The Navajo Peach: How Reagan Wytsalucy Traced a Traditional Fruit Isolated for Centuries

Peach trees have grown in the deserts of the American Southwest for hundreds of years. In Canyon de Chelly National Monument, orchards were first planted by the predecessors of the Hopi, and from the 1700s by the Navajo, as part of an economy of herding, small farming, hunting and gathering. Of all the orchard fruits the Navajo adopted, the peach — Diné didzétsoh — became the most culturally important: food, trade good and part of traditional ceremonies.

Pink blossoms no longer stretch for miles as they did in the mid-1800s, and most peaches grown now are modern varieties. But Navajo families still keep trees in the canyon — and a young Navajo horticulturist, Reagan Wytsalucy, working with the National Park Service, has shown why the old peaches are worth bringing back.

From China to the canyon

The peach originated in Zhejiang Province, China, where it has been grown for thousands of years. About 2,000 years ago, silk traders and Greeks carried it to Persia, then to Greece, Italy and the rest of temperate Europe. Portuguese and Spanish explorers brought it across the Atlantic in the 16th century, and conquistadors, Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries and Indigenous people carried it north from Mexico.

In the 1600s and 1700s, the Spanish empire spread across what is now Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Utah and Colorado, its missions aimed at expanding the empire and subjugating Indigenous people. A 1630 report by the Franciscan Fray Alonso de Benavides to King Philip IV recorded peaches, plums, apricots, corn, squash and beans in the pueblos of New Mexico.

By the 18th century, Canyon de Chelly was the center of Navajo peach growing:

• trees were planted on alluvial terraces watered by runoff from the cliffs;
• they were grown from seed, not grafts or cuttings — and through inbreeding and selection became adapted to the desert climate and alkaline, sandy soil;
• they bore small, apricot-sized fruit with white, freestone flesh;
• crowds gathered each September in Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto for the harvest, carrying fruit in wicker burden baskets of sumac, willow or oak.

People ate peaches boiled when green or fresh when ripe, and sun-dried them for winter and trade — for meat, sheep, baskets and skins. Women split the fruit, removed the pits and dried it open-side up on flat rocks, then stored it in skin sacks in pits or stone storehouses under cliff overhangs. Some pits were saved for planting or used to polish cooking stones. Families dug channels from springs to water the orchards and fenced them against wildlife.

Resistance, destruction and survival

Spanish colonists suppressed Indigenous cultural and spiritual traditions for generations. Resistance peaked in 1680, when more than 17,000 Indigenous people took part in the Pueblo Revolt, helping drive the Spanish out — though Spain gradually returned, and its missions prospered in the 1700s. The Navajo adapted by becoming skilled herders, especially of sheep.

The United States took the region from Mexico in 1848 (the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), and an 1853 treaty after the Gadsden Purchase set today's border in New Mexico and Arizona. The 1849 Gold Rush brought thousands of migrants; the Navajo defended their land, and the federal government used military campaigns to force treaties and move tribes onto reservations.

In 1863, the U.S. Army began forcing the Navajo from their land to Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River, under guard at Fort Sumner. Many fled to Canyon de Chelly — and the Army burned and cut down the peach orchards, destroyed crops and killed livestock until they surrendered. Nine to ten thousand people were marched hundreds of miles on the Long Walk, and many starved. By the end of 1864, 75% of the survivors were at Bosque Redondo; the rest had fled west or elsewhere. Among what they carried were peach seeds from Canyon de Chelly.

A peach orchard in Canyon del Muerto, Canyon de Chelly National Monument (undated). NPS

The 1868 treaty let the Navajo return home, within the four sacred mountains — Blanca Peak, Mount Taylor, the San Francisco Peaks and Hesperus Mountain — and created a reservation including Canyon de Chelly, later enlarged into the nation's largest. That ran against the tide: under the Dawes Act of 1887, the U.S. took two-thirds of the 138 million acres Native Americans had held.

Back in the canyon, the Navajo — including those who had evaded capture — replanted: they sowed saved seeds and regrew trees from cut stumps. By the 1870s, soldiers and Indian agents were recording new trees and survivors of 1864, and by the 1880s the orchards were re-established. The archeologist Cosmos Mindeleff, in the canyons in the 1880s and 1893, wrote of "the immense number of peach trees within them," some orchards holding perhaps 1,000 trees, and of Navajo coming by the hundreds and thousands from across the reservation when the peaches ripened.

A slow decline

By the late 1800s, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents were charged with steering tribes toward "civilized pursuits" such as farming. Children were required to attend boarding schools, where they couldn't speak their language or practice traditions — breaking the chain of peach knowledge. By the 1930s, the bureau had handed out peach trees in the canyon, adding new genotypes to the traditional stock.

Meanwhile American breeding — begun in Georgia in the mid-1800s and taken over by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — produced varieties such as Elberta and Lovell, and later hundreds more bred for looks and shelf life. Nearly all local landraces — fruits with uniform genetics from long inbreeding — disappeared.

Canyon de Chelly became a national monument in 1931, but the Navajo Tribal Council kept ownership of the land, and Navajo people still live in the canyons; the park and the Navajo Nation manage it together. Over the 20th century, modern cultivars and methods replaced the old ones, and orcharding declined. In 1972, the geographer Stephen Jett of the University of California, Davis, working with Navajo elder Chauncey Neboyia, mapped thousands of peach trees in Canyons de Chelly and del Muerto — many deteriorating, and far fewer than in the late 1800s.

Reagan Wytsalucy's quest

Wytsalucy grew up in Gallup, New Mexico, somewhat distant from traditional Navajo culture. Her father encouraged her to study agronomy, and at Utah State University she became intrigued by the nearly vanished Navajo peach. Corn, beans and squash were still widely grown in the Southwest, but traditional knowledge of growing them had faded — and for the peach, even more so.

Food on the Navajo Nation is a serious problem. A 2014 Diné Policy Institute report counted only 10 full-service grocery stores in an area the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts combined; about 80% of products in the largest chain's stores were junk food and sweetened drinks, and 51% of people surveyed drove off the Nation to shop — 155 to 240 miles round trip. A 2013 study found about 77% of Navajo people had some level of food insecurity. Wytsalucy wanted to help improve nutrition and create income by bringing back local foods.

In 2016 she began a master's degree in plant sciences with extension fruit specialist Brent Black and professors Dan Drost, Grant Cardon and Randy Williams, studying the southwest peach and Navajo spinach, or bee plant. Utah agencies and humanities groups funded the work, and the National Park Service and the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni governments granted permits to collect seeds and interview elders.

Guided by elders

With her father as guide and interpreter, she traveled from Navajo Mountain in Utah to Zuni, New Mexico, the Second and Third Mesas of the Hopi reservation, and Canyon de Chelly. Elders showed her 21 trees in Canyon del Muerto and entrusted her with pits from traditional trees kept apart from modern varieties. Dendrochronology showed the oldest, now dead, had lived 80 to 100 years — against about 15 for a modern peach tree in the West. Some elders had escaped boarding school as children and are now among the few who hold their communities' peach knowledge.

What the DNA showed

She grew seedlings in a test orchard in Box Elder County, Utah, and sent leaves to Ksenija Gasic's lab at Clemson University, a major peach research center and one of the first to map the peach genome, for DNA fingerprinting (genotyping by sequencing and SNP analysis).

• The Navajo and Hopi samples were distinct from every modern variety tested.
• They fell into three subpopulations; the Canyon de Chelly peaches formed one distinct group — a landrace shaped by long inbreeding.
• Combining inbreeding rates (more than six generations to diverge from one founder, more than ten for populations over 50) with her tree ages, she estimated the landraces had been isolated for 240 to 480 years — remarkable for a plant that cross-pollinates so readily.

Compared with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's standard peach, a traditional Navajo Mountain peach was higher in carbohydrates, fat and calories, lower in protein, and more than 30% higher in calcium and potassium.

The traditional way

Wytsalucy's great-grandfather, Hoskinini, was among those who evaded the Army in 1864, hiding in Jayi Canyon near Navajo Mountain, where refugees grew peaches and rounded up stray livestock. Navajo people still grow traditional peaches there, and she sampled them.

Elders described practices that differ from modern orcharding:

• no thinning of fruit, so as not to end life early, and pruning only dead wood;
• berms around trees to hold water and encourage suckers; the Hopi didn't irrigate;
• blossoming and ripening timed with ceremonies; orchards were sacred places, with shrines, offerings and chants praying for an abundant crop.

Mae Gui, born in 1936, who has replanted trees in Canyon del Muerto all her life, showed how to crack a pit and said seeds were planted where ash was thrown from the house, to feed the seedlings; they were started in November and came up in clusters in spring. Her orchard is one of the last healthy ones in the canyon, with those of elders Katherine Paymela and Francis Drapper. In Jayi Canyon, by contrast, siblings Rocky (born 1941) and Sarah Tsinnajinni (born 1954) advised planting the seed still in its pit for a stronger tree.

Paymela recalled that her grandparents' orchards needed no irrigation — there was far more rain then, and springs to spare; now drought has left even the springs low. Unlike Hopi and Zuni elders, Navajo elders doubted their peaches came from the Spanish: Wytsalucy's father, Roy Talker (born 1958), remembered his grandfather saying the peaches had been in the canyons for a very long time.

Wytsalucy gave her transcripts and findings to the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes to help them keep their heritage.

What's next

After finishing her master's in 2019, Wytsalucy joined Utah State University Extension in San Juan County as an assistant professor. Her research shows traditional peaches are more drought-tolerant than the modern Lovell peach, especially in how fast they recover from drought stress.

She hopes to plant demonstration orchards and help build sustainable farming in Indigenous communities, and is working with the National Park Service, the Navajo Nation and local farmers on a plan to protect and restore the traditional peach in Canyon de Chelly. Park integrated resources manager Keith Lyons says the work builds on years of clearing invasive plants: removing Russian olive and tamarisk from more than 900 acres has improved the environment, freed up water and made growing conditions better for farmers.

The Park Service treats historic orchards and their heirloom genetics as cultural resources to be preserved, and is supporting the traditional peach and the heritage it carries.

Sources

Based on Susan Dolan, with Reagan Wytsalucy and Keith Lyons, "How a Navajo Scientist Is Helping to Restore Traditional Peach Horticulture," Park Science volume 36, number 1 (Summer 2022), National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; the words of Wytsalucy and the elders are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article credits the 1680 revolt to Navajo resistance while naming it the Pueblo Revolt, so only the revolt itself is described; and it gives Navajo diabetes figures (one in three with diabetes or prediabetes; diabetes alone near 50%) that cannot both hold, so neither is used.