We stopped in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation, to visit the Museum of the Prairie Indian. We found out that we’d come during an intertribal powwow when the Blackfeet community welcomed other tribes from all over the country to congregate, parade, dance and share their experiences.
I was looking forward to trying some Native American foods.
At powwows I’d been to in Chicagoland, it seems the main “Native American” food you’ll be served at these events is fry bread. Fry bread is made of white flour dough, fried up puffy, tasty pastry, light, airy and fatty and usually topped with something, like cheese or meat, and frequently referred to as “Indian tacos.”
Fry bread is amazingly popular: I’ve seen t-shirts for sale at powwows proclaiming “Fry Bread Nation.” Clearly, Native Americans identify affectionately with this savory bread.
This identification is ironic in that this beloved food stuff could not have been enjoyed before the Europeans arrived with their wheat flour, their guns and their international business networks that’s disrupted and doomed indigenous civilizations. Fry bread became integrated into Native American cultures as a direct result of the rations delivered by government-sanctioned Indian agencies to native populations consigned to reservations.                                                  Â
The traditional foods of the American Indians – what they ate before contact with Europeans – is sometimes very difficult to determine.  Having an oral rather than a written tradition, no recipes were written down. It’s likely, however, that what Pre-Columbian people ate was what they found or what they grew, specifically the Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash. Of course, the number of wild foods that First Nations people found and foraged would have been considerable: berries, roots and edible plants are growing everywhere, as we discovered in a recent Oak Park forage with Nancy Klehm.
Native peoples also had some prepared foods like jerked meat (sun-dried and smoked buffalo and fish) and pemmican (meat mixed with berries and mixed with fat as a preservative and calorie source). The former is still widely available, though usually of dog-foody, convenience store quality. Fry bread, however, is the undeniable touchstone of modern Native American cuisine, and it is honored…and tasty.
Because the fried bread platform is so versatile (you can put pretty much anything on it, sweet or savory, meat or vegetable), it’s kind of surprising that it’s not offered more widely. In fact, I think it would be perfect if our local Native Foods Cafe offered some kind of fry bread vegetarian options. Seems like it could be a hit — and it would truly be native food (or perhaps, more accurately, the food of the natives).
