TUCSON, Ariz. >> 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 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.”

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.

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.