Native American Foods

How would you prepare food for storage to use several months from now if you didn't have a refrigerator, canned goods, or grocery store down the road? The Plateau Indians were fishermen and would preserve fish by using a sharp-edged stone to cut it into pieces. They put these fish pieces on a rack of green sticks over a low fire until the fish with dried. The dried fish could be stored for several months. Roots were dug from the ground with a digging stick made of hardened wood, bone, or horns. The roots were sun dried and pounded into a flour. Jerky was with made from deer, elk, or goat meat cut into thin strips and laid out on flat rocks in the sun or near a fire to dehydrate. Berries would be picked and dried in the sun before storing and then eaten is dried fruit or pounded together with jerky powder and fat to make pemmican, an energy bar that would store for a year.

See this collection of what we might call strange-looking weeds? The Indian tribes recognize these as parts of their daily diet and living habits. This one is Indian celery and the chief's granddaughter Ieetum told the story of how her grandparents both smoked and they would mix their tobacco half and half with kinnikinnick and then throw in some wild celery seed. Itum herself said, “I don't know what the white man calls it, but it grows up Nahahum Canyon and in April and early May I used to just about live on wild celery seed.