Peninsula Indians [2]
From the manuscript I'm working on:
When Indian children were about a year old, they were given a chipmunk to play with. The teeth of the firsky lilttle animal now called a sanjuanito
had been pulled so it couldn't bite, and it was tied to q cord to prevent it from running off. A small lizard and a very tiny snake were also given to
children as toys to keep them entertained.
"And since the children are brought up handling such disgusting things," Padre Miguel del Barco explained, "they never have a horror, as adults, of
touching them." (Although the padre recognized that Indian children were taught to tolerate lizards and snakes, he and other Europeans of his day he
believed that the horror of such creatures is a basic human trait, rather than merely the behavior THEY were taught as children.)
Because of the peninsula's length qnd the variations in its terrain, elevation, and weather, Baja Clifornia has provided a home for many different
kinds of wildlife. The number and types existing at any given time, as naturalist Edward Nelson obseerved in the early 1900s, are largelyl determined
by the availability8 of the plants they eat, which in turn react to the weather.
"During a series of consecutive heavy rains," Nelson wrote, "the desert vegetation flourishes exceedingly, great quantities of seeds are ripened,
tender vegetation abounds, and desert mammals--especially the small kinds such as pocket mice and kangaroo rats--increase enormously until favorable
areas swarm with them.
There are no world-wide standards that identify which animals can reasonablly be eaten by humans, and which are off-limits "One must recognize,"
anthropologist Robert Wenke has advised," that magotty meat, fresh cow blood, rotted fish heads, raw sheep eyes, charred goat intestines, tuna
casserole, pot roast simmered in packaged onion soup--all these are today savored with as much gusto as anything from the restaurants of Florense or
Paris."
The view of edibility held by the peninsula's natives was condensed into a single sentence by Homer Aschmann: "The Indians were singularly unsqueamish
both qbout the conditions of the animals and the parts to be consumed."
Padre Johann Jakob Baegert divided the carnivorous part of the native diet into two categories. The first included "meat or things resembling meat:
dogs, cats, horses, asses, and mules--also night owls, mice, rats, lizards, snakes, and bats. There are also grasshoppers and crickets; a kind of
green caterpillar without hair, about a finger long; and an abominable white worm as long and as thick as the thumb, which occasionally is found in
old, rotten wood, and tastes like pure bacon, so they claim."
Baegert's second carnivorous class consisted of "all kinds of unclean things. It includes almost everything teeth can chew and stomach can digest . .
. tanned and untanned leather, old straps of rawhide with which a fence or something else was tied together for years . . . .
"They will devour bones of small poultry, sheep, goats and cattle, also rotten meat or fish, green with decay, smelling abominably and alive with
maggots . . ."
The Jesuit vilew of proper food could be drastically modified by the pangs of hunger. In 1719 Padre Juan de Ugarte led a group of soldiers and
friendly Indians into the Sierra de la Giganta, where they felled trees to be used in building a boat.
When the food they had brought along ran out, the men shooed some buzzards away from a "stinking deer carcass," boiled part of the venison, roasted
the rest, and dined with gusto.
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\"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest never happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.\" -
Mark Twain
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