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| Robin egg like Wapato tubers from Dees Slough |
Shoreward, Cottonwood and Western Birch
blaze gold against the clear blue skies and slopeward, Maples burn fleeting red
hues amongst the more temperate evergreens. It is the season of contrast and
each day of sunshine is preciously coveted by veterans of our gloomy Cascadian
winters. When will the weather turn? Our first heavy frosts signal the
beginning of the season for harvesting the tubers of Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) and Jack Frost’s
pigmented associate does not fail to notice Wapato’s arrow shaped leaves,
painting them a delicate yellow. For Wapato, it is the season for attending to
future growth, and rhizomes that have stretched horizontally through soft silt
and muck all summer now squirrel away the last golden rays of sunshine into egg
shaped tubers deep beneath the mud. From these tubers will hatch the promise of
Wapato’s future when the sun shines anew next spring.
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| Wapato seed clusters easily shatter into hundred of seeds when ripe |
Not all is invested in the tubers. As
cool weather drives away Wapato’s final pigments and the entire emergent body
of the plant prepares to wither to the detrital depths, the spherical seed
clusters shatter into hundreds of embryonic vessels that disseminate across the
water’s surface until they strike sticky bare sediment suitable for growing a
new generation of roots.
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| A healthy patch of Wapato in the Coeur d'Alene watershed |
Prior to contact, Wapato grew abundantly
along the lower reaches of the Fraser and Columbia Rivers as well as in the Coeur
d’Alene and Yakima Rivers in the interior. Wapato was managed in carefully
tended family garden patches and gathered throughout the fall and winter as a
staple root vegetable. Sto:lo elder Ralph George told me that he remembers raking
away the detritus from sloughs near Chilliwack BC so that the Wapato would grow
better, and Melissa Darby writes of family owned patches being carefully market
and cleared of large woody debris by the Chinook near Sauvie Island (formerly
known as Wapato Island) on the Lower Columbia (see Keeping
it Living). During the winter of 1805-1806, Lewis and Clark noted that
Wapato was the “principal article of trade” along the Columbia. In 2007 archaeologists
from Simon Fraser University excavated a 3000 year old Wapato garden along the
shores of the Fraser River. They discovered a conspicuous rock layer at the
bottom of the Wapato bed that likely limited the depth that the tubers could
burrow, making them easier to harvest during the cold winter months. Unfortunately
habitat loss due to the construction of dams and dikes as well as predation
from introduced carp have severely restricted the abundance of Wapato
throughout much of its former Northwest range. Native American use of Wapato
for food has suffered a similar fate due to loss of access to the tubers and
the hyper-availability of introduced foods.
Today, Indigenous people are working to
revitalize this once important root vegetable. The Coeur d’Alene host an annual
Wapato digging festival at Heyburn State Park. The Yakama are working to remove
dikes and restore Wapato habitat (see here
for more details), and Roma Leon of the Katzie First Nation has started teaching
people how to harvest the tubers from the Lower Fraser River valley (see here for more details).  |
| Amongst driftwood Wapato can be difficult to harvest |
I too want to be part of the restoration
of such a valuable food source, and last weekend Katrina and I gathered some
Wapato tubers to transplant to my dad’s pond and experiment with other methods
of cultivation. We chose Dees Slough as our source population and carefully
extracted about 1 dozen tubers from the cool dark muck. The mud was thick with
branches and driftwood making it impossible to employ the “wapa-tip-toeing”
method of churning the soil with your feet and waiting for the tubers to float
to the surface. Rather, we tickled the roots of the plants until we located a
rhizome, and then slid our fingers along the bottom of the rhizome, loosening
the soil around it by wiggling our thumb and forefinger and raking away the
loose soil with our other hand until we traveled the 6-18 inches of rhizome to
the tuber. This method may be best called “wapa-tickle-hoeing.”
I planted half the tubers in my dad’s
pond and used wire tomato trellises to mark their location and protect them
from hungry ducks. I also cast a generous layer of Wapato seeds throughout the area.
In the wild, Wapato doesn’t generally grow in stagnant water, but I am curious
to see if my transplanted tubers will come up next year. Wapato seeds evidently
take 2 years to germinate. I planted the remainder of the tubers in a 30 gallon plastic tub (a “wapatote”) that was half filled with loose silt/organic soil
and topped off with water. I buried the tote in the ground so that it won’t
freeze solid this winter and plan on circulating the water with a pump once
they start to grow next spring. After I establish a healthy population, I can
then study the how the yearly process of disturbing the soil to harvest tubers affects
their size and abundance.