Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations

Interview by Arty Mangan

AM:  You write about and work with America’s oldest cuisine.

Lois: I look at how cuisine and the idea of a chef evolved, which are very European, and then go back in history and look at Native foods and what were the foods that were here and how did they evolve over time. Obviously, the environment played a big factor, and the idea of co-joining cultivations with what I call wild foods. 

The term I use for wild food harvesting is acceptance gardening, you accept what nature provides and you adjunct it. By harvesting wild foods the environment actually responds to the human intervention in a positive way and yields more based on that human intervention. So in that way it is a type of gardening. For instance, if you harvest prickly pear, the plant actually knows that its fruits were taken, and the following year it yields double the amount to make sure that it will perpetuate its own species. Wild foods respond to human intervention.

Photo credit Lois Ellen Frank

Pre European contact there was just the most amazing bounty of foods. You have all the wild game: elk, venison, bison, quail, dove, prairie chickens. There was the domesticated turkey, all sorts of wild greens, wild onions, wild carrots, wild celery, wild lettuces. Then you had everything in the cacti kingdom and nuts, berries, fruits, etc. Those would have constituted all of the wild foods.

Then we have this collision, this encounter, and with that you get a fusing together of introduced ingredients with ingredients that existed pre-contact. For instance, in the Southwest, the ingredients that the Spanish brought would include sheep, pork, beef, the wine grape, apples, apricots, nectarines, peaches, and wheat. Those foods were fused into the diet that was already here.

New Mexico at the time of European contact had two lineages: the Spanish settlers and their lineage of foods, which took Native foods and combined it with foods that they had, and then the Native American lineage, which took foods that they had and added the Spanish.

Many of these foods that are here now are very important. Everybody always asks, are those Native foods. My argument is yes absolutely. 500 years after contact, these foods have been fused so deeply into Native peoples’ ideology and identity that they are absolutely Native. If we told the Italians that they can’t use tomatoes because those foods didn’t exist pre-contact, their cuisine at this point in time ceases to exist, because tomatoes are so infused into everything that they do.

On the Native side, a really good example of this infusion would be the Navajo people or the Dine’. Sheep were adopted into their culture and now they have creation stories and sheep are so integrally tied to who Navajo people are that you can’t undo it. Rather than cause trauma historically and say that’s not Native, what I say is that is Native, but it’s a first contact Native.

We have pre-contact, and then we have first contact. A lot of the dishes now will use both of those categories. Then the third section on the food continuum, which has probably been the most harmful to Native populations, is what I call government issue. That was when the government issued commodity foods to Native people upon relocation onto reservations. Again, this varies based on which reservation you’re talking about.

When people were forcibly relocated, they lost their hunting base and their agricultural base, and the government issued them commodity foods. That included white flour, lard, honey, blocks of cheese, canned meat, milk powder, coffee, sugar. Being that they didn’t have any other foods at the time to supplement their diet, they started to create a cuisine based on this. The Indian taco and Navajo fry bread or Indian fry bread, that’s now iconic, everybody says, “Oh, that’s Native food.” It’s actually the most recent introduction into Native cuisine, and the most detrimental.

The food today is made up of all three of these. The direction that Native communities are going is to go back to the first contact and pre-contact foods for health reasons. With the movement towards Native food, you’ll start to see people identify with these first two diets that were much, much healthier. There was no Type II diabetes and there was no obesity during these two time periods.

There’s been a lot of movement toward educating the youth and encouraging them not only to be chefs and cooks in their communities, and in all of the gaming and casino operations that are opening on Indian land, but to take these traditional foods and bring them into the forefront, into the contemporary kitchen, and by doing that, you perpetuate the revitalization of these foods.

Gary Nabhan’s been working on something called RAFT, which is Renewing America’s Food Traditions, and this is very much in the forefront of what’s happening in Native communities, this revitalization of traditional foods and keeping them alive.

I worked with a cooking school in Arizona, where they actually have a Native American youth culinary workshop. They’re taking youth and training them with both the classical or the French cuisine components and then the traditional, ancient, Native components. I think one of the things that stood out the most to me is I saw a young girl who had just graduated from culinary school and we were doing a seven-course dinner and one of the courses was three types of corn mush, which is one of the most traditional of all the foods. One was pure, unadulterated blue corn. The other was infused with a wild sumac berry, so it turns it kind of orange. The third was a white corn meal, which has a little sweetening. She served them on corn husks. As she made this for a contemporary dinner, she had her grandmother’s stirring sticks. She had a very contemporary kitchen setting, and there she was, stirring it in the pot the way it’s been stirred, literally, for thousands and thousands of years.

When you plant seeds to grow the corn that you’re going to later use for this three corn dish, you have prayer, you have song, you have stories that go with that. So the whole thing is revitalized. Then you might have a traditional basket that you collect the corn in. The cultural practice of making the basket or the planting stick gets revitalized at the same time because it is a part of the food.

In Native ideology, there is no such thing as growing food in monoculture. You plant the three sisters together, for instance – corn, beans and squash. Everything is integrally tied to each other.

 AM: It’s pretty hard to overstate the importance of corn among Native American people.

Lois: There is no one universal way of looking at corn, but in different tribal groups, corn is maiden, corn is mother, corn is healer, corn is medicine. Components of corn might be used as offerings. You have the corn pollen, you have the corn meal, you have the corn husks, which are used not only for wrapping foods, but tobacco in ceremonies. You have the actual cob, which is dipped in chili and rolled onto different breads. And corn is used in art – it’s used in clay for making imprints.

Corn is integrally tied into all components of life. Corn comes in the four colors – yellow, white, blue or black, and red. Then you have the speckled, which represents Father Sky and Mother Earth. It’s the combination of them coming together. What I was always told by the elders in my lineage, which is Kiowa, is that corn represents the four colors of man on this Earth. They form the medicine wheel, and the circle of life.

Arty:       What about other traditional foods?  Were acorns eaten by native people?

Lois:       Acorns would be more abundant in Arizona, and they’re primarily used by Chirricahua, San Carlos, and White River Apache, and the acorns that grow there are a small acorn and, unlike the California acorn, they don’t need to be leached. They can literally be ground into a meal and used immediately.

In New Mexico, the ancient sustaining food would be the pine nut or the piñon. It has a huge amount of calories. It’s somewhere between two and 3,000 calories per pound, and this nut goes back in many Pueblo creation stories. Literally, when there was no game or the game didn’t migrate because of drought far enough south for people to hunt, the nuts are what sustained the people. It has almost every amino acid known to sustain human life. It’s a really, really important food, highly dense nutrition that can be stored.

AM:       What other wild foods are coming back or are still being used?

Lois:       I just placed an order today from the Tohono O’odham, for the harvested choya cactus bud. I cook it as a vegetable and I also make it in a salsa, and it’s absolutely delicious. Cactus has a mucous membrane, which regulates blood sugar naturally. It’s harvested in its green state in the spring as a vegetable, and then it’s roasted and dried. You get these tiny, very little hard buds. You can’t eat them in their dry form. You soak them overnight, like you would a bean, and then you boil them and then I chop them up into salsa or put them as a vegetable on a plate. They’re so delicious.

The other product I use a lot is the saguaro syrup. The saguaro are, of course, the giant standing people, the giant cactus to the Southwest that are still harvested by hand with giant sticks, with song, with prayer, and then boiled down into a syrup. When we buy the syrup as a chef, it not only supports that entire community but all the cultural traditions that go with that.

I’m a big advocate of eating local when I can, but also of making conscious decisions to support small co-ops and small communities that are still harvesting their foods. As I buy those products, I help perpetuate the revitalization of those processes or cultural traditions that go with those foods.

As I talk about harvesting these wild foods, I think it’s really important to interject that you only harvest enough. You never go in and desecrate or harvest more than the patch can sustain. And you always leave enough for the animals, and you always leave enough so those plants can repopulate. One of the faults that we’ve seen in the past, especially with American ginseng, for instance, or osha root is that people go, “Oh, this is good for you and we can harvest this,” and then they go out and dig up all these plants, and it destroys the environment and they can’t recover.

That would also go back to that term that I call acceptance gardening. They were harvesting wild foods but they were really gardening. You were never harvesting more than would be sustainable for the next year. It was very meticulously managed and watched and used in terms of a sustainable practice so there would be a perpetuation of all these wild foods for the future.