Cultural & Historical Significance of the Piñon Pine in the Southwest

The Piñon pine is the state tree of New Mexico whose pine nuts have long been revered for their value as a source for food and the sap, Trementina, as a medicine. Is there no hope for our long time friend?

My first memories of New Mexico were of being picked up by an Indian family outside of Mesa Verde. The elder sat in the back of the pick-up. They made frequent stops so that he could go into the woods to gather his medicine. Piñon and juniper were a main part of his collection. It always impressed me that the piñon is a sacred plant among the Native Americans. And now, so it is with us...

There is a misconception circulating in the wake of the bark beetle devastation that is wiping out the majority of our piñon pines in northern New Mexico. This misconception is that the piñon pine is an insignificant, opportunistic tree that has no real place in the high desert environment of Northern New Mexico, Arizona, the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin area of Nevada and California and in Utah. This is not true! The piñon pine has been evolving in these regions for millions of years. Not only have they evolved, but they have been instrumental in the survival of man. The nuts of the piñon have been eaten for thousands of years to sustain the indigenous peoples of this region. The piñon has, in fact, sustained agricultural communities while they learned how to grow other food crops such as maize, squash and beans. The piñon has always been here to fall back on when the experimental growing of these other crops have failed. Symbiotic relationships have developed over time with birds and mammals. The existence of the piñon in pre-historic times has been documented scientifically by archaeologists and botanists.
These facts and many others can all be found in the historical and cultural account by Mr. Ronald M. Lanner’s 1981 book The Piñon Pine – A Natural and Cultural History. The following excerpts have been taken from his book, mostly verbatim and in some cases restated, but all of these facts can be credited to the research and authorship of Mr. Lanner.

“… a tree is what you make of it, and once, much was made of the piñon. This little tree produced the fuel, building materials, food and medicines that enabled prehistoric Indians to establish their cultures on the Colorado Plateau – and to survive into the present as Hopi, Zuñi, Pueblo and Navajo. It was the piñon that made the Great Basin the coarse grained Eden of the pine-nut eaters who picked their winter sustenance from the treetops… Piñon served the whites with equal generosity and the roster of mounted pine-nut eaters reads like a roll call of western American exploration: Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, Tovar, Espejo, Escalante, Frémont, the Army of the West and the Donner party. (Preface, ix x)

Many of them still eat its nuts in the fall, and New Mexicans still burn its wood in candelarias, Christmas campfires that hark back to Spanish days. (preface xi)

No tree is a simple thing, and least of all one with so may links to our own species. (preface xii)

There are 11 species of piñon pine in the Southwest.

The irony of the current devastation is that the piñon pine evolved during a drought of 30 million years duration during during the Paleocene Epoch. This was a drought resistant piñon.

For many of the Indians of the Southwest, the piñon was bound up with their very origins. According to Navajo myth, the piñon was planted by the squirrel, and its nuts, nictc’ii pináa, were believed to have been the basic food of the early people. Similar stories were current on the Rio Grande. The Tewa of the Santa Clara Pueblo believed piñon to be the oldest of all trees and provider of toh, the oldest food of the people of past days. The pine-nut eaters of long ago used to go up on the mesa to the west. It was there that they gathered and ate fallen piñon nuts, and it was because of these journeys that the people “first knew north and west and south and east.” (page 58)

“Nobody who has sat before a roaring, pitch-boiling, bubbling, scented fire of piñon can think of it as a mere consumption of wood. It is the spirited release of centuries of brilliant sunlight absorbed under a cloudless Southwestern sky, the sudden and instant flow of energy patiently accumulated. (page 60)

The gum oleoresin or pitch of the piñon tree had many important uses in piñon country. The Navajo boiled it with sheep’and goat’s hooves to make glue, which they used to cement turquoise into silver settings. The Hopi also used it as a cement in turquoise mosaics. When mixed with a decoction of sumac leaves and yellow earth, pitch was made into a black ink like dye for coloring wool and blankets. But one of the most important uses of all was in waterproofing basketry water jugs. Melted gum was poured inside the jar, which was then turned until the entire surface was coated.
Pueblo and Navajo Indians used piñon gum to give their stone griddles a non-sticking surface, like an early Teflon. Ruth Underhill has described how a Pueblo woman prepared the griddle on which she will make the wafer bread of blue cornmeal. (pg. 61)

The sap was also used for other household purposes such as the repair of broken pots and the varnishing of wooden throwing sticks. (pg. 61)

The piñon was a mainstay of native medical practice in the Southwest. The Navajo and Hopi routinely used pitch for dressing open wounds, alone or mixed with tallow and red clay. This practice was widely emulated by white settlers and survives today in rural areas of the Southwest. The fumes of burning gum were inhaled to cure head colds and earaches, and buds were chewed up and spit on burns. Inner bark, sometimes eaten during hard times, was also a wound dressing; needle decoctions were drunk to relieve symptoms of coughs, headache, cold, flu and fever.

At the great pueblo of Zuni, syphilis was treated in the following manner:
The needles of the piñon pine were given for syphilis. The patient chews the needles, and after swallowing them drinks a quantity of cold water and then runs for about a mile or until he perspires profusely, when he returns home and wraps in a heavy blanket…. Frequently, a tea is made of the twigs and drunk warm in conjunction with the needles. The ulcers are scraped with the fingernail until they bleed, when the powdered piñon gum is sprinkled over them. If there is swelling at the groin, it is lanced by the attendant theurgist and the powdered gum sprinkled into an incision as an antiseptic.

Piñon figured in ritual practice, healing and ceremonialism literally from the cradle to the grave. (pg. 62)
Navajo medicine men pulverized the charcoal made by burnt piñon which they considered the best blackening for the sand paintings used in healing ceremonies. (pg. 63)
Piñon went to sadder ceremonies, too. Before burying the dead, the Navajo smeared pitch on the body, and the mourners placed some under their own eyes and on their foreheads. Among the Hopi, after the deceased was laid to rest, the survivors went back to his house and put piñon gum into the fire, purifying their bodies and their clothes in the pungent cleansing smoke. Piñon gum had preventative powers, too. Among the Hopi, a dab on the forehead before going out of doors in December gave protection against sorcerers. (pg. 64)

Food that Grows on Trees…
The piñon as a food source was invaluable in sustaining the historic people of the Southwest. The piñon was a primary food source and was relied upon to feed them while they developed new agricultural projects such as the growing of maize. Piñon was a basic staple of many of the indigenous people across the entire Southwest from Texas to California. The nuts were prepared and eaten in many different ways – raw, roasted, boiled, mashed, as a soup or ground into a paste like peanut butter.

For more on this significant tree and our relationship to it, visit Piñons.com