THE NATIVE AMERICAN hunter-gatherer’s dinner became front-page news in the late 1990s. Drawing from the writings of Dr. Boyd Eaton and Loren Cordain, experts in the so-called Paleolithic diet, columnists and reporters began spreading the word about the health benefits of a diet rich in protein and high in fiber from a variety of plant foods.¹ It’s actually amusing to see what the modern food pundits came up with as examples of the “Paleolithic Prescription,” the diet that Native Americans from both continents supposedly ate during their long prehistory. Columnist Jean Carper offered a “Stone Age Salad” of mixed greens, garbanzo beans, skinless chicken breast, walnuts and fresh herbs, mixed with a dressing made of orange juice, balsamic vinegar and canola oil.² Elizabeth Somer, MA, RD, “a leading nutrition expert,” suggested whole wheat waffles with fat-free cream cheese, coleslaw with nonfat dressing, grilled halibut with spinach, grilled tofu and vegetables over rice, nonfat milk, canned apricots and mineral water, along with shrimp and clams. Her Stone Age food pyramid included plenty of plant foods, extra-lean meat and fish, nonfat milk products, and honey and eggs in small amounts.³

Above all, the food writers told us—and still tell us—avoid fats, especially saturated fats. The hunter-gatherer’s diet was highly politically correct, they insisted, rich in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids, but relatively low in overall fat and very low in that dietary villain—saturated fat. Cordain (who, as noted earlier, owns the trademark for The Paleo Diet) provides the following monkish regimen for a correct paleo diet: eat grass-produced beef (which is typically lean), fish and seafood, eggs, fresh fruits and veggies, nuts and seeds, and “healthful oils” (olive, walnut, flaxseed, macadamia, avocado, and coconut), while avoiding cereal grains, legumes, dairy (including butter), refined sugar, potatoes, processed foods, refined vegetable oils and salt. He makes no mention of organ meats or fermented foods and frowns on fatty meats like bacon.^*⁴

Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution, aims the paleo message at millennials with a similar prescription, recommending a strict plan of lean meat, fruits, vegetables, seafood, nuts and seeds (including chocolate), and the same “healthy fats,” while denouncing dairy, grains, processed food and sugars, legumes, “starches” and alcohol.⁵

Fortunately for modern mankind, the diet that supported robust health among “Paleolithic” and indigenous people of the Americas, although regional and seasonal, was a lot more varied, satisfying and interesting than what passes for the hunter-gatherer diet in the pages of modern magazines and diet books.

THE HUNTER-GATHERER WAS healthier than modern man—of that there is no doubt. Focusing on Native American tribes from several regions, Dr. Weston A. Price noted an almost complete absence of tooth decay and dental deformities among those who lived as their ancestors did.⁶ They had broad faces, straight teeth and fine physiques. This was true of the nomadic tribes living in the far northern territories of British Columbia and the Yukon, as well as inhabitants of the Florida Everglades. Skeletal remains of the Vancouver Indians that Price studied were similar, showing a virtual absence of tooth decay, arthritis and any other kind of bone deformity. Tuberculosis was nonexistent among tribes who ate as their ancestors had done, and the women gave birth with ease.

In 1933, Price interviewed Dr. Joseph Romig, a physician who had spent three decades in Alaska, and noted, “In his thirty-six years of contact with these people he had never seen a case of malignant disease among the truly primitive Eskimos and Indians, although it frequently occurs when they became modernized.” He found, similarly, that the acute surgical problems requiring an operation on internal organs, such as the gallbladder, kidney, stomach and appendix, did not tend to occur among the primitive people but were very common problems among the modernized Eskimos and Indians. “Growing out of his experience in which he had seen large numbers of the modernized Eskimos and Indians attacked with tuberculosis, which tended to be progressive and ultimately fatal as long as the patients stayed under modernized living conditions, he sends them back when possible to primitive conditions and to a primitive diet, under which the death rate is very much lower than under modernized conditions. Indeed, he reported that a great majority of the afflicted recovered under the primitive type of living and nutrition.”⁷

The early explorers across the continent consistently described Native Americans as tall and well formed. Of the tribes in Florida, the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca^* wrote, “[They] are of large build and go about naked, from a distance they appear to be giants. They are a people wonderfully built, very lean and of great strength and agility.”⁸

“They are so skilled in running,” he marveled, “that without resting or tiring they run from morning until night following a deer.”⁹

“They boast and brag of being strong and valiant,” wrote a later observer of the Gulf of Mexico’s Karankawa people, “because of this they go naked in the most burning sun, they suffer and go around without covering themselves or taking refuge in the shade. In the winter when it snows and freezes so that the water in the rivers is solid and the pools, lakes, marshes and creeks are covered with ice, they go out from the ranch at early dawn to take a bath, breaking the ice with their body.”¹⁰

Far to the north, the First Nations peoples of Canada often surpassed six feet. According to a diarist writing in the early 1770s, “I have seen two northern Indians who measured six foot three inches and six feet four inches.”¹¹

In South America, European descriptions of their encounters with native peoples swelled with admiration. According to the explorer Francisco Dominguez, the Native Americans were “nimble and vigorous, swift of foot, and so long-winded that they tire out the deer, and catch them with their hands, besides slaying many more with their arrows.”¹²

Another early observer noted their dexterity, “not only in running, but also in swimming, which they all can do… As for the Brazilians, they are so natural in this trade, that they would swim eight days in the sea, if hunger did not prevent them, and they fear more that some fish should devour them, than to perish through weariness.”¹³

Others noted that the men were “tall and muscular, but never corpulent, with finely formed facial features and limbs of perfect proportion.” The women were “truly handsome as to features and proportion.” Writing in 1768, one observer noted that the Yuracaré of the mountain regions were “the tallest of the mountain peoples, and their women are finely proportioned. Everything about the Yuracares indicated force and suppleness… Theîr proud and arrogant gait accords perfectly with the character and the lofty idea they have of themselves. Their features are very fine and their faces full of vivacity and pride and not wanting a certain expression of gaiety.”¹⁴

Of another mountain tribe, the Guaraní, the missionary fathers noted their thick black hair, “which retained its color until extreme old age, and only rarely was any baldness to be seen among them.”¹⁵

One explorer reported that the Patagonian men of the Argentine Pampas averaged over six feet tall and measured four feet around the chest. Their strength was prodigious—it took nine or ten Europeans to hold down one Patagonian man.¹⁶ “They appear to be subject to no diseases,” wrote another explorer, “and enjoy remarkable uniformity of health, and many of them are very athletic and capable of great endurance.”

The stoic Native American men and women could endure great hardship. “The strength and boldness of the women comes from the little tenderness they are bred with,” wrote Alonso de Ovalle, a procurator for Rome in Santiago, Chile, “for they avoid neither heat nor cold; and in the coldest winters, when birds are killed with cold, they wash their heads in cold water, and never dry their hair, but let it remain wet, and dry itself in the air; and as for their children, they wash them in the rivers, when they are yet very young.”

In Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin found the indigenous people to be “quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body… At night five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of their tempestuous climate, slept on the ground.”¹⁷ Weston Price reported, “They can sleep comfortably through the freezing nights with the ponchos wrapped about their heads and their legs and feet bare.”¹⁸

Dr. Price and many others also noted the ease of childbirth among native women. “The indigenous Brazilian women are very fruitful, and have easy labors, on which occasions they retire to the woods, and bring forth alone, and return after bathing themselves and their child.”¹⁹ “When a woman is delivered of her first child,” wrote one observer, “she presently goes about her duties as before.”²⁰

However, not every indigenous group enjoyed good health. In Cabeza de Vaca’s travels along the Gulf Coast, he found several tribes suffering from hunger “because they do not have maize or acorns or nuts… [and were] confined to gathering small fruit from trees while waiting for the prickly pears to ripen. We found these Indians to be very sick, emaciated and bloated.”²¹ He reported on one village where, although the people were “very well proportioned and of very good features.… the majority of them are blind in one eye from a clouded spot that they have on it,”²² a sign of vitamin A deficiency. The people living along the Gulf of Mexico consumed mostly grubs, worms and seafood, having little access to game, except for the occasional deer. Once Cabeza de Vaca entered into the Rio Grande area of Texas where buffalo were plentiful, he found people who were much more robust and of “a better disposition.”²³ These were the first Native Americans he came upon who lived in permanent settlements, wore “robes of cotton,” and practiced an established agriculture that supplied them with beans, squash and maize.²⁴ He noted, “They are the people with the most well-formed bodies we saw and of the greatest vitality and capacity and who best understood us and responded to what we asked them. And we called them the people of the cows because the greatest number of those cows [buffalo] are killed.”²⁵

WHAT KIND OF foods produced such fine physical specimens? The diets of the American Indians varied with the locality and climate but all were based on animal foods of every type and description. They pursued large game like buffalo, deer, wild sheep and goat, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, bear, peccary, llama and alpaca (in the Altiplano of Peru), monkeys and tapirs (in the Amazon rain forest), as well as smaller animals such as beaver, rabbit, squirrel, skunk, muskrat and raccoon. They ate reptiles including snakes, lizards, turtles and alligators; fish and shellfish; wild birds including ducks and geese; and wild dogs (but not wolves and coyotes, which were taboo).²⁶ Those tribes living in coastal areas also ate sea mammals. They enjoyed insects including locust, crickets, worms, spiders and lice. Although the Native Americans did not domesticate large animals for milk, they did eat “the curdled milk taken from the stomachs of suckling fawns and buffalo calves,” and milk (along with blood) sucked from the slashed udders of lactating animals.²⁷

According to Boyd Eaton and Loren Cordain, these foods supplied plenty of protein but only small amounts of total fat, and this fat was high in polyunsaturated fatty acids and low in saturated fats. The fat of wild game, according to Eaton, is roughly 38 percent saturated, 32 percent monounsaturated, and 30 percent polyunsaturated.²⁸ This breakdown may help promote polyunsaturated vegetable oils as healthy and natural, but it does not jibe with the fat content of wild animals in the real world.

The table here lists fat content in various tissues of a number of wild animals found in the diets of American Indians. Note that only squirrel fat contains the level of polyunsaturated fatty acids that Eaton claims is typical for wild game. On a continent noted for the richness and variety of its animal life, it is unlikely that squirrels would have supplied more than a tiny fraction of total calories in any group’s diet. Seal fat, consumed by coastal tribes, ranges from 14 to 24 percent polyunsaturated. The fat of all the other animals hunted and eaten by Native Americans contains less than 10 percent polyunsaturated fatty acids, some less than 2 percent. Most prized was the internal kidney fat of ruminant animals, which can be as high as 65 percent saturated.

Sources of Fat for the American Indian ²⁹

Antelope, kidney fat

% Saturated: 65.04

% Monounsaturated 21.25

% Polyunsaturated 3.91

Bison, kidney fat

% Saturated: 34.48

% Monounsaturated 52.36

% Polyunsaturated 4.83

Caribou, bone marrow

% Saturated: 22.27

% Monounsaturated 56.87

% Polyunsaturated 3.99

Deer, kidney fat

% Saturated: 48.24

% Monounsaturated 38.52

% Polyunsaturated 6.21

Dog, kidney

% Saturated: 25.54

% Monounsaturated 41.85

% Polyunsaturated 7.69

Dog, meat (muscle)

% Saturated: 28.36

% Monounsaturated 47.76

% Polyunsaturated 8.95

Elk, kidney

% Saturated: 61.58

% Monounsaturated 30.10

% Polyunsaturated 1.62

Goat, kidney

% Saturated: 65.57

% Monounsaturated 28.14

% Polyunsaturated 0.00

Moose, kidney

% Saturated: 47.26

% Monounsaturated 44.75

% Polyunsaturated 2.11

Peccary, fatty tissues

% Saturated: 38.47

% Monounsaturated 46.52

% Polyunsaturated 9.7

Reindeer, caribou, fatty tissues

% Saturated: 50.75

% Monounsaturated 38.94

% Polyunsaturated 1.25

Seal, harbor, blubber

% Saturated: 11.91

% Monounsaturated 61.41

% Polyunsaturated 13.85

Seal, harbor, adipose tissue (fat)

% Saturated: 14.51

% Monounsaturated 54.23

% Polyunsaturated 16.84

Seal, harp, blubber

% Saturated: 19.16

% Monounsaturated 42.22

% Polyunsaturated 15.04

Seal, harp, meat (muscle)

% Saturated: 10.69

% Monounsaturated 54.21

% Polyunsaturated 23.51

Sheep, mountain, kidney fat

% Saturated: 47.96

% Monounsaturated 41.37

% Polyunsaturated 2.87

Sheep, white-faced, kidney fat

% Saturated: 51.58

% Monounsaturated 39.90

% Polyunsaturated 1.16

Sheep, intestine, roasted

% Saturated: 47.01

% Monounsaturated 40.30

% Polyunsaturated 7.46

Snake, meat (muscle)

% Saturated: 26.36

% Monounsaturated 44.54

% Polyunsaturated 0.09

Squirrel, brown, adipose tissue (fat)

% Saturated: 17.44

% Monounsaturated 47.55

% Polyunsaturated 28.6

Squirrel, white, adipose tissue (fat)

% Saturated: 12.27

% Monounsaturated 51.48

% Polyunsaturated 32.3

Game fat, according to Eaton

% Saturated: 38

% Monounsaturated 32

% Polyunsaturated 30

USDA data, prepared by John L. Weihrauch with technical assistance of Julianne Borton and Theresa Sampagna.

Politically correct paleo dieters also ignore the fact that Native Americans hunted animals selectively—just like their counterparts in Australia. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spent many years with the indigenous peoples of Canada, noted that they preferred “the flesh of older animals to that of calves, yearlings and two-year olds… It is approximately so with those northern forest Indians with whom I have hunted, and probably with all caribou-eaters.” They preferred the older animals because they had built up a thick slab of fat along the back. In a thousand-pound animal, this slab could weigh forty to fifty pounds. Another twenty to thirty pounds of highly saturated fat filled out the cavity, especially around the kidneys. This fat was saved, sometimes by rendering, stored in the animal’s cleaned bladder or large intestine, and consumed with dried or smoked lean meat. Used in this way, Stefansson estimates that fat contributed up to 80 percent of total calories in the diets of the northern tribes.³⁰

Beaver was a treat, especially the fat-rich tail, but smaller animals like rabbit and squirrel provided sustenance only when nothing else was available because, according to Stefansson, they were so low in fat. In fact, small animals called for special preparation. The meat was removed from the bones, roasted, and pounded. The bones were dried and ground into a powder. Then the bones were mixed with the meat and any available grease from other animals, a procedure that would greatly lower the percentage of polyunsaturated fatty acids while raising the total content of saturated fat.³¹

When a scarcity of game forced the Native Americans to consume only small animals like rabbits, they suffered from “rabbit starvation.” “The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate, in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger,” wrote Stefansson. “This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source—beaver, moose, fish—will develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken.”³²

In some locations, scarcity of game led to extreme eating. Cabeza de Vaca encountered tribes along the Gulf of Mexico who existed on the edge of starvation: “Their sustenance is chiefly roots of two or three kinds, and they hunt for them throughout the land. They are very bad and the men who eat them bloat. They take two days to roast, and many of them are very bitter. The hunger that those people have is so great that they are forced to eat them, they roam up to two or three leagues looking for them. Sometimes they kill some deer, and sometimes they take some fish, but this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders and ant eggs and worms and lizards and salamanders and snakes and vipers, and they eat earth and wood and everything that they can find, and deer excrement and other things that I refrain from mentioning. They keep the bones of the fish they eat and of snakes and other things in order to grind up everything afterward and eat the powder it produces… The women are very hard working and endure a great deal, because of the twenty-four hours there are between day and night, they have only six of rest, and the rest of the night they spend in firing their ovens in order to dry those roots they eat.” Although these people struggled to survive, they did not succumb to rabbit starvation thanks to the fat contained in reptiles, insects and worms.

IN HIS EARLY TWENTIES, Samuel Hearne of the Hudson’s Bay Company traveled with indigenous northern Canadians for several years between 1769 and 1772, seeking a fabled copper mine north of the Arctic circle.^* His diaries contain the first reports of the foodways and customs of the northern indigenous peoples, who inhabit one of nature’s harshest environments.

Like so many others, he was impressed by the hardiness and fortitude of the native people. Food came in waves—feast or famine. When the hunting was good, “Nothing is more common with those Indians, after they have eaten as much at a sitting as would serve six moderate men,” often to the point of making themselves sick.³³ “Notwithstanding the Northern Indians are at times so voracious, yet they bear hunger with a degree of fortitude which… is much easier to admire than to imitate. I have more than once seen the Northern Indians, at the end of three or four days fasting, as merry and jocose on the subject, as if they had voluntarily imposed it on themselves.”³⁴ Sometimes a piece of an old half-rotten deerskin or a pair of old shoes “were sacrificed to alleviate extreme hunger.”³⁵ Hearne reported that they appeared to eat human flesh “when driven by necessity.”³⁶

The practice of pounding and drying meat when game was plentiful helped forestall hunger during lean times—a tedious job that usually fell to the women—and this dried meat was always eaten with fat. Hearne was the first European to describe pemmican, a mixture of dried meat and rendered fat: “To prepare meat in this manner, it requires no farther operation than cutting the lean parts of the animal into thin slices and drying it in the sun, or by a slow fire, till, after beating it between two stones, it is reduced to a coarse powder… When fat is plentiful this shredded dry meat is often packed into a sack made of hide, and boiling fat is poured over and into it.”^*³⁷ The native tribes of Texas preserved pemmican as a sausagelike product, often mixed with pecan meal and stuffed into animal intestines.

The Dakota made pemmican by breaking up and boiling long animal bones to extract the fatty marrow, and mixing it with dried meat, cornmeal, or pounded chokecherries.³⁸ However, a tribe on the move did not usually go to the trouble of making pemmican, but instead carried fat and pounded meat. Hearne described it as “portable, palatable, all the blood and juices are still remaining in the meat, it is a very nourishing and Wholesome food; with care may be kept a whole year without the least danger of spoiling. It is necessary, however, to air it frequently during the warm weather, otherwise it is liable to grow mouldy; but as soon as the chill air of fall begins, it requires no farther trouble till next Summer.” Said Hearne, “I could travel longer without victuals, than after any other kind of food.”³⁹

According to Hearne, the dried meat of the northern indigenous peoples was superior to that of the southern. “All the dried meat prepared by the Southern Indians is performed by exposing it to the heat of a large fire, which soon exhausts all the fine juices from it, and when sufficiently dry to prevent putrefaction, is not more to be compared with that cured by the Northern Indians in the Sun, or by the heat of a very slow fire, than meat that has been boiled down for the sake of the soup is to that which is only sufficiently boiled for eating; the latter has all the juices remaining, which, being easily dissolved by the heat and moisture of the stomach, proves a strong and nourishing food.”⁴⁰

Hearne and his companions seemed fixated on getting plenty of fat from a variety of sources. He notes the practice of selective eating: when game was plentiful, they “frequently killed several merely for the tongues, marrow and fat.” At one point, they found plentiful musk ox and bison, “many of which the Indians killed, but finding them lean, only took some of the bulls’ hides for shoe soals [soles].”⁴¹ Unborn calves, pulled from their mothers’ bellies, provided flesh “being so equally intermixed with fat and lean, is reckoned among the nicest bits… The tongue is also very delicate… the young calves, fawns, beaver, etc. taken out of the bellies of their mothers are reckoned most delicate food.… and in the same may be said of young geese, ducks, etc. in the shell.”⁴²

Regarding moose, Hearne said, “the fat of the intestines is hard, like suit [suet], but all the external fat is soft, like that of a breast of mutton, and when put into a bladder, is as fine as marrow. In this they differ from all the other species of deer, of which the external fat is as hard as that of the kidneys.”⁴³

He observed that “the flesh of the musk ox noways resembles that of the western buffalo, but is more like that of the moose or elk; and the fat is of a clear white, slightly tinged with a light azure. The calves and young heifers are good eating.”⁴⁴

According the Hearne, “the flesh of the porcupine is very delicious, and so much esteemed by the Indians, that they think it the greatest luxury.”⁴⁵ Mallards, he noted, are good in the fall when they are fat; swan flesh is “excellent eating, when roasted equal in flavor to young heifer-beef.”⁴⁶ He praised “a large kettle of broth, made with the blood, and some fat and scraps of meat shred small, boiled in it. This might be reckoned a dainty dish at any time, but was more particularly so in our present almost famished condition.”⁴⁷

When foul weather prevented making a fire, they ate their meat and fish raw.⁴⁸ Said Hearne, “I have frequently made one of a party who has sat round a fresh-killed deer and assisted in picking the bones quite clean… I thought that the raw brains and many other parts were exceedingly good.”⁴⁹ Organ meats of the kill were always the first choice; the kidneys of both moose and buffalo were usually eaten raw, but tripe^* was cooked. “The tripe of the buffalo is exceedingly good, cooked by removing the honey comb and boiling three quarters of an hour. The lesser stomach or as some call it, the many-folds, either of buffalo, moose or deer, are usually eaten raw, and are very good. But that of the moose, unless great care be taken in washing it, is rather bitter, owing to the nature of their food.”⁵⁰ No part of any beast was wasted: “They are also remarkably fond of the womb of the buffalo, elk, deer, etc., which they eagerly devour without washing or any other process, but barely taking out the contents⁵¹… The parts of generation belonging to any beast they kill, both male and female, are always eaten by the men and boys; and though those parts, particularly in the males, are generally very tough, they are not, on any account, to be cut with an edge-tool, but torn to pieces with the teeth.”⁵²

One uncooked delicacy “is made of the raw liver of a deer, cut in small pieces of about an inch square and mixed up with the contents of the stomach of the same animal; and the farther digestion has taken place, the better it is suited to their taste; It is impossible to describe or conceive the pleasure they seem to enjoy with eating such an unaccountable food.” Hearne apparently enjoyed the dish with relish, but could not bring himself to join in a feast of maggots: “I have even seen them eat whole handfuls of maggots that were produced in meat by fly-blows.”⁵³

Deerskin thongs, according to Hearne, served mainly as a food, along with tiny inhabitants living in the hide: “When the hair is taken off and all the warbles are squeezed out, if they are well boiled, they are far from being disagreeable. The Indians, however never could persuade me to eat the warbles, of which some of them are remarkably fond, particularly the children. They are always eaten raw and alive, out of the skin, and are said, by those who like them, to be as fine as gooseberries.” The Indians also relished lice. Hearne admired “the wisdom and kindness of Providence in forming the palates and powers of all creatures in such a manner as is best adapted to the food, climate and every other circumstance which may be incident to their respective situation.”⁵⁴

Hearne especially enjoyed a special preparation of caribou: “Of all the dishes cooked by the Indians, a beeatee, as it is called in their language, is certainly the most delicious that can be prepared from caribou only, without any other ingredient. It is a kind of haggis, made with the blood, a good quantity of fat shred small, some of the tenderest of the flesh, together with the heart and lungs cut, or more commonly torn into small shivers; all of which is put into the stomach and toasted by being suspended before the fire on a string… it is certainly a most delicious morsel, even without pepper, salt or any other seasoning.”⁵⁵

Like all other indigenous peoples, the northern tribes consumed dried fish and fish roe, and valued train oil (oil from whales or other sea mammals) “as a cordial and as sauce to their meat.”⁵⁶

Samuel Hearne provides us with the best information we have about how Native Americans really ate, and although the modern individual could not be expected to consume such high-yuck-factor foods, it’s clear that he doesn’t have to eat lean meat and skinless chicken breasts, either.

BORN ON THE BLOOD INDIAN reserve in Alberta, Canada, Beverly Hungry Wolf interviewed her female relatives and tribal elders to collect information about food preparation, child rearing and myths and legends, which she published in The Ways of My Grandmothers (1980).⁵⁷ Beverly’s grandmother prepared the cow “as she had learned to prepare buffalo when she was young.” Again, the emphasis is on removing and preserving the fat. Her first step: removal and rendering of the large pieces of fat from the back and cavity. The lean meat was cut into strips and dried or roasted, pounded up with berries, and mixed with fat to make pemmican. Most of the ribs were smoked and stored for later use. All the excess fat inside the body was hung up so the moisture would dry out of it. It was later served with dried meat. Some fats in the animal were rendered into lard instead of dried.

Beverly Hungry Wolf’s kinfolk consumed all the organs of the animal, including heart, kidneys and liver, prepared by roasting or baking, or laid out in the sun to dry. They did not cook the lungs, just sliced them and hung them up to dry. Intestines were also dried. Sapotsis or “crow gut” is a Blackfoot delicacy made from the main intestine, which is stuffed with meat and roasted over coals. Tripe was prepared and eaten raw or boiled or roasted. Brains made a delicious raw delicacy. If the animal was a female, the teats or udders would be boiled or barbecued. If the animal carried unborn young, this was fed to the older people because it was so tender. The guts of the unborn were removed and braided, then boiled, too. The tongue was always boiled if it wasn’t dried. “Even old animals have tender tongues,” Beverly Hungry Wolf recalls.

Hooves and blood got special attention. The hooves were boiled down until all their gristle softened. Beverly Hungry Wolf saved the blood, often mixing it with flour or meat to make sausages in the guts.

The second stomach was washed well and eaten raw, but certain parts were usually boiled or roasted and the rest dried. “Another delicacy is at the very end of the intestines—the last part of the colon. You wash this real good and tie one end shut. Then you stuff the piece with dried berries and a little water and you tie the other end shut. You boil this all day, until it is really tender and you have a Blackfoot Pudding.”

Lakota holy man John (Fire) Lame Deer, author of the 1972 book Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, describes the eating of guts as a contest: “In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating! Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.”⁵⁸

The marrow was full of fat and was usually eaten raw. Native Americans knew how to strike the femur bone so that it would split open and reveal the delicate interior flesh. Boyd Eaton and other paleo-apologists report that the marrow is rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, but Vilhjalmur Stefansson describes two types of marrow, one from the lower leg that is soft and “more like a particularly delicious cream in flavor,” and another from the humerus and femur that is “hard and tallowy at room temperatures.”⁵⁹ According to Beverly Hungry Wolf, the grease inside the bones “was scooped out and saved or the bones boiled and the fat skimmed off and saved. It turned into something like hard lard.” More saturated fat the professors have overlooked!

Beverly Hungry Wolf’s people considered certain parts of the animal as appropriate for men or women. The male organs were for the men, as well as the ribs toward the front, which were called “the shoulder ribs, or the boss ribs. They are considered a man’s special meal.” For women, a part of the “intestine that is quite large and full of manure… the thicker part has a kind of hard lining on the inside. My grandmother said that this part is good for a pregnant mother to eat; she said it will make the baby have a nice round head. Pregnant mothers were not allowed to eat any other parts of the intestine because their faces would become discolored.”⁶⁰

IN NATIVE AMERICAN tradition, all foods considered sacred or important for reproduction were animal foods, rich in fat. Beverly Hungry Wolf tells us that pemmican made with berries “was used by the Horns Society for their sacred meal of communion.” Boiled tongue was an ancient delicacy, served as the food of communion at the Sun Dance. A blood soup, made from a mixture of blood and corn flour cooked in broth, provided as a sacred meal during the nighttime Holy Smoke ceremonies.^*⁶¹

Bear was another sacred food—altars of bear bones adorn many Paleolithic sites. According to American colonist William Byrd II, writing in 1728, “The flesh of bear hath a good relish, very savory and inclining nearest to that of Pork. The Fat of this Creature is least apt to rise in the Stomach of any other. The Men for the most part chose it rather than Venison.”⁶² According to the Chippewa, bear grease gave resistance by making them physically strong.^† According to a report on the Chippewa by Inez Hilger “We eat it sometimes now and everybody feels better.”^‡⁶³

Bear was an important food for reproduction. When William Byrd asked why the Chesapeake squaws were always able to bear children, he learned that “if any Indian woman did not prove with child at a decent time after Marriage, the Husband, to save his Reputation with the women, forthwith entered into a Bear-dyet for Six Weeks, which in that time makes him so vigorous that he grows exceedingly impertinent to his poor wife and ’tis great odds but he makes her a Mother in Nine Months.”⁶⁴

Fish roe was another important fertility food. Native Americans living in coastal areas consumed large amounts of fish, including the heads and roe, and dried roe provided high levels of nutrients throughout the year. Weston Price found that indigenous Peruvians living high in the mountains, twelve thousand feet above sea level, carried dried fish roe in their backpacks. When asked why, they told Dr. Price they ate it “for high perfection of offspring.”⁶⁵

Another important food, presented as a gift during gatherings and ceremonies, was the oil from the ooligan^* or candlefish. Price reported that in the area of Vancouver, the candlefish was collected in large quantities and its oil removed and used as a dressing for many seafoods. Shellfish were eaten in large amounts when available.

Animal fats, organ meats and fatty fish all supply fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K₂, which Dr. Price recognized as the basis of healthy primitive diets.^† These nutrients are catalysts to the assimilation of protein and minerals. Without them, minerals go to waste and the body cannot grow tall and strong. When tribes have access to an abundance of fat-soluble vitamins, their offspring will grow up with “nice round heads,” broad faces, and straight teeth.

In addition, certain fatty glands of game animals provided vitamin C during the long winter season in the north. The indigenous tribes of Canada revealed to Dr. Price that the adrenal glands in the moose prevented scurvy. When a moose was killed, the adrenal gland and its fat were cut up and shared with all members of the tribe. The walls of the second stomach also supplied vitamin C, to prevent “the white man’s disease.”⁶⁶

NATIVE AMERICAN PEOPLES were omnivores, eating a variety of plant foods to accompany a diet of meat and fat. Moreover, the plant foods they ate, most notably hundreds of varieties of corn, a staple crop throughout North and South America, were cultivated, not just gathered.^* Indeed, many American Indian groups practiced sophisticated farming methods, similar to modern permaculture. With corn, the civilized world first confronted the need for proper preparation of plant foods to ensure nutrient availability and palatability. When nonnative American people began to cultivate corn and consume it as a staple crop, the problem of malnutrition soon appeared. For example, in the late nineteenth century, the niacin-deficiency disease pellagra reached epidemic proportions in parts of the southern United States, where corn served as a major source of calories.^† Scientists found this a mystery, since these types of malnutrition did not occur among the indigenous Americans, for whom maize was the principal staple food.

The problem was that nonindigenous Americans adopted maize without the necessary cultural knowledge of its proper preparation. Native Americans knew they needed to soak maize in alkali water—made with ashes and lime (calcium oxide)—a process called nixtamalization, resulting in a product called nixtamal or masa. The soaking liberates the B-vitamin niacin; niacin deficiency leads to pellagra. Nixtamalization also removes virtually all the aflatoxins from mycotoxin-contaminated corn, renders it easier to grind, and improves its flavor and aroma. Interestingly, cornmeal made from untreated ground maize will not form a dough when water is added, but the chemical changes in masa allow a dough to form easily.

But nixtamalization was only the beginning of the complex process that turned corn into a nutritious, life-sustaining food. The indefatigable Native American women mixed nixtamalized corn with water to form a thick dough and then cooked it in a pot. The cooked dough was then wrapped in a corn husk and underwent an acid fermentation period of up to two weeks.⁶⁷ This was the original tamale (made with nixtamal)—a fermented food! A ball of fermented dough, flattened on a hot rock, made a nutritious tortilla. Often these preparations were then fried in bear grease or other fat. Added to water, the dough worked its magic to produce a refreshing fermented beverage.

As an adjunct to their meat-based diet, corn provided variety and important calories. But when the proportion of corn in the diet became too high, as happened in the American Southwest, the health of the people suffered. Skeletal remains of groups subsisting largely on corn reveal widespread tooth decay and bone problems.⁶⁸

In the jungles of Central America, the indigenous tribes followed a similar procedure, wrapping the nixtamalized dough in banana leaves for two weeks and then adding the dough balls to water to make a thick fermented drink called pozol.^* Europeans described pozol as a beverage that allowed the indigenous people to resist the heat of the tropical zones.⁶⁹

In South America, the Kaingang people of Brazil prepared a fermented corn product called jamin-bang. They put corn in wicker baskets and immersed the grain in a stream for several days. The soaked kernels were then ground into a pulp, placed in baskets lined with leaves, covered with leaves, and allowed to ferment for three to six days. The product was then rolled into flat cakes and baked to make a nutritious bread. A similar Brazilian fermented food is polvilho azedo, a fermented and sun-dried cassava starch product.⁷⁰

Another important native grain was wild rice—a grain of the genus Zizania and more akin to oats than rice—which grows in running water and along lake-shores, not only in the Great Lakes region and New England but as far south as the Patuxent River in Maryland; another species grew in Texas and New Mexico. Typically, Native Americans paired wild rice with beaver tail fat, stewed it in deer broth or maple syrup, or prepared it into stuffing for wild birds.

Many Native American groups cultivated or collected legumes—in fact, legumes were a mainstay for a large number of tribes, “paleo” diet proscriptions notwithstanding. Typically, the women planted bean seed together with a corn seed in little mounds in their fields—the corn stalk and bean vine grew together and their fruits were consumed together—often as succotash (see here), a dish composed of beans, corn, dog meat and bear fat. Shuco, a sour bean and corn porridge, provided nourishment in Central America. The plentiful harvest of the leguminous mesquite tree, which grows throughout the Southwest, was ground into flour and added to many foods, providing a nutritious staple.

As for “starches”—another “not recommended” item in the paleo diet—Native Americans had lots to choose from, starting with tubers like the Jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke (the root of a type of sunflower). These were cooked slowly for a long time in underground pits until the hard, indigestible root was transformed into a highly digestible gelatinous mass. Cultivated squash of myriad varieties, and cactus and yucca gathered through the Southwest, are high-starch foods. Indigenous tribes from the Amazon and Central America ate bananas and many other tropical fruits.

Various species of agave nourished the tribes of the southwestern United States, not only with the fermented drink pulque,^* prepared from the agave juice, but also with starch from the bulbs of the cacti. The bulbs required special preparation in which they were roasted for several days in underground pits, pounded into thin sheets, ground into flour, and formed into cakes, “which made a very good substitute for bread.”⁷¹

Wild potatoes in North America and cultivated potatoes in South America added carbohydrates to the indigenous diet. The domestic potato grows in the Andes Mountains, with some varieties cultivated above ten thousand feet. The indigenous varieties of potatoes contain glycoalkaloids, a toxin common to the nightshade family, especially those growing in the more hostile high-altitude environments. The glycoalkaloids concentrate in the skin of the potato, which the Native Americans removed and discarded. Drying, freezing and leaching techniques also helped reduce the glycoalkaloid content. The resultant potato powder was easy to transport and could be stored for many years.

And then there is the wapato, or duck potato—chestnut-size corms (the swollen stem base) produced by the aquatic plant genus Sagittaria. They grow in shallow waters and swamps in all the nondesert regions of North America, from Florida to the northwest. In the late fall or early spring, the women harvested these “swamp potatoes” by disturbing the mud with their feet, causing the corms to float to the surface. They could be eaten raw, but were less bitter when cooked.^† Varieties that do not produce starchy corms have lots of starch in the stalk.

Throughout the North American continent, nuts like acorns were made into gruel or little cakes after careful preparation to remove tannins. In the southeast, pecans contributed important calories from fat and carbohydrates. The starchy chestnut flourished throughout the forests of the eastern part of North America. Ground and sifted chinkapin and hickory nuts served to thicken venison broth.⁷²

Staples like corn and beans were stored in underground pits, ingeniously covered with logs and leaves to prevent wild animals from finding or looting the stores. The women protected corn against vermin by hanging it in baskets in the smoky part of their dwellings.⁷³ Birch bark was used to make trays, buckets and containers, including kettles. Water was boiled by putting hot rocks into the vessels. Southern and Southwestern tribes used gourds or clay pots for the same purpose. Even animal skins were put to work as cooking vessels. The Dakotas would fasten an animal skin to four stakes in the ground, then add water and finely cut meat. Heated stones added to the water would cook the meat. In times of want, a woman could make a stew of a single squirrel or bird, boiled in water with old bones to flavor the “liquor,” and no other condiment but salt.⁷⁴

In general, fruits were dried and used to season fat, fish, and meat—dried blueberries flavored moose fat, for example. Beverly Hungry Wolf recalls that her grandmother made pemmican by mixing wild mint with fat and dried meat. The mint would keep the bugs out and also prevent the fat from spoiling. Wild onions served as a common flavoring for meat dishes and, in fact, were an important item of commerce.

In northern Canada, plant foods were limited to summer berries and moss; the moss was consumed in peculiar ways. According to Samuel Hearne, “The stomach of no other large animal beside the deer is eaten by any of the Indians that border on Hudson’s Bay. In Winter, when the deer feed on fine white moss, the contents of the stomach is so much esteemed by them that I have often seen them sit round a deer where it was killed, and eat it warm out of the paunch. In summer the deer feed more coarsely and therefore this dish, if it deserves that appellation, is then not so much in favour.”⁷⁵

A “black, hard, crumply moss” was sometimes boiled “into a gummy consistency… It is so palatable that all who taste it generally grow fond of it. It is remarkably good and pleasing when used to thicken any kind of broth; but it is generally most esteemed when boiled in fish liquor.”⁷⁶

Native Americans also enjoyed sweet-tasting foods. Maple sugar or pine sugar served as sweetener for meats and fats. In the Southwest, they chewed the sweet heart of the agave plant. In fact, the Spanish noted that where agave grew, the indigenous population had bad teeth.⁷⁷

On the James River in Virginia, an early colonist described a dinner menu served by the wife of a chief: hominy, boiled venison, roasted fish and dessert of melons and other vegetables⁷⁸—a sophisticated meal with a balance of protein, fat and carbohydrates!

USE OF SOUR-TASTING fermented foods is a characteristic of all indigenous diets, including the diet of Native Americans across the continent. As noted, the Cherokee “bread” consisted of nixtamal wrapped in corn leaves and fermented for two weeks.⁷⁹ Beans, tubers, berries, and other plant foods underwent “special preparation,” usually fermentation. Many observers commented on the habit of eating gamey, rotten meat or fish.

Samuel Hearne described a fermented dish consumed by the Chippewa and Cree:

The most remarkable dish among them… is blood mixed with the half-digested food which is found in the caribou’s stomach, and boiled up with a sufficient quantity of water to make it of the consistence of pease-pottage. Some fat and scraps of tender flesh are also shred small and boiled with it. To render this dish more palatable, they have a method of mixing the blood with the contents of the stomach in the paunch itself, and hanging it up in the heat and smoke of the fire for several days; which puts the whole mass into a state of fermentation, which gives it such an agreeable acid taste, that were it not for prejudice, it might be eaten by those who have the nicest palates… most of the fat which is boiled in it is first chewed by the men and boys, in order to break the globules that contain the fat; by which means it all boils out, mixes with the broth; whereas if it were permitted to remain as it came from the knife, it would still be in lumps, like suet. To do justice, however, to the cleanliness in this particular, I must observe, that they are very careful that neither old people with bad teeth, or young children, have any hand in preparing this dish.⁸⁰

A number of reports indicate the Native Americans preferred broth and herbed beverages to water. The Chippewa boiled water and added leaves or twigs to make a flavored beverage.⁸¹ In the eastern part of North America, sassafras was a favorite ingredient in teas and medicinal drinks.⁸² Sassafras powder, corn silk and dried pumpkin blossom flavored and thickened broth into gourmet sauces. California Indians added lemonade berries to water to make a pleasantly sour drink.⁸³ Refreshing sour drinks were produced from fermented corn porridge.⁸⁴ In the Southwest and South America, a drink called chicha is made with little balls of corn dough that the women impregnate with saliva by chewing and then add to water to produce a delicious, sour, fizzy fermented beverage.

Indigenous people usually cooked their grains after fermenting them, but raw fermented beverages and even raw fermented meat foods provided beneficial bacteria for the digestive process on a regular basis—a practice that modern science has only recently validated as healthful.

THE EXPLORER HERNANDO DE SOTO led the first European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States during the 1540s. They landed in Florida and traversed Georgia, Alabama and possibly Arkansas, and saw the Mississippi River. The records of the expedition are the only European description of the culture and habits of North American native tribes before these peoples encountered other Europeans—de Soto’s men were both the first and nearly the last Europeans to witness the villages and civilization of the Mississippian culture.

Anthropologists have sometimes insisted that the American Indians did not consume salt,^* but de Soto received “an abundance of good salt” as a gift from the Mississippian tribes, and observed the production and trade of salt in the southeastern part of the country. In the lower Mississippi Valley, he met traveling native merchants selling salt. According to the de Soto records, lack of salt could lead to a most unfortunate death: “Some of those whose constitutions must have demanded salt more than others died a most unusual death for lack of it. They were seized with a very slow fever, on the third or fourth day of which there was no one at fifty feet could endure the stench of their bodies, it being more offensive than that of the carcasses of dogs or cats. Thus they perished without remedy, for they were ignorant as to what their malady might be or what could be done for them since they had neither physicians nor medicines. And it was believed that they could not have benefited from such had they possessed them because from the moment they first felt the fever, their bodies were already in a state of decomposition. Indeed, from the chest down, their bellies and intestines were as green as grass.”⁸⁵

The most important sources of salt were the salt springs that dotted northwestern Louisiana, western Arkansas and the Ohio River Valley. Archeological remains in these areas indicate that the indigenous people evaporated the brine water from salt springs in shallow clay salt pans, most likely by adding hot rocks to the brackish water. They also retrieved salt from the ashes of certain plants and from salt-impregnated sand, and sometimes gathered rock salt. Well-defined salt trails allowed the transport of salt to the east. Coastal tribes generally got their salt through trade rather than the evaporation of seawater, as wood for fire-making is sparse near the ocean beaches and the moist climate is not conducive to evaporation. Salt roads stretched hundreds of miles over South America, connecting the Amazon and the Andes with sources of salt, and a heavy salt trade crisscrossed the Yucatán, Belize and Honduras.⁸⁶

Salt traders traveled New Mexico as well. The traders did not belong to any tribal group but traveled alone from group to group carrying baskets of salt gathered from salt lakes, along with other goods.⁸⁷ Nor did the inhabitants of California lack salt. Mysterious basins carved out of the granite in the Sierra Nevada allowed the evaporation of salty water from nearby saline streams. Similar basins were discovered in 1891 by geologist Henry W. Turner in what is now Sequoia National Park.⁸⁸

American Indians used salt as a condiment for flavoring stews and corn dishes, and possibly in rituals, but not for salting meat as the Europeans did. Salt may have also served medicinal functions.^*

IN THEIR PREFERENCE for fat, their choice of organ meats over muscle meats, their use of a large variety of plant foods, and the inclusion of salt in the diet, Native American foodways resembled those of the Australian Aborigines in many ways. But did the natives of the American continents engage in land management like the Aborigines? Or—as archeological authorities in America have insisted—were they “at best complex hunter-gatherers and at worst ‘wealthy scavengers,’ incapable of the sophisticated cultural development associated with agricultural societies”?⁸⁹

Leaving aside the mysterious civilizations that planted pyramids in Mexico and Central America, and perched impossible stone fortresses high in the Andes Mountains, what about the iconic teepee-dwelling Native Americans? Were they treading lightly over the landscape, living in a wilderness “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, never changing their environment from its original untamed state?

The Americas may have appeared as untamed wilderness after huge numbers—something like 90 percent—of the indigenous population succumbed to smallpox and other diseases,^† leaving few to tend their fields and orchards, but the earliest Europeans to set foot in the new world described the woods as “park like.” They also noted the coastline and riverbanks dotted with innumerable villages, the land agreeably sculpted into fields of corn and other crops, the air smoky with brush fires, the rivers chevronned with weirs to shepherd fish for easy capture, orchards tended for chestnuts and other useful trees, and, above all, woods cleared of underbrush.

According to Charles C. Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,

At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.

Even in the Amazon, the local tribes had converted about a quarter of the rain forest into farms and agricultural forests.⁹⁰

Samuel Hearne described controlled burning above the Arctic circle: “In the preceding Summer, when they were in those parts, they had set fire to the woods; the moss still burning in some places.”⁹¹ He marveled that “strawberries known to be more plentiful in such places as have formerly been set on fire… after moss and underwood have been set on fire, raspberry bushes and hips have shot up in numerous spots where nothing of the kind had ever been seen before.… This is a phenomenon that is not easily accounted for; but it is more than probable that Nature wanted some assistance, and the moss being all burnt away, not only admits the sun to act with more power, but the heat of the fire must, in some measure, loosen the texture of the soil, so as to admit the plants to shoot up, after having been deep rooted for many years without being able to force their way to the surface.”⁹²

And then we have the example of California. California schoolchildren are taught that the indigenous peoples, the so-called “digger Indians,” were the “most primitive” of all the American Indian tribes, living in an ecosystem naturally blessed with abundance; for when the early European explorers and settlers came to California, they found a land of beauty and bounty. The descriptions compiled by M. Kat Anderson in her defiant book, Tending the Wild,⁹³ recount hills, valleys and plains filled with elk, deer, antelope, hare, rabbit and quail, with bear and mountain lion abounding, the sea shores crowded with seal and otter, and the skies congested with birds, sometimes so thick they blocked out the sun. One observer noted a flock of white geese that covered an area of four square miles when they landed. The lakes and rivers were swarming with salmon, trout and other fish, and their beds and banks were covered with mussels, clams and other shellfish. Shrimp thronged the San Francisco Bay!

Early observers were even more impressed with the profusion of California’s varied flora. The forests yielded pine nuts and pine sugar; California’s massive oaks produced prodigious amounts of acorns; the prairies and meadows were covered with wildflowers, often with just one species, creating a mass of color for hundreds of acres. Carefully tended mesquite trees yielded bushels of pods with just a few hours of gathering. Vast wetland regions yielded yampahs—an edible potato-like tuber. Even more amazing, the landscapes seemed magically clear of brush—oak trees grew in sprawling savannas and the Yosemite Valley was clear of undergrowth so you could see from one end of it to the other.

The Europeans assumed they had discovered an untouched wilderness that just happened to resemble a garden, populated by “primitive” native tribes who profited from nature’s bounty simply by hunting and gathering. But in fact, California was not so much a wilderness as a true garden, full of beauty and abundance because wise guardians had tended it for thousands of years. For untold generations, the California tribes had shaped the landscape by pruning, coppicing, cultivating, transplanting, weeding, selecting cultivars—and above all by controlled burning.

Controlled burning served as the main tool for creating California’s parklike landscape. Through periodic burning, they cleared brush under trees and enlarged meadows and prairies. Burning broke down dry vegetation, returning nutrients to the soil—everything grew better after a burn, the local tribes told the white man. Burning under the oak trees eliminated insects—without burning every year or two under the oaks, the acorns became infested with pests. Burning encouraged straight shoots to come up from bulrushes and from small trees, supplying material for basket making. Burning encouraged certain useful species above others. Burning could be used to corral wildlife—masses of grasshoppers moving ahead of controlled burns, for example, were nutritious and easily gathered morsels. Above all, frequent small fires prevented the buildup of brush that could fuel a catastrophic fire; while controlled burning helped to preserve trees and encouraged them to grow, uncontrolled fire could wipe out forests and, therefore, the food supply.^*

Like the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, the California Indians cultivated vast tracts of edible grains. Corn seems not to have traversed the Rocky Mountains, but wild rye, wheat and oats grew in abundance in California’s fire-managed prairies. This bounty was gathered with wicker seed-beaters into large baskets—so abundant were wild grains in some places that many bushels could be gathered within hours. The grains were winnowed and sifted with special baskets, ground on flat rocks, roasted and made into gruels and cakes. The seeds of wildflowers, particularly the chia seed, were also gathered and consumed as staples. Gathering methods always dispersed some seeds, enlarging the area of cultivation and increasing yield over the years.

Like the Australian Aborigines, the California Indians saw their role as guardians of nature, agents for improving nature’s appearance and increasing her abundance; the plants and animals were their relatives, needing support and care, just like human relatives. By contrast, the European colonists viewed nature as something outside—unpredictable and often dangerous; nature was there for exploitation or, in the case of naturalists like John Muir, to be left “pristine” and untouched. Interestingly, modern Native Americans often use the word “wilderness” as a negative label for land that humans have not taken care of for a long time, a land where dense understory shrubbery or thickets of young trees block visibility and movement. Indeed, this is exactly what happened in Yosemite Valley when the white man took over: the valley became filled with brush and the beautiful vistas through the oak trees disappeared.^* The indigenous people believed that a hands-off approach to nature—above all the prohibition on controlled burning—promoted wild and rank landscapes that were inhospitable to life. “The white man sure ruined this country,” said James Rust, a Southern Sierra Miwok elder. “It’s turned back to wilderness.”

The white man also ruined the traditional foodways. Today the American Indians still living on reservations—some three hundred thousand of them—get most of their food from the government store. The National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990, also known as Public Law 101-445, states that all federal agencies shall promote the current U.S. Dietary Guidelines in carrying out any federal food, nutrition or health program. These low-fat, high-carb recommendations that have replaced the Native American diet of guts and grease are more than voluntary guidelines; for Native Americans, they are a federal prescription for diabetes, obesity and other diseases.

The foods that the long industrial supply lines deposit on the reservations are the cheapest foods that modern technology can produce, and the multinational giants that produce them are equipped with lawyers and lobbyists to ensure that their products are the ones our government buys.

American Indians on reservations are hit harder and faster than the general population by this onslaught of processed food because their choices are so limited. Uncle Sam will never admit that the native populations were tall, strong and healthy just three or four generations ago. Today a large proportion suffer from chronic disease. Addiction is common. Yet many American Indians remember stories or even have vivid memories of life before federal handouts, a time when diabetes and other diseases of civilization were unheard of. A few are indeed returning to native ways—hunting, fishing, and gardening—learning the hard way that the white man’s food trinkets come at a terrible price.

CHAPTER 2

Native Americans

Guts and Grease