By GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Cousins Tanisha Tucker Lohse and Maria Francisco set off from their desert camp around dawn on most early summer days, in search of ripe fruit from the towering saguaro cactus, an icon of the Southwest that is crucial to the Tohono O’odham Nation’s spirituality.

One plucks the small, thorn-covered fruits called “bahidaj” with a 10-foot-long (3-meter-long) stick made with a saguaro rib as the other catches them in a bucket. The harvest ritual is sacred to the O’odham, who have lived for thousands of years in what are now U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and it’s enjoying a renaissance as many seek to protect their traditional way of life.

The fruit collected in late June is central to annual summer rain ceremonies, which mark the New Year. The laborious, weekslong harvest process also reinforces crucial connections to the Creator, the natural environment and fellow O’odham across generations.

“I feel like I’m surrounded by all the people that were here before us, all the ancestors,” Francisco said in a desert wash lined with saguaros, flowering creosote bushes and spiny cholla cacti. “We talk about them constantly when we’re out here.”

Foremost for the cousins’ extended family is “Grandma Juana.” In the 1960s, elder Juanita Ahil campaigned to preserve their access to the harvesting camp in the foothills west of Tucson after the land became part of Saguaro National Park. Tucker Lohse’s late mother, Stella Tucker, carried on the harvesting tradition that’s now organized by the two cousins.

“I’m taking on a big responsibility, a big legacy,” said Tucker Lohse, who brought her 4-year-old daughter along this year. “My mom knows we’re still here.”

The saguaro and its spiritual story

Saguaros are the iconic plant of the Sonoran Desert, a land straddling the border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, that’s surprisingly lush even though it receives less than 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain yearly and summer temperatures routinely soar above 100 (38 degrees Celsius).

The treelike cacti start to produce fruit at 30 years old, then sprout their trademark arms around 75 and live up to 200 years. Most of the fruit is near the top, which can be more than four times the average person’s height, so the fruit of the tallest can be beyond their reach.

They’re an essential shelter and food source for desert creatures from mice to wrens, which is why harvesters — traces of whose camps date back to the 1500s — never pick them clean, Tucker Lohse said.

“We don’t look at land and animals as a resource — we create a relationship,” she said, echoing perspectives shared by Indigenous people across North and South America.

For the O’odham, the saguaros, or “ha:sañ” in their language, provide far more than food, tools and shelter material — they’re family.

“Ha:sañ to us are like people, and we respect them that way,” said Silas Garcia, Francisco’s partner. He started harvesting as a child with his aunt on the O’odham reservation, which is one of the largest in the United States.

Garcia said there is a specific creation story about the saguaros — though like many stories sacred to Native Americans, it cannot be told in summer — and their spiritual presence makes the harvest central to the O’odham.

“It’s being reconnected to the desert, to who I am, to where our stories talk about where we come from as a people,” Garcia said as he built a mesquite wood fire to boil the sugary fruit pulp into syrup.

From saguaro fruit to New Year’s wine

Starting in May, O’odham families check the saguaro buds. The fruit is usually ripe by mid-June, opening a one-to-four week harvesting window until the fruit is spoiled by the first summer monsoons.

After picking the first fruit, harvesters praise the Creator, believed to reside in a nearby mountain peak, the Baboquivari, that has been the site of many rescues of migrants who tried to evade U.S. border authorities.

Then they bless themselves with some of the pulp, often making a cross-like sign over their foreheads and hearts — for some, a reference to Christian beliefs many O’odham also embrace. They taste it and thank the saguaro for providing for them.

When it’s cut open — using the saguaro’s dried-up flower as a knife and leaving the pods by the saguaro for animals — the fruit is the color of a ripe watermelon. It changes shades from fuchsia to blood red as it’s processed at camp.

After the pulp is boiled for about an hour, it’s strained to remove any debris, fiber and seeds. The latter two are collected into patties that, after being dried in the relentless sun, make natural pectin for saguaro jam. Then the juice is cooked again, reducing it to a syrup, and its flowery, caramel-like smell pervades the camp.

Since the syrup is one-tenth the quantity of the harvested fruit pulp, it takes a pair of harvesters about 10 hours in the desert to get enough to make 64 ounces (1.9 liters) of syrup.

Finally, a bit of syrup is mixed with water and left to ferment to make wine for Nawait I’i. That’s the dayslong ceremony in which O’odham pray together to their Creator to keep sending the monsoon rains that make it possible to plant traditional crops like beans, squash and corn.

The resurgence of traditional ways of life

For many Native Americans, losing access to land, natural cycles of agriculture and the local foods that sustained them for centuries has meant spiking rates of diabetes, alcoholism and other diseases that disproportionately plague their communities.

Too many elders lost their lives this way, putting at risk their language and traditions and more of their land.

“I watched them slowly pass away and no one took over,” Tucker Lohse said. That’s why she, Francisco and others push to teach youth about saguaro harvesting and other practices.

“I’m really proud Maria has picked it up,” said Francisco’s mother, Josephine Ramon, adding that she’s relearning some traditions she was taught as a child from her daughter.

Ramon said she regrets not teaching the language to younger family members who lived off the reservation, as about one third of the nation’s 30,000 members do.

City living also distances many from heirloom crops, which the Indigenous-run San Xavier Co-op Farm just south of Tucson is trying to regenerate, said one of its managers, Amy Juan, who harvests near the cousins’ camp.

“With everything we do, there’s a teaching of some sort,” added Garcia, who said he’s encouraged by programs on the reservation and beyond that help youth connect to their ancestral culture.

Francine Larson Segundo, who also harvests nearby, said her grandparents taught her about planting and caring for the saguaro.

“They’re people, and they are our people, and when we’re gone, one will take our place,” she said after picking the fruit for nearly two hours. “Anybody that’s younger than me, I have a responsibility to teach as much as I can.”

Francisco’s aunt Helen Ramon, widely known as “Grandma Helen,” stopped by. She’s especially adamant about instilling in youth the need to treat the natural environment with the same respect due to fellow beings.

“They need to carry on our traditions,” she said. “We can’t lose our ways of being Native.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.