The Cahuilla, Serrano, Chemehuevi and Mojave people all alternately occupied portions of what is now the surrounding national park. The area around Coyote Hole functioned as part of a old trade route between tribes near the Pacific Ocean, through Yucca Valley and out to the Colorado River, Milanovich said. 'Because we don't know what a lot of this information is.' 'It all depends on who you talk to as well,' he said. He knows the meaning behind some of the petroglyphs scratched into the granite rocks of Coyote Hole - one vertical shape is a desert tobacco plant, an anthropomorphic figure is a medicine person - but not all. “If you don't know what you're looking for, you're not gonna see it,” he said.īut mysteries of the area remain, even for Milanovich, a member of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.
The springtime blossoms and buds of a nearby cholla cactus were converted into a salad. A humble green-branched shrub, ephedra, can be boiled into a medicinal tea, he says.
On a plot of land less than five miles from the mouth of Joshua Tree National Park, Sean Milanovich gestures knowingly to desert plants sprouting up along a sandy wash, describing how his ancestors would have used them thousands of years ago.
