LINK: https://www.wknofm.org/code-switch-npr/2024-07-17/waiting-in-no-mans-land-code-switch
“Weapons of Health Destruction…” How Colonialism Created the Modern Native American Diet
Andrea Freeman on the Impact of Systematic Oppression on Indigenous Cuisine in the United States
July 24, 2024
Frybread, sometimes called “die bread” or a “weapon of health destruction,” has multiple origin stories, and they all involve oppression and perseverance. In one rendition, the federal government’s Indian agents in charge of providing rations stored flour carelessly, allowing weevil larvae to infest it. No other food was available, so Indigenous cooks fried the flour in hot lard to kill the larvae. With this stroke of genius, they salvaged the flour and created the first frybread.
Another tale locates frybread’s birthplace on Fort Sumner’s Pecos River, where US soldiers incarcerated Navajos and Apaches after a military campaign. Army officers gave the captives sparse supplies of flour and salt and iron pots. Charged with creating something edible, Navajo women kneaded the flour into dough balls, flattened them, then deep-fried them in animal fat. The prisoners enjoyed the dish so much that even after leaving Fort Sumner and returning home, they continued to cook and eat it.
Modern frybread is still made from simple ingredients: flour, baking powder, salt, and sometimes sugar, fried in shortening, lard, or oil. It is a versatile food that can be sweet or savory, perfect as the base of a taco, a filling breakfast, or a snack. When served sweet, it often has cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top and comes with jam. A savory version might have pizza toppings.
Frybread…has multiple origin stories, and they all involve oppression and perseverance.
T-shirts celebrating frybread abound: “Frybread Feels,” “Got Frybread?,” “Frybread Power,” “Frybread Is My Soulmate,” “I Was Told There Would Be Frybread,” “It’s All About the Frybread.” In “Commod Bods and Frybread Power,” scholar Dana Vantrease explains that these popular T-shirts help Indigenous people find each other in environments where wearing traditional regalia is no longer common. A’aninin anthropologist George P. Horse Capture called frybread “a divine gift in exchange for hardships such as racism and disease that native people have endured.” In 2005, South Dakota declared frybread its official state bread. A 2012 mockumentary, More Than Frybread, comically portrays the cutthroat competition among Indigenous nations in an Arizona frybread championship.
Ojibwe rock artist Keith Secola’s song “Frybread” is a musical tribute to the beloved food. In one version of the song, he associates frybread with Indian resistance. “They couldn’t keep the people down,” Secola explains, “because born to the people was a Frybread Messiah, who said ‘There’s not much you can do with sugar, flour, lard and salt. You got to add something special, and that special ingredient is love.’” Secola serenades the unifying power of frybread: “A mile long frybread line / ’Cause we’re all the same inside / We need frybread all the time / All I’m asking for… frybread.”
At the same time, Secola contends that “frybread has killed more Indians than the federal government.”
On the hit television show Reservation Dogs, the only series ever to feature all Indigenous writers, directors, and main cast members, the Indian Health Center invites rapper Punkin’ Lusty, played by real-life Mvskoke rapper Sten Joddi, to perform his hit song “Greasy Frybread.” The occasion is Diabetes Awareness Month. Lusty raps,
Baby girl looking deadly (Yeah!)
Why she acting all Rezzy (Yeah!)
Hotter than a pan of frybread grease!
Have a Native hittin’ Powwow Beats!
Gotcha Auntie in the kitchen
Like no he didn’t
Got her Gramama’s skillet
Like she ’bout to kill it!
The song solidly locates frybread within Indigenous culture.
Sofkee [a corn drink or soup] on the
burner
Hokte Hokte [woman] head turner
Water baking powder
Choppin’ up that white stuff
All purpose flour
Gotta mix it right up
Hit the Rez with the Shits
They eats it right up! Watch the grease pop
Watch her waist drop
She got that blue bird bag [Blue Bird flour comes in a twenty-pound cloth bag
and claims to be “The Native American Frybread Secret”]
In her tank top
he got that white powder
All over everything
She gettin’ to bussin’ man
But we ain’t cousins man!
We from the same tribe
But a different clan
She my Rez Bunny
And I’m her Red Man
She love my Tattoos
And my two braids
Frybread money at the Creek Fest get paid! On that!”
Foregrounding this song in the Health Center’s battle against diabetes underscores the other side of frybread’s legacy, also emblazoned on a T-shirt that announces “Frybread: Creating Obesity Since 1860.”
Cheyenne and Hudulgee Muscogee Indigenous rights activist Suzan Shown Harjo, who vowed to give up frybread as a New Year’s resolution, explains, “Frybread is emblematic of the long trails from home and freedom to confinement and rations. It’s the connecting dot between healthy children and obesity, hypertension, diabetes, dialysis, blindness, amputations and slow death.” Reflecting on stereotypes that dehumanized Indigenous people to justify colonization, such as the worn-out trope of Indians drinking “firewater,” Harjo asserts that frybread love is another way to portray them as “simple-minded people who salute the little grease bread and get misty-eyed about it.”
In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, scholar David Treuer introduces health educator Chelsey Luger, who is Ojibwe and Lakota. Chelsey talks to Indigenous communities about the perils of frybread as part of her efforts to steer their diets in new directions, even in the face of limited food options. “Sometimes people get defensive, but we are able to make the conversation positive. We say we grew up with it and like it and we say frybread is not power. We say frybread kills our people. It’s that serious. It causes diabetes and heart disease. We have to look at those colonial foods as a kind of enemy.”
Frybread arouses passionate feelings in its fans and detractors. Some people celebrate it as culinary artistry, some consume it as a comfort food, some curse it as a colonial byproduct, and some hold it up as a sign of ignorance or self-destruction. But everyone agrees that it is a far cry from the pre-colonial foods that nourished Indigenous people for centuries.
Corn is the centerpiece of Indigenous agriculture. Because corn does not grow wild, its cultivation requires extensive knowledge and care. Indigenous gardeners produced five different types of corn—sweet, dent, flour, flint (for hominy), and popcorn—and dozens of varieties within these types. Processing corn is extremely labor intensive, requiring impressive strength. One Indigenous woman reports beating corn until “our arms felt like they would break.” Activist and environmentalist Winona LaDuke, a member of the Mississippi band Anishinaabeg, recounts her father’s comment when she was a student at Harvard: “I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you cannot grow corn.”
Before Columbus invaded the continent and began to export corn across the ocean, corn grew only in what we know today as the Americas. Beginning in 1500 BC, the Huhugam people built canals that allowed them to grow the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash. Pre-colonization, many Indigenous nations relied on this trio for their primary sustenance. The corn stalks act as a ladder for the pole or climbing beans while the squash leaves guard against the intrusion of other plants while also providing shade, protection, and moisture for the corn’s roots. Eaten together, corn, beans, and squash form a complete protein, rich in vitamins and minerals. The corn’s sweetness perfectly balances the beans’ heartiness and the squash’s lightness.
Later, between 1450 and 900 BC, the Huhugam built a complex irrigation system that allowed them to cultivate and then export surplus crops. They supplemented the three sisters with desert foods—cholla cacti (famous for their ability to jump on people or animals passing by, stinging them with their spiky spines), prickly pear, mesquite (tree pods that make a sweet, nutty flour when ground), and dense tepary beans.
Frybread arouses passionate feelings in its fans and detractors…but everyone agrees that it is a far cry from the pre-colonial foods.
Some Indigenous cooks made bread out of persimmon seeds, while others combined poached and sifted corn, peanuts, and salt. Chestnuts, acorns, bamboo vine, and greenbrier vine, crushed and fried in bear grease, also made good bread. These breads were high in protein, dense, and flavorful. They also helped prevent disease. The Hopi technique of mixing ashes with cornmeal, common across Indigenous nations, protected against pellagra, a disease caused by a vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency, which later tormented both Europeans and enslaved people whose primary food source was corn.
Bison, or buffalo, were also essential to the diets and culture of Plains Indians—over thirty nations that include the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Pawnee, Osage, Navajo, Comanche, and Apache. Being native to the northern and southern plains, bison traveled east with Indigenous people who used fire to transform forests into fallows that resembled the creatures’ natural habitats. When settlers saw these paths, their untrained eyes registered only burned-out waste areas. They missed the carefully plotted trails that spread a vital food source across the land and later, they slaughtered the bison to near extinction as a military and political tactic. In addition to bison, Indigenous people ate alligators, bears, beavers, caribou, deer, moose, elk, fish, geese, turtles, seals, shellfish, and whales.
Cherries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, potatoes, pecans, peanuts, peppers, black walnuts, acorns, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and cacao were staples of Indigenous diets. Black walnuts have more antioxidants than English walnuts, making them popular foods in the fight to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Hickory nuts are hard-shelled, dense, and sweet. These traditional diets, consisting mainly of proteins, fruits, and vegetables, sustained health and strength.
Almost immediately upon arriving on the continent, settlers seized Indigenous trade networks, cutting off their access to food staples and sparking shortages. Lacking knowledge of how to survive in their new environment, colonizers claimed Indigenous farmland, stole corn and vegetables, and commandeered deer parks. Confronted with violence and intimidation, Indigenous people led the intruders to water and food sources like oyster beds.
In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz recounts the settlers’ inability to fend for themselves after landing in Jamestown in 1607. Unequipped to hunt or grow their own food, the British demanded that the Powhatan Confederacy, comprised of thirty different polities, give up the food that they had cultivated and hunted for themselves. John Smith, part of the settlers’ governing council, is famous for demanding self-sufficiency from his community: “He that will not work shall not eat.” But Smith relied on theft and extortion to feed his followers.
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From Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch by Andrea Freeman. Copyright © 2024. Available from Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.
SCALP COUNT 2024??
By Trace L Hentz (blog editor)
Cash Bounties were paid for dead Indians. How did you get paid? Scalps.
Where are all those SCALPS?
I had an idea to write all the historical societies where I live to see if they have any scalps. These scalps must be somewhere, right? (I wonder where all the bodies are buried, too. We know our bones were scattered clear across this country.)
There was an entire population here that got massacred in New England. The proof would be their scalps and their bones, right? Trust me: You cannot find any accurate figure of how many Indians were living in Massachusetts, or how many were killed. Why not?
It's another chapter. Again: WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW.
💀Considering History: The Troubling Story of Scalp Bounties
7/22/2024
This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.
In 1755, Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Royal Lieutenant Governor issued a scalp bounty proclamation, offering substantial cash payments to any white colonists who brought in the scalps of indigenous men, women, and children. This was just one of approximately 70 scalp bounty proclamations issued in New England in the century before the American Revolution; U.S. governments issued at least another 50 throughout the new nation in subsequent decades. These planned genocides are a profoundly painful part of American history, but are often little remembered or discussed.
Earlier this month, I was invited by the folks at Revolutionary Spaces, the organization that manages both the Old State House and the Old South Meeting House historic sites on Boston’s Freedom Trail, to view the new short film Bounty. Created by Penobscot Wabanaki Native American filmmakers Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana, and Adam Mazo, with the support of the Upstander Project, this 8.5-minute film screens on a continuous loop in a second-floor room adjacent to the Old State House’s central attraction, a recreation of the Council Chamber where the Massachusetts Colony’s Royal Governors met with their Councils — and where they signed the scalp bounty proclamations that are the subject of this bracing and powerful film.
Working to recover, remember, and engage such histories is a difficult process, and one in which museums and other historic sites have a vital role to play. Both this film and the Old State House are modeling thoughtful ways to remember these harsh stories from our past.
While these proclamations generally targeted a specific tribe, related to ongoing conflicts for example, there was of course no way of knowing the tribal identity of a particular scalping victim, and so the bounties became a general license for the murder of all indigenous peoples.
The short film Bounty focuses on one particular scalp bounty proclamation, as it targeted the Penobscot Wabanaki people specifically. That proclamation, issued by the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Royal Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips in 1755, was one of five issued in Boston in that year alone, including another signed in the same Old State House Council Chamber by Royal Governor William Shirley. But the Phips Proclamation went even further than most: it not only offered bounties for the scalps of Penobscot men, women, and children, but also offered bounties for the capture of living Penobscot males 12 years and older (who would then be sold into enslavement).
The Penobscot were seen as allies of the French, with whom England was at war, and this scalp bounty thus represented not just intended genocide, but also a way to weaken a military adversary and bolster both the slave trade and the colony’s coffers in the process.
Bounty does not shy away from any of those complex and painful details. The film (available for streaming on its website) features both the filmmakers and other Penobscot elders reading the text of the Phips Proclamation in full, as well as discussing its contexts and especially its genocidal effects with their children, grandchildren, and other family members. The accompanying Teachers Guide includes four extensive lessons that delve into not just scalp bounty proclamations, but also a number of other relevant historical and cultural settings. And to its credit, the Old State House has not only partnered with the filmmakers to screen Bounty continually; they have also located that screening room directly adjacent to the Council Chamber, a space that now features multiple laminated copies of the Phips and Shirley Proclamations which, as the museum’s explanatory materials note (including in a revised caption for the Chamber’s portrait of Governor Shirley), were signed in that very room.
The most powerful elements of this compelling short film were the presence and voices of the featured Penobscot children. Because the Phips Proclamation directly targeted Penobscot children, this is a historically relevant and painful connection to be sure, and one to which those kids react directly in the film.
The last spoken line in the film (delivered by filmmaker Dawn Neptune Adams) is “They tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds,” and the film ends with a number of images of its 21st century multi-generational Penobscot families walking through and engaging with the Council Chamber and the copies of the Proclamations. These stories continue affect contemporary indigenous peoples (as they do all Americans); for this reason, we all have an important role to play in how we remember, how we engage and discuss, and how we move forward.
The re-creation of history can too often become mythologized and even idealized, and this film and exhibit challenge those trends, forcing visitors to consider the contradictions and conflicts that are present in the Old State House and all of colonial New England and America.
But important as this step is, it is also, as Revolutionary Spaces President and CEO Nat Sheidley acknowledged in our conversation, just a starting point for that continued work. Sheidley linked the film screening to another recent Revolutionary Spaces event, one intended to become an annual tradition: a live (and recorded) communal reading of Native American preacher and activist William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836). Delivered not far from the Old State House, at Boston’s Odeon theatre, Apess’s stirring speech makes the case for the Wampanoag leader King Philip as not an adversary to colonial Americans, but instead a revolutionary ancestor akin to George Washington, a figure to whom all Americans can look with pride and patriotism.
While indigenous people were without question victims of white supremacist genocides such as the scalp bounties, they likewise were and remain essential American communities, from King Philip to William Apess to the filmmakers and children behind and featured in Bounty. Better remembering our hardest histories helps us engage with America’s foundational diversity, goals modeled in the Old State House’s powerful new film.
U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs,and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), vice chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, led a group of senators to speak on the dark history of Indian Boarding Schools and the progress being made on the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, legislation that would establish a federal commission to investigate, document, and acknowledge past injustices due to the federal government's former Indian Boarding School policies.
“The history of Indian boarding schools is, without doubt, one of the darkest, most shameful chapters in our country’s history. For over 150 years, the United States government stole hundreds of thousands of Native children from their families and communities and forced them into federally-run and -supported boarding schools, often far away from their homes,” said Chairman Schatz.
Video of the remarks is available here and a full transcript as prepared for deliver follows.
👇
On Wednesday, the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee unanimously passed H.R. 9076, the Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act of 2024. This legislation would reauthorize Title IV-B of the Social Security Act through 2029, provide additional funding, and make updates to these critical child welfare programs.
Rep. Judy Chu (CA-28) served as Vice Ranking Member and successfully included several of her bipartisan bills in the larger legislation, including:
I will be posting articles today that I had saved.
THIS WEBSITE MAY DISAPPEAR which I why I will be creating a mirror site, just in case.
(👇HERE is a link)
https://nativeindigenousadoptees.blogspot.com/
To search, always use keywords: splitfeathers, american indian adoptees, native indigenous adoptees or my name Trace Lara Hentz... if this site goes out...
Trace
EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
For decades, federal and state governments have shared the cost of subsidies for families that adopt children out of foster care. The goal is to bring added stability to the lives of kids who have often experienced deep trauma.
Adoption subsidies are provided either through the Title IV-E program or the non-Title IV-E program. Children cannot qualify for both Title IV-E and non-Title IV-E benefits.
But when those adoptive families fall apart and children end up back in foster care or worse, out on the streets, those monthly payments can continue to be sent to parents who are no longer involved.
A New York law that passed both houses of the Legislature would set a clear path to end subsidies following these “broken adoptions.”
“The money must follow the child,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, the bill’s author.
Regarding those who accept payments for absent children, she added: “That’s just greed, in my opinion. If you gave up the child, then you shouldn’t be entitled to the money.”
Dawn Post, who has long advocated for youth in New York who experience broken adoptions, said the proposed law in New York would make it the first state in the nation to meaningfully monitor the continuation of adoption subsidies under these circumstances.
“I am ecstatic that this is the first bill in the country that’s really going to address this,” Post said. “This provides a real opportunity for youth to continue to be supported with the funds that were originally intended for them.”
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👉Campaigning for Child Welfare Opinion: Child welfare leaders must make a concerted effort to educate national and state office-seekers about a vision for better supporting families and children, Paul DiLorenzo writes.
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