in eighteen fifty-four, cut through the middle of that territory without the O'odham's consent. Their homeland predates the border by millennia.

At the center of O'odham cosmology stands the saguaro. The Tohono O'odham call it Hasan, and in their songs and stories, saguaros are not plants. They are people, understood as ancestors, as brothers and sisters. The saguaro's lifecycle carries cultural weight that the English word cactus cannot hold. A saguaro takes up to ten years to reach six inches tall. It may live two hundred years. Its first arm does not appear for half a century or more. The oldest saguaros on these hillsides were alive when the Presidio San Agustin del Tucson was built.

When the bahidaj, the deep red fruit, ripens each late June, O'odham families travel to their traditional harvest sites using long poles made from the dried ribs of dead saguaros. The fruit is knocked from the tops of the cacti, gathered, and boiled down into syrup and fermented into a ceremonial wine. The wine is used in the Nawait I'i, the rain ceremony, the most important ceremony of the O'odham calendar. The belief is that the saguaro wine, drunk in community, brings the monsoon rains. In a desert where rain is life and its absence is catastrophe, this ceremony is not metaphor. It is weather management and cosmological maintenance in one.

The right to harvest saguaro fruit inside what is now Saguaro National Park was taken from the Tohono O'odham when the national monument, now the park, was established on their traditional territory in nineteen thirty-three. After decades of advocacy, those harvesting rights were formally returned to tribal members. The harvest continues. The new year arrives each June with the ripening fruit, as it has for as long as the O'odham have been desert people, which is to say longer than any flag has flown over this valley.