

“In your head, they are dying.” -Dolores O’Riordan My father raised me off the rez in my mother’s white, European immigrant America. He didn’t want me trapped (mentally or physically) in a place that the country had abandoned. He wanted to be one of those dudes who watches NFL and Clint Eastwood westerns, buys Ford pickups, and chases their dreams. He wanted his boy to be an American. When I was small, my father and his brother would take me and my cousins into the Olympic mountains to hunt deer and elk. I can still taste the morning mist on my tongue. If I close my eyes, I can still smell those ancient firs and cedars. I can hear the light crunch of the forest floor under my feet — a world dying and regenerating. The flutter of a raven. The slow, ominous creak of tree limbs older than the United States itself. To this day, I can feel the chill of that mountain air in my bones.

The Power Of Food After most hunts, we’d head back to my uncle’s house. Maybe once a year, he’d make frybread. I never knew when it was coming, or why he chose to make it after certain hunts and not others, but when it did happen, I paid rapt attention. I’d study my uncle’s movements as he mixed white flour with milk. A can of Calumet baking powder came off the shelf next, the chief in the war bonnet always felt familiar, comforting even. The smell of gun oil wafted through the house as my dad cleaned rifles in the next room, sitting beside the fireplace. My uncle always kneaded the soft, glutinous dough in the same big milk glass bowl. Next, he’d roll out little balls, flatten them into discs, and drop them in an old iron skillet, bubbling with canola oil. My job was to lay out the paper towels on a plate for when the hot rounds of dough came out of the oil. It was torture to wait even a minute for them to cool. We ate our frybread with peanut butter and jam, sitting around the dining room table, as my dad shared stories about walking across the west in the ’60s. As a young man, he lit out to search for details about the life of his estranged father — a bare-knuckle boxer who knocked out the wrong white guy and was thrown in front of a train… by a sheriff. On the road, dad slept under trees. He foraged for food. He crashed in the dorms at Berkeley. As an Indian, he also got arrested. A lot. He calculated once that he spent two non-consecutive years in jails between 1968 and 1974 for being an Indian with long black hair and daring to walk down the highway.

Listening to these stories while eating frybread imbued me with both a sense of adventure and a respect for the power of food — two of my life’s cornerstones.

A Touchstone Of American Indian Culture “Frybread is the story of our survival.” -Sherman Alexie Let’s go back. Frybread — or Bannock bread as it’s called up north — is food born from tragic necessity. In 1862, the U.S. government and Abraham Lincoln decided to rid the Arizona territory of the Navajo. The tribe had been fighting European/Spanish aggression for 300 years by this point. Their numbers were severely diminished over the centuries, due to disease and near constant war. By the time 1860 rolled around, the Navajo population had dwindled to 25,000 souls — getting raided and scalped by New Mexican militias and ranchers does that to a population. The settlers and U.S. Army needed food and feed for their animals, so they attacked the Navajo. The Indians retaliated by raiding ranches and outposts to restock their food supplies. Lincoln wasn’t going to let that shit fly. In 1863, the president sent in the Army to sort this mess out. Apparently, they had the time and resources. They devised a “reservation” at Fort Sumner in New Mexico, a 40 square mile plot in a river bowl. They planned on interning 5,000 Navajo there. Leading the charge was noted murderous maniac, Kit Carson. He used a scorched earth policy to drive the Navajo from their land. They burned thousands of peach trees in the vast orchards of Canyon de Chelly. They killed entire herds of goats, sheep, horses and cows. They burned it all — literally all — of the grazing land and destroyed thousands of irrigation systems that fed corn, beans, and other crops. They destroyed an unknown number of towns and villages. Scorched Earth. Then they waited all winter for the Navajo to starve, and thus surrender. Mind you, these were the good guys in the Civil War. After the Navajo surrendered, some were sold into slavery further west. Ironic given that Lincoln had already given the Emancipation Proclamation. The rest were sent on what is called The Long Walk. A 300+ mile journey from Fort Defiance in western Arizona, across the Rio Grande, to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Pregnant women and stragglers were shot. The train of people stretched to 10 miles. This was not a shining moment in the history of the United States Army, and it happened 50 different times. 50. By 1865, after the last of these forced marches, 9,022 people lived in Fort Sumner. The U.S. Army had murdered two-thirds of the Navajo population to get them into what was, in essence, a concentration camp. They were interned and shot if they tried to leave. Remember that the plan was to hold 5,000 people at the fort. Disease would become endemic. The Navajo planted a crop in the river bowl. Infestation destroyed it. They planted again. A flash flood destroyed it. There wasn’t nearly enough wood for fires. The water was too alkaline and thus not potable. Basically, they could not have picked a worse spot. Soon, the U.S. Army had mass starvation on their hands. The preferred resolution option for the New Mexican governor and the militia was extermination. Instead, the U.S. Army spent $1.5 million in 1865 feeding the 9,022 Navajo and Apaches interned. That’s $166 per person or $2,595 per person per year in 2016 dollars. That included a set of clothes and a ration of food: tinned meat, flour, salt, water and lard.