How Picking Piñon Nuts in New Mexico Became Big Business

[Karen Fischer]

The painstaking process of picking piñon nuts makes for a booming roadside economy for the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous Americans

Ellis Tanner started his business, the Ellis Tanner Trading Company, in Gallup, New Mexico, more than 50 years ago — the seemingly natural outcome of growing up among four generations of Native American art traders. His gallery walls are decorated with murals of prominent Navajos within the community, and lining the space are glass cases of Native American jewelry and crafts. But there’s one other, more ephemeral portion of the business that makes Tanner’s eyes light up, even after half a century of experience with it: buying and selling tiny, dark-as-earth piñon nuts. “I have made and lost a lot of money trading piñon,” he says.

Tanner’s gallery is located on Highway 602, just north of what is locally known as the Checkerboard. The land bordering the winding highway looks sparse, and is dotted with thickets of forest-green piñon pines and gnarled cedars. But once the curves of the road calm, it opens into breathtaking downhill vistas of rocky bluffs en route towards the Zuni Pueblo. Up close, the trees multiply and resemble, in their own high-desert kind of way, a lush canopy.

Gallup, New Mexico is part of a patchwork of land known as the Checkerboard.

Parcels of land in the Checkerboard are, as the name might imply, mixed — there is tribal-owned, state-owned, or privately owned land in close proximity to each other. “Checkerboarding” dates to the mid 1800s, when Navajos were forced onto reservation lands and assigned individual plots for subsistence farming, while other parcels were sold to railroad companies and private citizens. If you take a few steps in any direction today, you may end up on property that is in an entirely different jurisdiction than where you started. Pragmatically, the land designation is a challenge — getting the proper permits for construction or utility installation quickly becomes complicated. But one perk of the land in this particular area, one that makes it so very valuable to locals who visit it in the summer, is the wealth of bushy piñon trees.

Piñon pine trees are indigenous to the high desert of the Southwest and produce nuts that are simply called piñon. The small, dark brown nuts ripen and fall from the pines each summer and autumn across the intersection of the Four Corners states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. To eat them, you must crack the shell of the piñon between your canine teeth, peel open the shell, and pull out the pale meat within the nut. The process is similar to munching sunflower seeds or pistachios, except that the shell can’t be mechanically loosened ahead of time for easy snacking — the hard exterior must always be cracked and shucked by hand. Though piñon closely resemble pine nuts to the untrained eye and palate, a local around Gallup will quickly correct you. “Pine nuts are big and bland,” Tanner says. “Piñon are small and sweet.”

The area around Gallup — which occupies the unceded traditional homelands of the Zuni, Pueblo, and Diné Bikéyah and other Indigenous tribes — isn’t the only place where piñon can be harvested. The trees also grow in western California, veer east across New Mexico to northern Texas, range north across southwest Colorado and even pop up in Wyoming — but in New Mexico, the culture of foraging for piñon is particularly deep-seated because of the sheer abundance. For centuries, Mescalero Apaches, Navajos, and Puebloan communities, among others across the Southwest, relied on piñon as a staple source of fat and calories. They also steeped the pine needles for tea and chewed the inner bark to ward off starvation in lean times. The wood of the piñon tree is still burned today as a form of incense and is a favorite souvenir from a visit to New Mexico.

During boom years of piñon drop, late-summer Gallup transforms into a massive center for piñon commerce. Gigantic signs outside of gas stations, restaurants, and trading posts advertise that they are buying piñon. Vans toting brokers from outside of the region park along Highway 602 and set up tables and chairs with their own handmade signs: “BUYING PINON.” And, depending on the year and the yield, strings of cars will be parked along highways, National Forest roads, or within rural communities with dense vegetation, their passengers flocking to bursting piñon trees with their families. People lay blankets on the ground and sift through the ripened nuts that have fallen from sticky pine cones, as part of this tradition-turned-robust seasonal economy for many New Mexicans.

Piñon dealer Ellis tanner is a fourth generation Native American art trader in New Mexico.

During boom seasons, roadsigns in this part of New Mexico advertise the buying and selling of piñon.

“As far as I’m concerned, the Almighty put piñon here for the Navajo people,” says Tanner. “If you ever have a chance to watch a Navajo family go out and harvest piñon, stop what you’re doing, get some lunch, and watch. It’s a family event.” Per local lore, especially large yields of piñon only occur once every four years. Precise movements are required to pick the very best nuts: The piñon must be rolled gently between three fingertips. If the nut feels heavy through the rolling motion, you have a good piñon. If, by touch, the nut feels light, it is a dud. The only reliable way to pick piñon requires spending long hours beneath trees, perhaps with a small stool, and feeling each individual one by hand. The value of piñon also stems from the timeliness of the drop: The nuts are only good for about a month once they hit the ground.

For many years, piñon was a central cash crop for New Mexico: “Piñon is like gold,” you’ll hear locals say. Thus, those little nuts are worth a whole lot of cash if you choose to pick and sell them to the highest bidder. In the summer of 2020, piñon pickers were regularly selling nuts to local traders in Gallup for $15 a pound. If a picker finds a particularly rich tree, a pound can be collected in about an hour. Rumors swirled that in outlying areas across New Mexico, piñon was going for upwards of $40 a pound to the end customer. Therefore, the cash earned from picking can be vital for families in the region. According to 2019 census records, 79 percent of residents of McKinley County (which includes Gallup) were Native American, mostly hailing from the southeastern quadrant of the Navajo Nation and the entirety of the Zuni Pueblo to the south. The median household income hovered around $33,000 and 30 percent of residents lived below the poverty line, which is 12 percent higher than New Mexico at large. For these families, harvesting and trading piñon is often about more than tradition: it’s an important financial boost.

Jesica Adeky, a member of the Navajo Nation, picks piñon with her family each year.

“It’s like a seasonal job — I have a family member who picks piñon in the summertime and, with that money, buys silver and stones to work on silversmithing in the winter,” says Jesica Adeky, a local from the Checkerboard region off of Highway 602. Adeky lives in Bread Springs, New Mexico. Her swath of familial land is about 20 minutes south of Ellis Tanner’s gallery and is a parcel of Navajo Nation. During the day, Adeky balances two part-time jobs as an office assistant with the Bááháálí (Bread Springs) Navajo Nation chapter house and at Gallup’s public library. If Adeky is too busy working to pick piñon, she’ll reach out to a family member to pick for her and pay them for their labor.

The farther one gets from piñon epicenters like Gallup, the higher the price gets for the raw product from a picker. Adeky has heard of pickers going as far as Flagstaff, three hours away, to sell their product to a buying middleman. Often, getting out of the hyper-localized piñon epicenter into drier, less piñon-dense regions immediately gives sellers the upper hand to earn more money on the transaction. But more often than not, folks who pick are seeking same-day cash. As that middleman or broker, like...

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