Back to Native American roots

Fry bread out, indigenous foods in as old ways prove more healthful

 

 

By Barbara Yost

The Arizona Republic

 

      Elaine Reyes is a modern American woman. She works, is raising four young daughters and puts food on the table.

      But Reyes has one eye on the past.

      A member of the Tohono O'odham community in Sells, she and her girls have just finished the spring cholla bud harvest, plucking fruit from the spiny cholla plant. They'll eat some, sell some and use some as currency to barter for goods with other Native American tribes.

      "That's a way of life out here that the Tohono O'odham have done for centuries," Reyes says. "God has blessed us with that."

      The traditional Native American diet, mostly plant-based with some wild meat, is a healthful one, relying on fish, game and a little red meat. It's elk, rabbit, dove, wild turkey, even prairie dog and porcupine. It's also corn, squash, tepary beans, mesquite beans and desert plants believed to contain compounds that help control blood sugar levels and prevent diabetes.

      Native Americans who began to stray from that diet decades ago, turning to processed foods and fast foods like much of the rest of the country, are recognizing that it's time to return to their roots in the wake of alarming increases in obesity and diabetes. Non-Indians are embracing the cuisine as well, much as they have turned to healthful Asian and Mediterranean foods.

      "In the non-Native world, it's trendy. In our world, it's survival," says Terrol Dew Johnson, co-founder and co-director of Tohono O'odham Community Action, an organization that works toward revitalization and sustainable economic development on the Tohono O'odham Reservation.

      By survival, Johnson means not only physical health but the preservation of a culture. He believes that food is the way to reconnect young Native Americans with their heritage.

      In the Gila River Indian Community, nutritionist Chaleen Brewer, a Lakota and Hopi, says the elders are already on board. Brewer is helping the Pima people embrace better health through cooking classes that stress traditional foods and the cultivation of home gardens. Now, she says, "It's a matter of getting young people interested.

     

Tradition goes trendy

      Young people will discover that tradition is trendy. Anton Brunbauer, executive chef at the tony Westin Kierland Resort & Spa in Phoenix, chose Native American cuisine for one of his three spa menus, along with Asian and Mediterranean. It's more than a gimmick, Brunbauer says. It's a healthful way of life.

      "A lot of us sit around and think we have to eat tofu for the rest of our lives," he says. "If we went back to eating what Native Americans ate, we'd all be healthier."

      At the upscale Kai restaurant at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa near Chandler, executive chef Sandy Garcia is giving an ancient cuisine a 21st-century spin.

      Garcia, 40, grew up on the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation of New Mexico. Like many Native Americans, his family chowed down on mac and cheese and spaghetti in true American fashion. But on Sundays and feast days, it was all tradition. Garcia's father would roast buffalo tongue. His aunts baked round loaves of bread, pies and cookies in an outdoor oven called an horno, made from adobe and lined with mud.

      When Garcia opened Kai in summer 2002, he drew on those memories and put indigenous American foods on his contemporary menu: buffalo, wild turkey, wild boar, cholla buds, prickly pear and a ciabatta bread much like the loaves his aunts once baked.

      "We have this vastness in our back yard we haven't investigated," Garcia says. "It creates a new experience."

     

Tribal distinctions

      There are so many back yards to explore - perhaps not all suited for a fine dining experience. Though common threads wind through all Native American kitchens (bread is a staple), each tribe has distinctions, many based on geography.

      Ron Carlos, 35, grew up on the Salt River Reservation, a member of the Piipaash (Maricopa) tribe. He remembers the food he ate as a boy:

      "All burned," he says with a laugh. Because most Piipaash food is cooked over a wood fire, "everything has that smoky taste." His sister makes tortillas over a coal fire in her back yard - all nicely blackened.

      His Salt River neighbors ate chili stew, made with potatoes and carrots. They hunted, and ate jackrabbit stew and roasted cottontails. Cottontails are the tastier, he says.

      A stew with the consistency of cream of wheat was a staple on the Navajo Reservation when Ruth Roessel was a girl there about 60 years ago. Roessel is now director of Navajo Studies at Rough Rock Community School near Canyon de Chelly.

      Her family members would gather wild celery, boil it and add cornmeal, salt and lard. They would harvest wild onions and prepare them the same way. In June the Navajos would go into the mountains to pick sumac berries, grind them into flour, add cornmeal and eat it as a soup or stew. These dishes would be eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

      Food is holy, Roessel says.

      "The plants come up from the earth and we pray to them. We'd pray for good health and a good life."

      Centuries ago, Navajos also became sheep farmers, adding mutton and lamb to their menu and using sheep oil for cooking over outdoor wood fires. Navajos reinvented their culture to include sheep, says Devon Mihesuah, a Choctaw and professor of applied indigenous studies and history at Northern Arizona University.

      While many Anglos think of Indian fry bread as the quintessential Native American food, fry bread is "absolutely not" traditional, Mihesuah says. "Fried bread (or more inaccurately 'fry bread') is something unhealthy created by Natives after they were introduced to wheat."

      Fry bread was born out of the imprisonment of Navajos and Apaches by the U.S. government in 1863. Their rations consisted of wheat flour and lard, and they made the best of their rations, says Tristan Reader, co-director of Tohono O'odham Community Action.

     

Return to roots

      Tohono O'odham Community Action began a decade ago to promote a return to the tribe's culinary heritage.

      The tribe operates a farm in Sells that uses an ancient farming method called "ak chin." This system of planting crops in flood plains takes advantage of the short growing season of such foods as tepary beans, which resemble pinto beans, Reader explains. The crops germinate quickly and can be harvested before the earth dries up again.

      The cultivation of cholla buds is another way the Tohono O'odham link past and present. In ancient times, the picking was done with dried cactus ribs lashed together with rawhide thongs. Now Reyes and her daughters use metal barbecue tongs, and it has become a family outing that begins early each morning during harvest season.

      "It's a family thing," Reyes says. "We get the girls together . . . . They need to respect what God has given us."

      Buying ingredients for traditional Native American dishes can be done online or by telephone. Tohono O'odham Community Action works with Heritage Foods USA, an American company that sells indigenous products to the public: meats, fish, poultry, fruits and grains, all derived from small family farms. By next year, Heritage will have a product list of 500 items.

      Next year, the Tohono O'odham organization also will put its name on a Native American cookbook with the working title Harvesting the Desert: Traditional Foods of the Tohono O'odham. Edited by Tucson food writer Mary Paganelli, the book will contain recipes from such Arizona chefs as Janos Wilder (Janos, in Tucson), Scott Uehlein (Canyon Ranch Health Resort, in Tucson), John Sharpe (La Posada, in Winslow) and Garcia, from Kai.

      Garcia believes it's time to take these tasty foods and discover the next great cuisine. Nouvelle Native American could take its place alongside French and Italian.

      "It's a great culture," he says.