6 North Central and Western United States and Canada

The rainy coast of the Pacific Northwest, the dry lands of the high plateaus, the waving grasses of the prairie—each ecosystem was the home of diverse Native American tribes, each with a unique culture and style of cookery. The tribes of this western region in what is now the United States ate well from nature’s bounty.

The Northwest Pacific coast was rich with seafood. The tribes in this region fished for salmon, halibut, and cod. They collected shellfish from the shallow waters. Some tribes even harvested whales that had been beached or driven near the coast. The great evergreen forests supplied these tribes with all sorts of wild foods, too, including berries, roots, and game. Because of the abundance of food supplied by nature, the native peoples of this region did not need to grow their own food.

Salmon was a staple food, and each tribe had traditions for honoring salmon. The Kwakiutl tribe thought of salmon as supernatural beings that lived beneath the sea in villages. The “salmon people” had their own rites and ceremonies. For the Kwakiutl, it was important to put the bones of the salmon back in the river where the fish had been caught so its soul could return to its village.

Salmon was prepared in many ways. Sometimes, it was eaten fresh. The Gitksan people of British Columbia used grills made of willow twigs, held by hand over an open fire, to cook freshly caught salmon. Because these tribes caught more than they could eat at once, salmon was usually sliced thin, then dried or smoked. Smoked or dried salmon could be stored for the winter season or traded with inland tribes for other food, such as corn.

The forests of the Northwest coast are filled with a variety of berries, such as loganberries, blueberries, strawberries, and elderberries. In the summer, women gathered berries while the men of the tribe fished. Berries that were not eaten fresh were slowly cooked over a fire and formed into cakes. The women preserved these cakes by putting them in containers with eulachon oil, so they would be ready to eat in the winter.

In the high plateau region, the great Columbia River and its tributaries provided the tribes who lived there with one of their staple foods: salmon. Like the peoples of the coast, these inland tribes caught great numbers of salmon, which they split and dried on racks, then pounded flat and stored for later use and for trade.

Wild foods, not agriculture, supplied these tribes with the ingredients for their meals. They hunted deer and other game and harvested berries. Away from the rivers, other tribes depended on camas as a staple, as well as on several other kinds of roots. Camas is a relative of the onion. After being dug during the summer months, it was eaten raw or roasted. What they couldn’t eat fresh, the women then ground into meal, which was made into cakes and stored for winter.

The chokecherry, a wild berry, could be eaten fresh or dried. The Dakota used dried chokecherries in a thick sauce called wojap.

On the great prairies of the western United States and Canada lived the tribes known as the Plains Indians. Many of these tribes were nomadic, following herds of buffalo as their major source of food. Others were semi-agricultural; that is, they lived in villages, practiced agriculture, and hunted buffalo in season.

Although the semi-agricultural tribes had smaller fields and a shorter growing season than did the Eastern tribes, they grew the same crops. Corn, squash, pumpkins, and beans supplemented wild foods in their diet. A typical dish was corn balls, called wagmiza wasna by the Sioux people. The women made corn balls by pounding parched corn into flour, mixing the meal with sunflower seeds, berries, water, and hot fat or marrow, and rolling the mixture into balls. It was used as traveling food.

Thin strips of beef jerky are smoked over a fire. Preserving meat in this manner helped the Plains Indians survive the winter months, when they couldn’t hunt buffalo.

Like most other tribes, the native peoples of this region hunted game and gathered wild foods. Dried berries, such as chokecherries, buffalo berries, wild plums, wild raspberries, and strawberries, were made into a thick sauce that the Dakota called wojap.

Some of these tribes lived near the western waters of the Great Lakes. They gathered wild rice, which was called manoomin (the good grain) by the Ojibwa people. Wild rice was harvested by men poling canoes through water while the women knocked the rice seed into the canoes with sticks. The seeds were dried and roasted. Husks were winnowed away by tossing the seeds into the air. Wild rice was stored for winter and used in soups and stews.

When most people imagine the natives of the Plains, they think of the buffalo hunters—the nomadic tribes that hunted buffalo for food. When horses arrived on the prairies in the late 18th century, some tribes left their fields to hunt buffalo. They still ate corn and vegetables, which they got through trade with the agricultural tribes, but the buffalo became their way of life and their staple food.

Because these nomadic tribes were often on the move, they developed recipes and prepared foods that could be easily packed. One important food was “jerked” meat. Jerky was buffalo meat that had been sliced thin, dried in the sun, and packed for later use. Another traveling food was pemmican. Pemmican was concentrated food, made of pounded dried meat mixed with dried, crushed berries and wild seeds. This mixture was stuffed into an animal-membrane bag with melted fat and marrow poured over it. Then, it was made into patties or balls and allowed to dry and harden. Pemmican was a high-energy food that didn’t spoil, thus keeping the Plains Indians alive during long journeys and the winter months.

By killing the vast herds of buffalo, whites destroyed the Plains Indians’ main source of food—and much of their entire culture. Shown here: slaughter along the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, 1871.

All of this changed when white settlers from the East flooded the West during the middle of the 19th century. White settlers competed with the buffalo hunters for land and aggressively killed the buffalo as a way to rid the land of native tribes. Terrible wars between the tribes of the Plains and American soldiers did great damage to the Plains culture. By the end of the 19th century, most of the buffalo were gone. The tribes were driven north or forced to live on reservations.

Before the first salmon feast of the fishing season, the Kwakiutl would say this prayer: “O Supernatural Ones! O Swimmers! I thank you that you are willing to come to us. Protect us from danger so that nothing evil may happen to us when we eat you.”

Eulachon was a kind of fish valued for its flesh and oil. Eulachon oil was used for flavoring on everything from dried salmon to berries. It was also used to preserve food.

Wild rice is not really a kind of rice, but a water plant with seeds. It grows only in clear, slow-running water.

The buffalo hunters showed their gratitude for their meat with a buffalo altar prayer: “Let us honor the bones of those who give their flesh to keep us alive.”

All tribes were affected by the coming of white settlers, but few had to give up their staple food. The agricultural tribes of the Great Lakes and the salmon-fishing tribes of the Northwest had to adapt their traditional ways of living and eating, but they didn’t have to abandon them. The Plains tribes, however, suffered deeply in body and spirit with the vanishing buffalo. Not only their food, but also their way of life, was taken from them. Reservation life was hard for them, as they had to develop new ways of eating and living. In recent years, however, some Plains tribes have begun to raise buffalo as livestock. They eat buffalo themselves and sell buffalo meat throughout the country. §

A humpback whale emerges from the frigid ocean. In the frozen Arctic, the Inuit people hunted whales both for food and for whale oil, which was used to light and heat homes during the cold winter months.