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 [email protected].