Marlena Jones rolls up a ball of white flour, shortening and baking powder, then claps it between her hands until it’s as big as her face. She then stretches it thin and lays it on a pan of bubbling grease. That pan sits over an open fire on a 90-degree day.

Jones is sweating. She’s making fry bread for 40 people at a Cameron church function.

“I used to make it every day because my kids love it,” Jones said. “After I found out that I did have high blood pressure I cut down on the greasy stuff.”

Laurel Morales, Fronteras Desk

Jones found out she was a candidate for Type 2 diabetes.

“It is scary once you hear it that you have diabetes. But after I cut down everything came out to be normal,” she said. “It was hard to get my blood to where it should be, my sugar level. It scares you because I have eight kids. And I try not to feed them all the greasy stuff.”

Fry bread was born out of tragic necessity. In the 1860s, the U.S. Army forced 10,000 Navajos and Apaches to a prison camp in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, some 300 miles from home in what is today known as the Long Walk. Col. Kit Carson said he was trying to “tame the savages.”

“Navajo people were basically given tin meat, lard, sugar, salt and flour. And that became the staple diet,” said Manley Begay, a Navajo and a professor of Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University.

After four years of imprisonment, the federal government let the Navajos return home. But Begay said there wasn’t much to come home to. Their crops and animals had withered and died, so the government supplied the Navajo with rations of tin meat, lard, sugar, salt and flour. Fry bread remained a staple.



