A Delicious Native Food
Amul growing in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (Noah Elhardt photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
By Pat Murkland
For generations, Cahuilla people have traveled each spring along desert and mountain trails to time-honored places where they harvest the heart of amul, or desert agave (Agave deserti), a native superplant of the Cahuilla homelands.
It took Native American ingenuity to figure out how to obtain a sweet and sustaining food staple from a fibrous plant with leaves so sharp-edged they could be teeth.
Gathering and processing the plant was traditionally a tribal event. Juan Siva was 12 or so in 1884 when he and other boys his age went with the men on their community’s last traditional agave gathering, his daughter Katherine Siva Saubel remembered in 1999.1
(Thankfully — spoiler — that wasn’t the last time people gathered amul.)
I wrote what Cahuilla Elder Katherine Saubel taught me: “Just as previous generations did, the men and boys used hardwood poles to uproot plants, then peeled the coarse outer leaves from the plant’s stalk and heart. They saved leaves and fibers to make sturdy twine and baskets later.
“The men would dig by hand a roasting pit in soil blackened with generations of agave roasts. The group would layer hot coals, then rocks, then agave hearts, and cover the pit. While the agave roasted for three nights, the men would tell stories and sing songs with the boys.”
Katherine Saubel remembered: “Then they would really give them instructions and tell them what was what … And it was really like going into a classroom, that’s what I picture it like, because they were being taught by these Elders.”
The group placed the prepared agave in carrying baskets and took the food home for everyone. “It’s really something that ended at that time with him,” she said.
Crowds of newcomers in the 1880s were continuing to take over Indigenous food-gathering homelands. “So it was really an ending for a lot of the ways they lived, you know,” she said.
Revived Traditions
Some 27 years ago, the late Elders Katherine Saubel and brother Alvino Siva joined the late archaeologist Daniel McCarthy in reviving traditional agave gathering and roasts at Malki Museum on Morongo Reservation. The agave roast continues to be a treasured springtime event at Malki Museum. You won’t want to miss this year’s agave roast on Saturday, April 9, 2022.
Daniel McCarthy using a traditional stick made from mountain mahogany to uproot an agave plant for the Malki Museum’s second agave harvest and roast in 1996. Note the growth progress of the plant’s trademark stalk. If the stalk is well along, the heart won’t be very edible. (Courtesy of Malki Matters newsletter, Summer 1996, p. 4)
At the Malki’s first annual collecting event in mid-April 1995, harvesting with permission on San Bernardino National Forest lands, it was tough going. But they persevered. Alice Kotzen wrote, “It was snowing heavily while Mrs. Saubel talked about the plants of the area. A few hardy individuals followed Daniel McCarthy, Forestry Department archaeologist, to the agave collecting site. We walked right over an ancient roasting pit before Daniel stopped us, pointed out the features of a used pit, how to tell when it was used and for how long. There is a series of such roasting pits right on the trail…” 2
She explained further after the 1996 harvest, “People would have harvested those agave hearts that were ready in a given area, placed them in the pit and leave them cooking while they moved on to harvest another nearby area, fire up and roast those in another pit. Other members of the tribe would bring the roasted hearts back to the village for immediate consumption or storage for further use.” 3
The Malki gatherers took the agave hearts back home for careful cooking in the museum’s underground pit. This also took trial and error to rediscover the traditional Indigenous ways.
Daniel McCarthy (left) and Cahuilla Elder Alvino Siva have taken the agave out of the pit and are cutting the cooked hearts for the crowd to enjoy, at the spring 2000 Agave Roast (Pat Murkland Photo).
The results: delicious. Please don’t try to gather agave on public or private lands without permission, or without knowing the crucial details of how to process and prepare it. Please do come and taste amul and other fabulous Native foods on Saturday, April 9, 2022. Please support our friends at the Malki.
Thank you!
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, led by Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that saves and shares Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. We welcome your donations. (MORE INFO.)
We welcome your EMAIL. Thank you from Editor Pat Murkland, March 23, 2022.
Murkland, Pat, The Press-Enterprise newspaper, Riverside, CA, Sunday, Oct. 17, 1999, special section p. 3, “Family Album: Chapters Ending.”
Kotzen, Alice, Malki Matters, the newsletter of the Malki Museum, Summer 1995, Page 1.
Kotzen, Alice, Malki Matters, the newsletter of the Malki Museum, Summer 1996, Page 4.