3 Southeastern United States

The Southeastern United States enjoys a mild climate and a long growing season. This gave the native inhabitants of that region a great abundance and variety of food. They farmed, hunted, fished, and gathered wild foods from their native forests, rivers, and coastline.

Most tribes of this region were successful farmers. They cultivated corn, beans, squash, melons, sunflowers (for seeds), and tobacco. In the far South, corn could be planted and harvested twice a year, giving the native tribes an ample supply of their staple food to get through the brief winter.

Southern tribes did not take the abundance of their natural resources for granted. Their spiritual life was full of acts of thanksgiving for food. In the summer, most tribes had a Green Corn Ceremony in some form or another. For the Creek tribe, it was the most important rite of the year. They called this ceremony boskita. It was a time of purification, cleaning houses, and fasting. Then, they celebrated the new corn with feasting and visiting. At the end of boskita, a ceremonial new fire was lit in the hearth of every home. For the Creeks and many other tribes, green corn symbolized a fresh start.

Southern tribes also took advantage of nature’s bounty in the wilderness. They gathered nuts, berries, and other wild foods. One kind of nut that people continue to think of as a Southern food is the pecan. However, these nut trees are native to the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. Not only the native peoples, but also the European settlers, learned to value these nuts as a tasty source of fat and protein.

Native wild herbs, tree bark, and leaves were sought for both seasoning and healing properties. Sassafras, from a deciduous tree native to the East, was used in cooking and for medicine. Its roots and bark taste like anise, fennel, or cloves. The green leaves of the sassafras tree contain a thickening agent used in stews. After the leaves were gathered, they could be dried, ground, and stored as a powder for use in the winter season.

The Southern tribes added variety to their diet of grains and vegetables by killing wild game whenever possible. The men hunted bear, deer, turkey, wildfowl, and even alligator in the far South. Game was often prepared in the form of a stew, which was cooked in clay pots. Meat and vegetables were also sometimes baked in clay pots buried in the ground and covered with hot coals.

The Jamestown settlers in Virginia gave the name “Brunswick Stew” to a game stew that they learned to make from the women of the Powhatan tribe. This stew was prepared from leftover bits of game. Squirrel, rabbit, or turkey might have been mixed with produce from their gardens, such as corn, beans, and tomatoes, to make this tasty dish.

Other favorite dishes of the Southern tribes included bear ribs, hominy, corn cakes, and corn soup. Hominy was a kind of processed corn. It was made by soaking dried kernels of corn in water that had been mixed with ashes. This made the corn whiter and puffier. Fermented hominy was made into soup or fried with meat and vegetables. Hominy could also be dried and pounded into grits. Corn cakes were another corn dish. The women would mix cornmeal with ashes to make the dough rise and to give it flavor. Then, they would wrap the dough in corn husks or grape leaves and bake it in the ashes of a campfire. The Choctaw called these corn cakes bu-na-ha.

Seminole men spear fish, an important part of the Florida tribe’s diet. Note the weir, a fence-like trap, at the left of the picture.

With the arrival of European colonists, many changes came to the Southern tribes. By the 18th century, Southern tribes began to adapt to European farming methods. The biggest change was the introduction of livestock. At first, native people didn’t like to eat meat that had been kept in pens—they thought livestock was dirty. Eventually, however, Native American farmers kept livestock, as overhunting by white settlers made wild sources of meat scarcer.

The traditional farming lifestyle of these tribes made it relatively easy for them to live side by side with their white neighbors. However, pressure from white landowners to acquire more land meant that these tribes kept getting pushed farther to the west. By the mid-19th century, many of the tribes of the South had been forced to leave their homelands. The United States government removed these tribes to reservations in Oklahoma, known as Indian Territory.

Southern tribes took food traditions with them to Oklahoma, adapting their tribal recipes to the new region in which they had to live. In Oklahoma, many tribes from different areas lived near one another. As a result, they learned other tribes’ traditions, including food traditions. These displaced tribes also had to invent new traditions, as their old ways of doing things, especially growing and cooking food, had to adapt to a drier climate and a shorter growing season.

An Indian cultivates crops in this late-16th-century illustration. Most Native American tribes were neither pure farmers nor pure hunters but instead combined hunting, gathering, and agriculture to supply their nutritional needs.

For the Cherokee tribe, gathering food provided a basis for understanding the cycle of the seasons. For the Cherokee, gogi, the warm season between April and October, was a time to plant and harvest. Gola, the cold season, was a time to collect nuts and hunt for game.

Because reservations often did not have good land for agriculture, tribes depended on the U.S. government for some food. New kinds of staple foods emerged from this situation. For example, fry bread became the staple food of the reservation. Fry bread was the invention of reservation women, who were given foods that they didn’t know how to use, such as flour, lard, baking soda, and white sugar. Even so, fry bread evolved into a tasty Native American dish, one that is still eaten on reservations and throughout homelands today.

One food Southern tribes had harvested from the wild in their native lands that they could still find in Oklahoma was wild onions. Gathering wild onions near the beds of creeks and rivers continued as a tradition. Today, some tribes, such as the Creeks and Cherokees, sponsor wild onion dinners in early spring. These dinners are social gatherings that raise money for churches or clubs. They often begin with a group outing to gather onions. The wild onions are prepared by washing them, cutting off the roots, and chopping them into small pieces. Usually, the onions are mixed with eggs and fried. Traditional native foods from the South, such as cornbread, sassafras tea, and huckleberry pie, complete the meal. §

A Navajo woman carries an armful of corn she has just picked. For the Navajo people, corn—a vital part of the traditional diet—is sacred.