On this day, the day of thanksgiving, history may be debated. Is Thanksgiving the story of indians and pilgrims enjoying a three day feast in 1621? Is it a story of the slaughter of Pequot men in 1637? Perhaps it is actually about advertising. Did you know that in 1939, the National Dry Goods Association had requested Roosevelt move Thanksgiving back one week to allow for a longer Christmas season. A longer Christmas season? Well you can’t get more American than that. Now back to the Indians…
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As a person who lives in Indian country and counts many Indians as friends, I have a fascination with the history of those that were here before my ancestors. How did the indians manage without the europeans? Or more to the point of this diary, what did they eat before they had a corner store?
This diary will look at the diet and some history of the Northern California coastal tribes. I will focus on the Yurok/Wiyot. A few explorers arrived in the dense forests earlier than the 1800’s, but the arrival of a population of whites that remained in the area was brought about by the gold rush. Before the whites arrived the native population had control of their land and lived a mostly peaceful existence for 5,000 to 10,000 years. They lived in as many as 500 villages in their aboriginal territory. What did they eat? The primary diet was acorns and salmon. Their diet also included seafood, eel, game such as deer, berries, bulbs, seaweed and seeds. They maneuvered their river canoes to catch fish in the river and ventured into the ocean and hunted sea lions as well. Women collected plants while men hunted and fished.
Traditional Yurok Home
Basic Nutrition
Carbohydrates: Nuts, berries and seaweed.
Protein: Meat and fish. Fish can be dried and stored for the winter months. If salmon was not eaten fresh, it was cut into strips and smoked.
Salt: Sea salt.
Fats: Fish oil.
side note: When the Yurok Tribe opened a gas station on the reservation there was a discussion on what to name the station. The Yurok language had no word for crude oil or gas. It was decided that the closest native word they had was Pem Mey which translates to fish oil. So if you are ever in Klamath California be sure to stop in at the “fish oil” gas station and mini mart.
Acorns are a primary staple. Newly collected acorns are too soft to cook so they are stored for a year before preparation. Once the acorns have dried they are cracked open to get the nutmeat. Hammer stones were used and the shell was removed by hand. Once they are cracked open winnowing must be done. The acorns were put into a basket and rubbed together until the skin was loose. Then they were tossed into the air and the wind blew the skins away. Acorns were then pounded into a meal and sifted into a fine flour. Acorns then required leaching to remove tannic acid, this poison had to be removed to make the acorn flour safe to eat. First, women scooped out a large basin in the ground. Next, they spread the acorn meal out in the basin and placed branches over it. Then, they poured water through the branches into the basin. Once the acorn meal no longer tasted bitter it was safe. An acorn formula was made to supplement a babies nutrition. Trees were not cut down to allow future generations to obtain food. To cut down sugar pine and oak trees was considered a crime.
Traditional salmon recipe:
- Build a fire.
- Clean the fish and cut it in half or cut into meal size chunks.
- Skewer the fish on a stick (preferably a sturdy willow).
- Place the fish on a stick into the ground very close to the
hot coals (like the picture shows.)
- Turn the fish over, as the bottom will cook quickly.
An ancient Yurok ceremony. One that could be compared to our thanksgiving. It had spiritual dance for the renewal of the earth and provided a feast for hundreds to thousands of indians. In one recollection as many as three thousand indians arrived for the celebration from neighboring tribes. Fish was shared. No individual tribe claimed ownership of the food.
Yurok History: THE FISH DAM
"In all of northwestern California, the largest and most elaborate social event of the year before 1848 is said to have been the building of the fish dam at Kepel, near the confluence of the Trinity and Klamath Rivers. This highly formalized event occupied a hundred or more men and their families for ten days, exactly, and thousands of ritualized person-hours went into the construction of the weir across the river each year. Once completed, the structure was fished for just ten more days, regardless of the size of the run or the number of fish caught, and then it was opened up and abandoned, to be built anew the next year.
"Each step in the process -- the cutting of the poles, their placement in the river, the ceremonies required before fishing began -- was informed by such complex ritual content that the role of remembering the exact procedures and supervising the event each year was invested in one man, called a formulist by the anthropologists... After the structures were abandoned at the end of ten August days, he and his assistants remained in a hut above the dam site to be sure that it was washed away by early winter storms, so as not to interfere with later runs of other stocks of salmon."
"In these traps, there get to be a mass of salmon, so full they make the whole structure of the fish dam quiver and tremble with their weight, by holding the water from passing through the lattice-work freely. After all have taken what they want of the salmon, which must be done in the early part of the day, Lock [the formulist] or Lock-nee [his assistant] opens the upper gates of the traps and lets the salmon pass on up the river, and at the same time great numbers are passing through the open gap at the south side of the river. This is done so the Hoopas on up the Trinity River have a chance at the salmon catching. But they keep a close watch to see that there are enough left to effect the spawning, by which the supply is kept up for the following year."
"That these [indigenous] cultural conservation strategies were successful and enduring cannot be denied. Conflicting estimates of annual consumption of salmon by tribes in the Klamath-Trinity basin range between half a million and two million pounds. There may have been that much variation in seasonal abundance anyway. Indigenous peoples could have taken more, but they didn't. Fishermen in the cannery-driven fishery that replaced the native one could take more, and did. The industrial fishery peaked out with a catch of 1.4 million pounds in 1912, and has been in steady decline ever since."
The last fish dam at Kepel was built in 1906, and then the tradition ended. That was 103 years ago.
Things have changed drastically between human and salmon over the past hundred years.
The European American approach to salmon has been a bit different from the Yurok's. Salmon were harvested indiscriminately, swaths were cut out of the forests in logging operations, roads were built and streambeds made unpassable by the movement of earth, hillsides were dynamited to make way for train tracks. The special conditions that salmon need to spawn -- loose gravel, cool, shaded running water, continuous access from ocean to estuary to river to stream -- all were gradually eroded. And eventually, of course, huge dams were built that salmon, no matter how strong, how determined, how majestic, could never hope to scale. But we needed water for agriculture and for cities, and we needed electricity for cities, and that imperative trumped all other concerns.
Klamath River - present day in vicinity of the ancient fish dam.
http://cauldron.wisefoodways.com/...
Thompson: To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. 1916;1991 Heyday Books
Spiritual Health: A deep belief in renewal of the land and having the world in balance. Jump Dance ceremonies are held to dance in order to fix the world, a spiritual belief that they can dance together and bring about a change in all societies.
Another form of renewal is to bring back the Condors. "It can soar the highest, so we figured that was the one to get our prayers to heaven when we were asking for the world to be in balance," said Richard Myers, a member of the Yurok Tribal Council and a leader in the revival of the tribe's world renewal ceremonies.
http://www.news9.com/...
A little more history:
It was the discovery of gold in 1849 that brought white settlement to the Bay, and resulted in the destruction of Wiyot people and culture. The ensuing, "Indian troubles" culminated in a series of massacres February 26, 1860, the most infamous at Tuluwat on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay.
The Wiyot people had gathered at this traditional site for the annual World Renewal Ceremony, which lasted seven to ten days. At night, the men would replenish supplies, leaving the elders, women and children sleeping and resting. Under cover of darkness, local men armed with hatchets and knives rowed to the Island and brutally murdered nearly all the sleeping Wiyot. Estimates of the dead ranged from 80 to 250 in that night's series of orchestrated massacres.
Although the white men involved were locally known, no charges were ever filed. Remaining Wiyot temporarily took refuge at Fort Humboldt (where nearly one half died of exposure and starvation), and later were forcibly relocated to reservations at Klamath, then after a devastating flood in 1862, to Hoopa, Smith River, and Round Valley.
http://www.wiyot.com/...
http://www.yuroktribe.org/... Yurok Culture/History/Boarding Schools
http://www.yuroktribe.org/... Yurok Tribe fisheries management
So there you have it. A society that had good nutrition, exercise, a spiritual connection to the world and a conservative approach to resources. And a concern for future generations and their food availability. Perhaps what we didn't understand those short 150 years ago we can all learn from now.
Human bodies are designed for simple foods and planetary cycles. When Native Americans diets changed to an american diet diabetes followed.
According to the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the "thrifty gene" theory proposes that African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans inherited a gene from their ancestors which enabled them to use food more efficiently during "feast and famine" cycles. Today there are fewer such cycles; this causes certain populations to be more susceptible to obesity and to developing type 2 diabetes. http://vltakaliseji.tripod.com/...
Scheduled WHEE diaries:
November 26 (Thanksgiving - U.S.)
Thurs AM - ???
Thurs PM - debbieleft
November 27
Fri AM - ???
Fri PM - Alexandra Lynch
November 28
Sat AM - juliewolf
Sat PM - Edward Spurlock (Kessler, Ch. 27 - start of Part 3)
November 29
Sun AM - ???
Sun PM - Holiday Fit Club - kismet
November 30
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
December 1
Tues AM - ???
Tues PM -- Clio2 (Kessler, Ch. 28)
December 2
Weds AM - ???
Weds PM - Edward Spurlock