Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Food and Cuisine

The wealth of the Americas in 1492 was not in gold and silver, as Europeans thought, but in the variety of foods that grew in American soils. Pineapples, avocados, chocolate, chilies, tomatoes, and peanuts are all familiar American foods today. Corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and potatoes are also important.

Throughout the Americas, native people utilized an amazing variety of wild and domesticated plants. From upstate New York through the Ohio River valley, people gathered a wide variety of wild foods—fruits (grapes, plums, thorn apples, bearberries, cherries, blackberries, blueberries, elderberries, sumac berries) and nuts (acorns, butternuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, and beechnuts). The Iroquois ceremonial cycle included a strawberry festival that celebrated the small, new wild strawberries that were a particular delicacy and a harbinger of spring. Their juice is still drunk at ceremonies in contemporary Iroquois communities.

In the northeastern part of North America, native people domesticated sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) and their associated tubers, now known as Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) although they are more like a radish than an artichoke. They also cultivated sumpweed (Iva annua var. macrocarpa), goosefoot (Chenopodium bushianum Aellen), maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana Walt.), and giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida L.). These plants could withstand a wide range of environmental conditions and spread readily (qualities that today lead them to be classified as weeds).

Fresh berries provided energy and assuaged thirst. Dried, they served as thickeners and flavorings. Mixed with fat and dried meat, they were an essential ingredient of pemmican (an Algonquian language term), a very concentrated food source for travelers.

Seeds, the stored energy that produces new life, were an essential part of native foods. Wild rice, technically a grass (Zizania aquatica), was and is an important staple for Indians in the upper Great Lakes, where it grows extensively in shallow lakes. It stores an exceptional amount of nutritional value, probably the greatest of any grain used by Native Americans.

Wild rice is still a staple of the diet of Indian people in the Great Lakes area. Its Ojibwa name is manoomin, "good seed." It is harvested in the late summer, usually at the end of August and the beginning of September. The green grain is then dried, threshed and winnowed. It can be ground into a kind of meal and used for making bread; like corn, it can even be popped.

Wild plants provided not only seeds and roots but also tender greens in the spring. The first shoots of dandelions, milkweed, pokeweed, lamb's quarters, mustard, dock, and watercress were gathered by the Delaware Indians in the nineteenth century. They were parboiled and then cooked with meat. The tender green fiddleheads (tightly curled fern fronds) that are eaten as a delicacy during the early New England spring today were probably enjoyed by New England Indians before European settlers arrived.

Corn is generally regarded as the greatest agricultural contribution of American Indians to the world's diet. It was the major food source for many native groups throughout North and South America. Corn is descended from teosinte, a wild grass that some eight thousand to fifteen thousand years ago began to be modified by human selection. It was probably domesticated in northern Mexico and introduced into the American Southwest by about 4000 b.c. It was a relative latecomer in the Midwest, appearing sometime around 200 b.c.

Domestication creates a symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A plant's primary form of energy storage is the seed. Wild plants reproduce by being able to scatter their seeds freely; however, humans who collect seeds want them to stay in one place, and they favor plants whose seeds stay attached to the plant. But because humans must then remove the seeds from the plants, the plants become dependent on humans to disperse the seeds so they can reproduce. This is what happened with teosinte, whose seed cases modified into rigid containers characteristic of the kernels of maize. Although the process of human selection was not systematic in the beginning, it became deliberate, and it altered the structure of the corn plant.

Humans altered food plants in other ways. The Hopis produced a corn plant whose seed is adapted to the arid growing conditions of their mesas. The taproot is very long, to reach down to the underlying subsurface moisture, and the seedling adapted to growing a long way under the soil before breaking through and putting out its first leaves. The colors of Hopi corn—red, white, blue, and yellow—are the result of selection and the careful preservation of seeds.

Corn, beans, squash, and deer meat fed as many as ten thousand people in the Chaco Canyon region of western New Mexico around a.d. 1100. For Pueblo people in the Southwest, corn is both food and religion. Ceremonies mark the beginning and end of planting seasons. The Hopis celebrate the Niman Kachina Ceremony in June to bid good-bye to the Kachina spirits who have lived with them during the winter and spring and who must now go to their homes in the San Francisco Mountains to plant their own crops.

When children are born in traditional Pueblo communities, they are presented to the sun with two perfect ears of corn, their corn mothers. These ears represent the ideal relationship between human beings and the corn plants upon which they depend for their existence. The Iroquois (and many other eastern tribes) celebrated the Green Corn Ceremony in the early spring. It marked the emergence of the first ears of corn. The immature "milk" corn was scraped from the cob and made into puddings.

Squashes and gourds (Cucurbita pepo) were domesticated in the Southwest. Tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius var. latifolius) were also domesticated as an important source of protein.

Corn, beans, and squash became an important triad of domesticated crops throughout North America. A Navajo planting song tells how the spirits of the corn, beans, and squash enjoy being together. In the Northeast, among the Iroquois, these spirits—and the crops they represented—were called the "three sisters," and myths tell of three beautiful maidens seen walking by moonlight around the fields that bordered the villages. Mohawk women planted corn seeds in holes poked into the ground with digging sticks. When the corn had sprouted, they piled earth around the base of the stalk to discourage hungry animals, and close by they planted bean seeds, whose sprouts climbed the corn stalks to reach the sun. Squash seeds were sometimes planted around the base of the plants as well; the broad squash leaves served to keep the soil moist under their shade. Native people processed some of the corn they grew by boiling it with wood ash. The Iroquois cooked corn with beans because the spirits of the sisters wanted to be together. Scientific nutritional theory explains that the amino acids in corn and beans complement each other to produce complete protein.

Sweeteners for food included wild honey, dried and fresh fruit, and maple sugar, produced by sugar maple trees, which were found from Alabama to the northern Lake Superior region. Maple sugar was used most extensively by native people around the Great Lakes region Menominees, Potawatomies, Ojibwas, Fox, and Sauks. The sap develops in freezing temperatures during late winter as the tree rests, and rises during early spring when the temperatures are warm enough to thaw the sap.

Fish and game provided protein. An estimated 45 million buffalo and probably as many deer and antelope roamed the Great Plains by the time Europeans arrived. On the Northwest Coast, salmon and halibut fillets were dried in the smoke from common cooking fires that rose to the rafters of the longhouses. Whole halibut were dried in the sun on the roofs. Whole salmon had to be smoked slowly in small, closed huts because of their rich oils. On the East Coast, lobsters, clams, and mussels abounded, although lobster was used mainly as bait for bass and cod. In the Southeast, Indians ate deer, wild geese, gar, crabs, bass, and squid. Deer were abundant, and flocks of wild turkeys hung around Indian villages scavenging the kitchen middens; the birds were small, very fast, and probably quite tough unless one got a young one.

Animal fats and oils provided seasoning and texture for food. Bears were widespread throughout North America, and fat was commonly rendered from their meat. On the Great Plains, the rich hump meat of buffalo also provided fat. The whales and seals of the Northwest Coast offered the local Indians a rich source of oil.

Native people in North America did not domesticate animals for food. The abundance of wild game probably made it unnecessary. The only domesticated animal in North America, the dog, was, however, used for food on some ceremonial occasions. One part of the Iroquois midwinter ceremony involved the killing and cooking of a white dog. Feasting was an essential part of many ceremonies. On the Great Plains, Lakota women boiled buffalo tongues for a feast during the annual Sun Dance.

Indian meals generally consisted of a soup or stew cooked and eaten out of a single pot, most often with the fingers. Some sort of bread made out of ground meal and water and cooked on a hot, flat stone was used to dip food from the pot and sop up juices. Food was readily available throughout the day.

Cooking techniques included roasting meat or fish over an open fire. On the Northwest Coast, salmon were roasted in a latticework of cedar splints held in a split stake that was driven into the ground facing a bonfire of cedar or alder wood. Boiling was done in pottery vessels in the Southwest and on the East Coast, and, on the Great Plains, in the cleaned paunch of a slaughtered buffalo suspended on a framework of sticks and filled with water heated by dropping red-hot stones into it. Root vegetables (like the camas root, the bulb of a species of lily used widely by the Nez Perces in Idaho) were often buried in pits lined with hot coals and leaves and left to steam for a day until tender. In the Southwest, young Navajo women ground corn into meal to be mixed with water and cooked in a pit oven overnight. The act was part of a puberty ceremony. The more corn the girl could grind, the more successful her life as an adult woman would be.

Traditional native foods, both animals and plants, largely disappeared as European settlers moved into Indian territories. Indian people came to depend on the foods used by Europeans. During the reservation period beginning in the 1850s, government rations of beef replaced buffalo and deer meat, sugar replaced wild honey, wheat flour substituted for cornmeal, and coffee became part of the diet on Indian reservations. These were the rations provided to Indians in exchange for the land that their leaders signed away in treaties. Today, however, in native communities, wild rice, wojape (Lakota grape dumpling stew), grilled salmon on the Northwest Coast, and piki bread in Hopi communities still are markers of tribal identity.

Cooking food is an activity that transcends culture. The ways in which food is cooked, and the ingredients, depend on the environment. The ceremonies that surround its cooking and its eating are very much a product of human culture. Native American cuisine is a product of basic human needs, a wide range of environmental conditions, and a cultural understanding of how people relate to their environments in practical and ceremonial ways.





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