Carrie Cannon
Carrie Calisay Cannon is a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and also of Oglala Lakota and German ancestry. She has a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Resource Management. If you wish to connect with Carrie you will need a fast horse; by weekday she fills her days as a full-time Ethnobotanist with the Hualapai Indian Tribe of the Grand Canyon of Arizona, by weekend she is a lapidary and silversmith artist who enjoys chasing the beautiful as she creates Native southwestern turquoise jewelry.
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A geoglyph or an intaglio is a large design created on the ground using land elements best viewed from the sky. The most well-known geoglyphs may be Peru’s Nazca lines, stylized figures of plants and animals, some thousands of feet wide. Yet well over 600 geoglyphs have been identified along the Colorado River from Nevada along the Arizona/California border to the Gulf of California into Northern Mexico. -
For millennia tribal groups of the Southwest made baskets from local plants to use as specialized harvest tools. Skills are still passed down among basket weaving families to maintain the tradition. The baskets played a crucial role in gathering and processing food and other resources, and in celebratory events.
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Twenty-five hundred palm species are known worldwide, yet the Desert Fan Palm is the only one native to the Western U.S. Also called the California Palm, it happens to be the largest of the 14 species in the country and can live up to 250 years.
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The oldest organism in the world is 600,000-year-old Siberian bacteria, and the oldest plant is a 200,000-year-old sea grass meadow near Spain. But the Southwest has the distinction of being home to the largest concentration of old plant species.
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The Grand Canyon is home to numerous native plants that are nutritional super houses. These “grand foods” or super foods contain high amounts of nutrients and antioxidants. The nutritional and medicinal values of many wild foods are only recently gaining attention from western dietitians, yet they’ve long been known by local Tribes.
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What could be rarer than diamonds? Turquoise, actually! Natural gemstone-grade turquoise happens to be one of the rarest natural materials on our planet, and one that has been celebrated, collected, and coveted worldwide. Here in the Southwest, turquoise holds special significance to many Native cultures.
