what is the work and social customs of people in sonoran desert
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ANSWER :
The O'Odham are Piman-speaking Native Americans who have lived for thousands of years in the Sonoran Desert region now transected by the United States/Mexico boundary. They have recently become involved in cultural and natural resource management issues relating to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, decreed a biosphere reserve in 1978, and to the Sierra El Pinacate Protected Zone, established in Sonora, Mexico, in 1979.
For nearly a decade, the Sierra El Pinacate has been nominated as a biosphere reserve, a UNESCO designation for natural areas that have management benefits to surrounding communities. (For an excellent overview of the Pinacate's cultural and natural history, see Wilson et al. 1988.) In this area, adjacent to the Sea of Cortez, endangered desert pronghorn and bighorn sheep take refuge. Some 600 square miles of lava fields, cinder cones, and craters are surrounded by a sand sea with some of the highest dunes in North America, and certain drought-hardy plants show their flowers and release their perfumes even when rain does not fall for two years.
Such landscapes have long served as home, legendary locus of emergence, sanctuary, and waystation for O'Odham gathers, hunters, farmers, fisherpeople, salt pilgrims, and sacred song seekers. (For more on historic land uses and ethnobiology of the Hia Ced O'Odham, see Nabhan, Hodgson, and Fellows 1989.) However desolate it may seem at first to the outsider, the area has supported the O'Odham people for a minimum of 5,000 years. The archaeological record of North American deserts "has been better preserved in the Pinacate then anywhere else," and one noted archaeologist has offered carefully detailed evidence of cultural remains in the Pinacate dating back more than 40,000 years (Hayden 1989).
Recently, interest in both the natural and cultural resources of these landscapes has interwoven, but what pattern will emerge from this tapestry remains to be seen. The issue at hand is how much the members of the binational O'Odham community, formerly known as the Papago tribe, will be allowed to function as full participants in the planning and implementation of protection for the Pinacate - for its cultural as well as its natural resources. If she last two years' events are any indication, conservation, eco-tourism, and resource management may take a new twist in the North American deserts as a result of the keen interest that O'Odham elders and young activists are taking in cultural preservation, aridadapted land uses, and cross-cultural education.
Setting Aside a Homeland
The Sierra El Pinacate sits immediately on the Arizona-Sonora border, less than 30 miles from the already established biosphere reserve of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and 50 miles from the 250,000-acre Tohono O'Odham Nation reservation in the United States. To the west of the present-day reservation, a related group, the Hia Ced O'Odham, or Sand Papago, formerly inhabited a large area of the United States and Mexico now managed as bombing range, recreational area, wildlife refuge, national park, and groundwater-irrigated farmland. It is amply documented that O'Odham families resided in or made seasonal pilgrimages into the S-cuk Do'ag (Pinacate) region throughout recorded history, but their populations declined and they abandoned routine use of the area earlier in this century (see Hayden 1989).
Nevertheless, it came as somewhat of a surprise to many conservationists when a dozen O'Odham representatives from both sides of the international boundary were invited to the podium at a Pinacate research symposium sponsored by the Ecology and Environment Committee of the Arizona-Sonora Commission in October 1988. There, in Hermosillo, Sonora, they presented several provisional statements prepared and revised by consensus to reflect the views of not just one of them, but of the community as a whole. The O'Odham delegation also read a position statement from the tribal government of the Tohono