Abstract
I am most grateful to the Society of Ethnobiology for presenting me with its first Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award. Naturally, the recipient questions if he is deserving of such an honor when there are so many others whose contributions are equally or more meritorious. This new award, I am certain, will honor them as they become historically recognized contributors to the dynamic field of Ethnobiology. As I prepared this acceptance speech, I received many messages asking me to include the sources of inspiration for my career and to provide guidance for the next generation of ethnobiologists so that they may appreciate the multifaceted field of Ethnobiology as a very satisfying career choice.
I am now part of history as I present this brief autobiographical review of my experiences in the wondrous field of ethnobiology. Although I was fortunate to have had personal friendships with many of our pioneers, the most influential were Volney Jones, my mentor and dissertation adviser at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Edward Castetter, Volney's M.S. adviser at the University of New Mexico. Volney taught me how to conduct ethnobotanical fieldwork and to engage in paleo-ethnobotanical laboratory identifications, both morphometric and microscopic, as flotation fragments came to dominate archaeological plant inventories. Professor Castetter encouraged my ethnobiological research in the Pueblos by providing me with his unpublished field notes and ideas to integrate plants and animals from an ecological perspective. Others contributed uniquely to my ethnobotanical field methods and paleo-ethnobotanical comparative studies. Al Whiting, Dick Schultes, Jim Duke, and even the now forgotten Gretchen Beardsley (1939, 1942) assisted my field training through advice and helpful criticism. C. Earl “Smitty” Smith, Hugh Cutler, Leonard Blake, and Larry Kaplan advanced my plant identification skills and comparative studies. I am disappointed that I did not know Melvin R. Gilmore or John Peabody Harrington. All inspired me and made me a better ethnoscientist.
I will present four vignettes to examine my career choices and how they might help others fully appreciate Ethnobiology.
How Ethnobiology Saved My Life
In 1962, I attended the University of New Mexico Archaeological Field School at San Gabriel Pueblo on the San Juan Pueblo reservation, now Ohkay Owingeh. The goal was to learn archaeological techniques and Pueblo archaeology. However, Dr. Florence Hawley Ellis encouraged independent projects based on ethnographic interviews. Alfonso Ortiz, a native of Ohkay Owingeh, then a starting graduate student at the University of Chicago, organized these projects and provided transportation in the evening from El Rito back to the Pueblo where we were living. My project was about intertribal exchange, which emphasized food, medicine, and ceremonial accoutrements (published as Ford 1972). My inquiries were ethnobotanical but soon included ethno-ornithology. I was learning Tewa ethnobiological terms and the project was quickly becoming ethno-archaeological, although the term was not used at the field school or in many other places at that time (Ford 1992). Among the many Tewa bird names I learned,
When the field school ended, several of my Tewa friends invited me to stay in the pueblo. I informed them I would like to but I lacked money. That was not a problem, I was told, because they would provide a house and I could make adobes for $4.00 a day working 12 hour shifts (6 to 6 with an hour for lunch). I stayed to continue my interviews and to learn about life in the village. I was provided with an old adobe house lacking running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity. I got water from a village pump where I gossiped with the neighbor kids and their mothers. I was fed by friends in the Pueblo and my meager salary paid for the privilege. I read and wrote notes in the evening by the light of a kerosene lantern, and observed dogs guarding the houses at night and keeping the village clean of night soil. My nocturnal company was a few bedbugs that not only made sleep uncomfortable, but made sure I would not forget them at the 5 AM sunrise as I ate cold tortillas and warm soft drinks.
My employment consisted of making adobes and doing odd jobs for the landlord whose land included the architecture of the site we excavated. The adobes would cover the exposed walls of the very important first colonial Spanish capital founded in 1598 by Don Juan Onate. I found it curious that the work team consisted of me and two Mexican teenagers. Further questioning in the village revealed the reasons no Pueblo men would work for my new boss, and I discovered they were betting to see how long I would last on the job. Our first task in the morning was to walk along the Rio Grande to collect old shoes and bottles. These were subsequently pressed into the adobe mud to make it go further. Other odd jobs included caring for the horses, plastering the horno (oven) with mud, and making corn chicos in it after the mud dried. These were obviously skills that complimented my education but did not benefit any future livelihood except as anecdotes in university lectures.
After a week on the job, I was returning from lunch in the Pueblo where I daily regaled my hosts with stories of what we did that morning. That afternoon I was accosted on a bridge over the Rio Grande by two drunks who ordered me out of the Pueblo and threatened to throw me over the bridge into the river. Cajoling them did no good except to irritate them into violent action and more antagonistic language. They picked me up, hung me over the rail, and threatened to drop me into the Rio Grande some 25 feet below. Quick thinking brought forth my new ethnobiological knowledge. As I was suspended over the river, I instructed them to put me down or I would tell P'indee, my good friend, what they were doing to me. P'indee was a former prize fighter, I reminded them. He would beat them up. Immediately, they pulled me back from the abyss, put me down gently, dusted me off (remember I was bathed in adobe dust), and made me promise not to tell P'indee except about how nice they were to me now that we were friends!
Despite this interruption, I still managed to return to work with a minute or two to spare. No matter, I was immediately fired! I was told I was indeed late. When I requested my morning wages ($2.00), they were refused because I would only be paid if I worked all day and I had not! In retrospect this was the best thing that could happen to me because I could still get up with the roosters’ calls, walk to the fields with my farmer friend, and learn about traditional agriculture, classificatory rules for hoeing, and gender expectations in the harvest of non-domesticated plants. I drowned gophers with irrigation water, skinned them and prepared them for roasting, and discovered they were one of the few edible meat sources, along with fish and small birds, available in the summer until after the harvest. With ethnobiology having saved my life, firsthand ethnobiological instruction in Tewa became a daily routine for an additional five weeks until I returned to Oberlin College where I would share my unique experiences.
Friends Are Very Important
Professional friends are indispensable to a successful career. In my case, they kept me from giving up ethnobotany prematurely and provided ethnobiological opportunities unimagined by me. To support my University of Michigan dissertation research, I was Volney Jones's field research agent on his NSF grant. The goal of this project was to do Pueblo comparative ethnobotany in order to improve the interpretation of archaeological plant remains from southwestern dry shelters and open sites. Much of my intensive field work was done at Ohkay Owingeh and other Eastern Tewa pueblos. Dr. Edward Castetter's guidance and his notes were indispensable to gaining access to some of his still living Pueblo consultants. I completed my requirements in anthropology at the University of Michigan in four years and went to the University of Cincinnati in September 1967. I was still writing my dissertation. Since I was married and really did not enjoy the graduate student sub-culture, I was happy to be employed, to be teaching anthropology, and to be participating in adult civic roles.
Al Ortiz (Oekuu p'in or Turtle Mountain, as I soon knew him) and his family became close friends during the summer of 1962. Since we were conducting research, although on quite different topics, in the same Pueblo, we discussed our work frequently and read chapters of our drafted dissertations (Ford 1968; Ortiz 1969). Al invited me to work with him in the summer of 1968 in Nambe Pueblo to edit and annotate a two volume manuscript by Herbert Spinden from his field work in that community from 1909 to 1913 (Spinden 1913). I would explore their ethnobiology and material culture and Oekuu would look into social organization and ceremonial proceedings. I applied for a University of Cincinnati faculty grant, received one, and would conduct this new research while my committee read the draft of my dissertation.
My salary at the University of Cincinnati in 1968 was $9000, and I supplemented it by teaching summer school. Our apartment was within walking distance of my McMicken Hall office. In the last week in June I spent Sunday playing tennis and performed poorly. I told my wife about my unexpectedly flawed play, but thought no further about it. The next day while walking up Clifton Avenue to my class, I collapsed. I was immediately hospitalized, extensively tested, and developed a neurological problem. Subsequently, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which I have had all these years. At only 26, I saw my life flash by and imagined it coming to a disappointing end.
Friends came to my assistance. Al Ortiz kept the Nambe project open even though I had to return my grant. The only year I did not return to Ohkay Owingeh for its San Juan Saint's Day was 1968 because I was in the hospital. Jimmy Griffin gave me a job at Michigan with a $2000 raise and the winter semester in 1969 off. The University of Cincinnati wanted to fire me for non-performance because of continuing illness, just as it had terminated my summer teaching contract for using a faculty visitor to teach my last two summer classes. With my Ph.D. in hand, I was delighted to return to Ann Arbor in December 1968.
I slowly recovered my eye-sight and my equilibrium. Since I lacked the strength to conduct or direct excavations, friends invited me to serve as paleoethnobotanist on their projects and encouraged me to involve student assistants. Stewart Struever invited me to join his Lower Illinois Valley program in Kampsville, Illinois. As the originator of extensive water and chemical flotation, Struever provided more than enough plant fragments from the Koster site to keep me and several graduate students busy sorting and identifying these charred plant parts for several years (e.g., Asch et al 1972).
Dr. Sarunas (“Sherm”) Milisaukas, who as a graduate student was a friend and who now has a distinguished career teaching at SUNY, Buffalo, asked me to initiate paleoethnobotany and conduct the first flotation in Poland in 1971, near Krakow at Olzanica. With Polish colleagues, we produced several papers about the paleoethnobotany of the Neolithic and later Bronze Age there (Ford 1986). The flotation program required flour sieves purchased in the market and a wash tub to do the water separation. The Polish experience had other unique qualities. It was a PL480, Food For Peace project administered by the Smithsonian that enabled American scientists to do research in foreign countries. When I arrived in Poland, Sherm gave me an enormous stack of zlotys to spend in Poland because they could not be converted to dollars or taken from the country. Although the Polish economy was regulated, some barter occurred in the local farm market. On my way home one evening I stopped to get an apple. Not knowing Polish and seeing no need to barter, I gave the farmer what he requested at a vastly inflated price. The next day as I walked through the market many farmers greeted me with brightly polished apples wanting to sell them for the same price. How do you dispose of zlotys other than by being generous? So I continued dispensing money as tips in my hotel. It quickly became apparent that the Hotel Monopol, where foreigners stayed, was inhabited by a pack of prostitutes/spies. This became obvious when one of the girls addressed me as “Dr. Ford.” I had completed no documents with that title, perhaps Sherm had, but how would she know? I assume the authorities knew who I was and kept track of me. The women in the hotel where either very slender with mini-skirts or sizeable, trying to wear mini-skirts over legs like telephone poles and breasts the shape of pineapples. In either case, one of the latter followed me to my room to “be my friend,” which I did not need. A sizeable zloty bill dispensed her quickly but happy. Afterwards, Sherm came to the hotel and used his impeccable Polish to insure my privacy. I cannot say that all my ethnobiological experiences were as intriguing or exciting as this one, but they were educational.
Dr. John Humphrey, who was a Classical archaeologist specializing in Roman antiquity at the University of Michigan, invited me and Naomi Miller to join his excavation team in Carthage, Tunisia. We introduced another flotation program with locally available materials, but this time to secure animal remains as well as plants. You never know in advance what problems will require investigation, and Naomi and I certainly did not know on this initial trip. For instance, Naomi investigated local olive production and discovered that the local
The Society of Ethnobiology has always been a small, friendly, and inclusive organization. I encourage students and young professionals to take advantage of its annual meetings and to use the internet to meet and contact other ethnobiologists from the United States and other countries. It was at the second annual meeting that I met Dr. Harriet Kuhnlein, who is a distinguished ethno-nutritionist, then teaching at the University of British Columbia. She assisted me in developing community nutrition models for the Pueblos and did the same for understanding the plant foods consumed by archaeological populations. The next year “Botany ‘80” convened in Vancouver, and Harriet invited my family to stay with hers because Nancy Turner, whom I admired for her exceptional papers on tobacco, some with her co-author Roy Taylor (Turner and Taylor 1972), was going to stay there as well. Nancy's early oeuvre was so distinguished (see Turner 1975, 1979) that I assumed she was a senior member of the small group of practicing ethnobotanists. Was I surprised when an attractive blond, younger than me, arrived at Harriet's! Our friendship blossomed and a mutual opportunity presented itself the next summer at Bella Coola among the NeXulk, in Canada. In a short ten day period working there with Harriet and Nancy, I learned about four different salmon, fished for two of them, and processed each in a unique way for storage. Our field interviews taught me about fire ecology for berry plant management and the “domesticated” landscape. Together we constructed a community ethnobotanical garden at the community health center as a means to educate young mothers and children about healthy plants. I was so impressed with the educational results of this project that I subsequently constructed one with Heather Trigg based on Ojibwa plant knowledge at the University of Michigan Mathaei Botanical Garden, and I am doing another at the Ohkay Owingeh Cultural Center. Soon I will assist still another in the greatly anticipated Santa Fe Botanical Garden: thank you my friends Harriet and Nancy. The Society of Ethnobiology is directly responsible for these enduring friendships and it will enable young ethnobiologists to have similar opportunities.
Another aspect of my career follows from my health experience. For 43 years I been a confidante, supportive friend and role model for many young professionals with multiple sclerosis and other neurological problems, and continue in retirement to provide peer counseling. Life will probably never be the same for them, but there is no reason to despair.
Value and Acknowledge Students and how Ethnobotany Almost Took My Life
Jimmy Griffin and Volney Jones taught me how important students, at all academic levels, are for conducting research projects in the field and laboratory. I have tried to follow their example in providing financial support for students, by crediting students through publication or conference participation for their contributions to my research, and by assisting them in finding or creating their own research projects. I have also tried to visit them in the field.
The lesson I learned from working with students in the field came early at the University of Michigan. I conducted National Science sponsored ethnobotanical research for Volney Jones in the Pueblos as other Michigan graduate students were doing similar projects on faculty grants around the world. Griffin had a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participation grant to help undergraduates gain field experience. His heart attack in 1969, however, led him to relinquish it to Bob Whallon, but his sudden need to attend to his wife in Holland left it up to me to complete. The NSF-URPP projects enabled undergraduate students from Michigan and other schools to participate in meaningful archaeological field research and to write papers for publication. From 1969 to 1978, I annually received a NSF-URPP grant to assist undergraduate students and graduate student supervisors in participating in some of Michigan's largest archaeology projects at the time: in Oaxaca with Kent Flannery, Powers Phase in Missouri with Jim Price and Bruce Smith, and the CIBOLA Archaeological Research Project (CARP) near Zuni, New Mexico, with Patty Jo Watson, Steve LeBlanc (who was then a post-doctoral student at Michigan) and Charles Redman. As the grant administrator, I could visit Steve Plog, Nanette Pyne, and Bill Merrill in Oaxaca, numerous students in Missouri, and Debby Pearsall, Naomi Miller, and Mindy Zeder at CARP.
Dana Lepofsky's experience illustrates the variety of research opportunities we tried to extend to undergraduate students. Despite coming from Connecticut to Ann Arbor, she had long been interested in the Northwest Coast. She wrote her Honors thesis on a Northwest Coast topic and eventually went to British Columbia for graduate school. As part of her becoming acquainted with the area, I introduced her to Harriet and Nancy. She worked with them in Bella Coola and wrote several notable ecological studies about the community associations of important utilitarian plants (Lepofsky et al. 1985). In 1985, I was participating on a lands claim case for Zuni Pueblo. Dana had archaeological experience at Zuni Pueblo and knew many people there. She was the first person I thought about when I needed a field assistant to interview women consultants about traditional plant uses and management practices in the Pueblo.
I never wanted or expected a student to become a clone of me. It was my intent to learn from them while they were students at Michigan and after they completed their degrees. I continue to read their publications, to applaud their professional accomplishments and honors, and to watch them become intellectual leaders in ethnobiology. The Ethnobotanical Laboratory had many simultaneous projects and engaged in a variety of discussions that often led to complementary field research and new laboratory results. One of the earliest innovations was to move beyond the then standard practice of using ethnographical analogy to interpret edible plants. A list of these made little importance unless we could reconstruct diets, quantify crop plant production or gathered ruderal yields, and calculate the amounts needed to provision an archaeological site's human population. Wilma Wetterstrom received training in nutrition and developed algebraic mathematical models for the food remains at Arroyo Hondo in New Mexico and highlighted lean times for the population in her dissertation and published monograph (Wetterstrom 1986). Paul Minnis developed these ideas further with his approach to food stress (Minnis 1985) in his cross-cultural and archaeobotanical study of starvation foods (Minnis 1991). The next step was a giant leap forward by Tim Johns and his award winning dissertation, which introduced biochemistry into ethnobotanical nutritional studies. He basically created the field of chemical ethnobotany (Johns 1990). For paleoethnobotanists it became a question of how do we identify herbal plants and condiments that were important for improving health and nutrition in the past and for increasing the availability of food nutrients. While identifying the food contents of coprolites from Bat Cave, Heather Trigg worked with a gastroenterologist who reconstituted the odor of feces through gas chromatography and subjected these odors to a person, trained in discriminating them by smell to identify plants that left no other evidence (Trigg et al. 1994).
Another recurrent theme in the laboratory was anthropogenic ecosystems and its two interdependent themes, and began with Gilmore's work in the Bluff Dwellers in the Ozarks and Volney Jones's in eastern Kentucky. One theme was the domestication of local plants. The second was human management in structuring plant communities by cultural means, including agriculture. Wes Cowan followed Volney into the Red River area of Kentucky and studied the plant ecology and distribution of Canary grass (Cowan 1978), chenopodium (Smith 1985; Smith and Cowan 1987) and local domestication of cucurbit in the east (Cowan and Smith 1993). Tim Johns applied his theory to look at alkaloid selection in the domestication of potatoes and their neutralization with cooking clays (Johns 1990). Several dissertations examined the forest structure around archaeological sites (see Minnis 1985) in the Mimbres in New Mexico, using plant remains. Kurt Anschuetz (1998) developed a landscape approach to discover numerous Pueblo farming methods in which specialized fields captured and conserved water and concentrated heat to lengthen growing seasons in northern New Mexico. All these and other innovative and informative studies by other students taught me much, and on many occasions made me change my mind and reject previously held ideas.
My paleoethnobotanical contracts to assist various archaeological field projects enabled me to give University of Michigan students many opportunities for field work and laboratory analyses. In a five year period, in the early 1980s, many students did field and laboratory work with Southern Illinois University to recover and analyze plant remains from Black Mesa. This project led to multiple publications (see Ford et al. 1985; Trigg 1985; Wagner et al. 1984). Other students with ethnobiological backgrounds selected other projects that were exciting and needed my grant support. One was Sunday Eiselt's technological neutron activation research to source micaceous clay in northern New Mexico in order to match it with Jicarilla Apache potters and Pueblo identities (Eiselt and Ford 2000, 2007).
I love to teach and always thought ethnobotany was a “hands-on” discipline, which formed the basis of my many summer courses, workshops and foreign teaching opportunities. I began teaching a summer ethnobotany workshop in 1984 for Southern Methodist University at its Fort Burgwin campus in Taos, New Mexico. I taught it alternate years for a decade to numerous students from around the country and world. Many later earned advanced degrees at their home universities but still credit my course for inspiring them. I taught one summer at Colorado College in Crestone, Colorado. The next year I was invited by the University of Michigan's Biological Station director to “move” my course to a summer term course on an annual basis. I accepted, but again it attracted mostly Michigan students and only a few from other universities where ethnobotany was not offered. Twenty years of summer teaching exposed me to over 400 ethnobotanically trained students.
I also offered ethnobotany abroad. I taught an ethnobotany workshop at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México in Mexico City at the invitation of a former summer student, Dr. Marci Rodriguez. My greatest thrill and honor was when Pei Sheng-ji asked me to teach the first ethnobotany course in China, in Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province. The course had simultaneous translation and my handouts had all been previously prepared in Chinese. Students came from all over China where afterward
To assist students with normal college expenses and research needs, I put all my speaker fees, honoraria, royalties, and contract fees into a fund to support students. Daphne Gallagher and her student assistants were supported by this fund to work on our e-book on Southwestern Ethnobotany (Ford et al. 2007). The remainder of these funds is the basis of the Volney H. Jones Ethnobotany Fund at the University of Michigan to support student research. I am very proud of the 50+ Michigan student honors theses and dissertations I chaired, and of the students I worked with for advanced degrees at other universities. I have continued to learn from them as their professional careers have flourished.
Be Certain to Give Back
I am now an elder, in the Pueblo sense. I have outlived most of my Ohkay Owingeh (a.k.a. San Juan Pueblo) consultants who instructed me while I worked on my dissertation, but their children now acknowledge how much I know about their Pueblo. In proper Pueblo behavior, I do not want to take their knowledge with me. I published my dissertation with the Ohkay Owingeh Governor's and Council permission, but the officers who followed would not let me publish The Weeds are Laughing at You!, which is an ethnobotany and farming guide to update Robbins et al. (1916). Now they want me to!
As outsiders we ethnobiologists have more than local knowledge to share with community members. We have practical experience for dealing with various American cultural institutions to make lives easier. In 1962, I did not know where my future would take me. I was inexperienced as an anthropologist and as a “politician.” My reservation-bound friends did not have abundant experience dealing with state and federal government agencies that controlled so much of their lives. For some, English was unknown or was a second language, and made bureaucratic blabber hard to follow. On several occasions, as inexperienced as I was, I drove with Sa‘yâa, “Grandmother” (Martinez 1982:10), to Espanola or Santa Fe to address her welfare or health issues with government officials. I could explain the problem in English terms that were understandable and could interpret the responses in terms she and her attending relatives would comprehend. This was a translator role I was not prepared for, but one that came easily after a few interactions. They appreciated my efforts as a sign of friendship and I soon understood why native people can be so frustrated by governmental bureaucrats who really have good intentions but don't understand other cultures. These experiences reinforced why I wanted to become an anthropologist!
I give their knowledge back to this Pueblo and several others in many ways. I present ethnobotany lectures and workshops for children in many Tewa Pueblos, Picuris and Cochiti. I am an expert witness for the Ohkay Owingeh Abbott water rights legal case, handling its ethnobiology portion –hunting, animal herding, domesticated plant irrigation and pre-contact lithic mulch farming, and wild and cultivated plant procurement. I also consult for the Department of Justice ecologist expert witnesses on the Aragon water case, providing details about plants and animals, including birds and fish, found in the Bosque of the lower Rio Chama. My professional experience as the Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology and my services on many university executive committees and national science and museum review panels has provided ample information about developing tribal museums, cultural centers and historical archives (Ford 1977). I am on museum and cultural center boards for Ohkay Owingeh, San Ildefonso Pueblo and Pueblo de Abiquiu, in New Mexico. All are investing in ways to educate their young people and outside tourists about their history and culture. These communities are all different, unique, and situational.
My teaching experiences have changed along with the focus of my field work. Because I do not have a research laboratory in Santa Fe after retirement, my field research has changed in the past decade. During this time, I have been “discovering” and recording petroglyphs in northern New Mexico. Each year in June, I work with Paul Williams from the Bureau of Land Management in Taos and a local environment organization called Vecinos del Rio to instruct local middle and high school minority students about how to record petroglyphs and to think about their cultural significance. This has been a very rewarding new teaching experience.
Finally, Tewa Pueblo elders asked me to teach a course, Tewa Ethnobiology, at Northern New Mexico College. But first they gave me an examination in the Tewa language about plants and animals in the dominant dialect and Santa Clara dialect. Fortunately, I passed! You can read online (Ford 2010) the most comprehensive and up-to-date notes on Tewa Ethnobiology since the classic works of Harrington and others. I continue to enjoy teaching, especially fulfilling a long standing desire to teach minority students; most of my students are from Tewa Pueblos and some from Spanish speaking villages. This is another form of giving back while I am still here!
Conclusion
I want to thank the Society of Ethnobiology Board for this unexpected honor and opportunity to share insights about my almost 50 year career with you, especially the young professionals. For the reasons I shared with you, after 1968 my ethnobiological adventures and research opportunities were not planned. They were a series of fortunate circumstances, mostly thanks to friends, when health and time permitted. For senior members of our profession, these expressions duplicate their experience and reinforce their guiding career principles. Newly initiated ethnobiologists must develop personal ethical principles and understand the meaning, value, and importance to others, either community consultants or public policy makers, of what they are doing as ethnobiologists. Starting in 1962 it was Pueblo friends, professional colleagues, and students that made this Ethnobiological journey in Wonderland possible and still so enjoyable.