Native Knowledge 360°—Native Life and Food: Food Is More Than Just What We Eat (2024)

FAQs

What do Native Americans believe about food? ›

Corn, beans and squash, called the Three Sisters by many tribes, serve as key pillars in the Native American diet and is considered a sacred gift from the Great Spirit. Together, the plants provide complete nutrition, while offering an important lesson in environmental cooperation.

What Native Americans ate depended greatly on their geography and culture. Most tribes were hunter-gatherers, foraging for wild vegetation and hunting and fishing for meat. They ate foods such as berries, edible roots, seeds and nuts, deer, bison, salmon, and birds.

Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, especially dark green, red, and orange vegetables such as bell peppers, berries, apples, squash, and salads. Eat small portions of healthy proteins like nuts, seeds, eggs, pasture-fed meat, and wild fish. Snack on whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.

Corn was the most important staple food grown by Native Americans, but corn stalks also provided a pole for beans to climb and the shade from the corn benefited squash that grew under the leaves. The beans, as with all legumes, provided nitrogen for the corn and squash.

Depending on where they lived, Natives consumed alligators, bears, beavers, buffalo, caribou, deer, moose, ducks, elk, rabbits, a variety of fish (salmon, smelt, bass, trout, sturgeon, etc.), geese, insects, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, turtles, seals, shellfish and whales, to name a few animals.

That is to say: North Americans discovered caffeine long before Europeans “discovered” North America. Cassina, or black drink, the caffeinated beverage of choice for indigenous North Americans, was brewed from a species of holly native to coastal areas from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Important crops and wild foods included pumpkins, wild rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggs, honey, a variety of nuts, cranberries, strawberries, wild plums, roots, greens, and a huge variety of other fruits and vegetables.

Native Americans typically do not drink milk. Among the Apache and Navajo tribes, one should not eat snake, bear, reptiles or fish meat. In many tribes, the owl is considered a messenger of bad news or even death so eating owl meat is taboo. The Navajo and Yavapai tribes also do not eat fish.

The Iroquois and the Cherokee called corn, bean, and squash the three sisters' because they nurture each other like family when planted together. These agriculturalists placed corn in small hills planting beans around them and interspersing squash throughout of the field.

What did Native Americans eat for breakfast? ›

Corn porridge was popular among the Native Americans, who called it “sofkee” or “sofgee” and eventually became popular with the colonists. As you might wonder, hoecakes and johnny cakes – otherwise known as corn bread – were also breakfast staples.

Some Cherokee favorites include cornmeal-dredged fried crawdads, wild onions cooked with eggs, fried hog meat, fried fish, brown beans, bean bread, greens such as kochani, poke sallet and watercress, and desserts such as grape dumplings and kanutsi.

Pre-columbian native Nations had ancestral fermented beverages. Based on Anthropological studies and current community traditions, uses were spiritual in nature and had religious connotations. These beverages included corn beers, cactus wines, berry, and root ferments, and even alcoholic gruels.

Along with potatoes, many other foods—including corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, peppers, tomatoes, yams, peanuts, wild rice, chocolate, pineapples, avocados, papayas, pecans, strawberries, cranberries, and blueberries, to name a few, are indigenous to the Americas.

We're going to talk about an older name for America: Turtle Island. Turtle Island is the name for the North American continent in many Native American cultures. This name comes from mythology, or rather mythologies, as every tribe has a slightly different version of Turtle Island and how it came to be.

In Hindu culture, food is offered to the Hindu deity as a part of worship ritual before consuming it; hence, tasting food during preparation is strictly forbidden. This way, the food is considered a medium of sacrifice, and eating is seen as a selfless act.

Barriers to obtaining Native traditional food include permits limiting access to hunting, discriminatory farm-lending practices, fishing or farming, and degradation of the environment, while barriers to buying healthy food include the lack of transportation and the higher cost of food in Tribal areas.

Native American people's belief structure usually centers around a central primary God served by a pantheon of gods and spirits. There is typically a counterpart to God, an evil presence, or nature that controls its pantheon of spirits.

Some of the most well-known Indigenous foods are the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—as they were staple foods. This trio grows well together in the same soil and comes together to form many nutrient-dense dishes, such as Three Sisters soup or stew.