Food: Its Preparation and How Obtained
Fish and berries form the staff of life amongst the Indians of this region. Around the summer camps, at all times, can be seen strips of halibut or salmon suspended…
From: Unknown To: 1884 C.E.
Location: Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada; Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, United States of America
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia by Albert P. Niblack, 1890.
Food
Fish and berries form the staff of life amongst the Indians of this region. Around the summer camps, at all times, can be seen strips of halibut or salmon suspended in the smoke of the dwelling-houses, or drying in the open air on frames erected for the purpose.
In the summer season there is an abundance of all kinds of food, but the energies of the Indians are directed to laying up a stock for winter’s use. Halibut abound from March to November, and are readily caught on their favorite banks, known to the natives who camp near such localities.
Halibut and salmon, fresh and dried, form the basis of the food supply. The salmon are caught during the ‘‘runs.” After the daily wants are supplied, and a sufficient number dried for winter’s use, the surplus fish are converted into oil. This oil, as well as all other kinds, is used as a sauce, into which nearly everything is dipped before eating. Seal and porpoise flesh, or blubber, is esteemed a great delicacy, although they will not eat whale’s blubber for superstitious reasons.
Any kind of meat of wild animals is eaten when procurable, but it is only in recent years that they have ever salted down or dried meat for winter’s use. Other kinds of fish, such as cod, herring, and eulachon, are much esteemed. During the run of herring large quantities are dried or pressed into oil. Eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus), the so-called “candle-fish,” a kind of smelt, run in March and April at the mouth of the Skeena, Nass, and Stikeen Rivers. These have the greatest proportion of fatty matter known in any fish. In frying they melt almost completely into oil, and need only the insertion of some kind of a wick to serve as a candle.
Fish roe
The roe of fish is esteemed a great delicacy, and great care is taken to collect it in the water, or remove it from captured fish. It is either eaten fresh, or dried and preserved for winter’s use, when it is eaten in two ways: (1) It is pounded between two stones, diluted with water, and beaten with wooden spoons into a creamy consistency; or (2) it is boiled with sorrel and different dried berries, and molded in wooden frames into cakes about 12 inches square and 1 inch thick.
Herbs and berries
Roots, herbs, berries, and snails are amongst the luxuries of the summer season. Raspberries, salmon berries, strawberries, currants, red and blue huckleberries, salal, and thimble berries abound late in the summer. Some of these are collected and dried for winter’s use, forming, with the dried fish, the principal winter’s supply Poole (1863) says of the Haida, that they often, through feasting or improvidence, eat up all the dried berries before spring, and “were it not for a few bulbs which they dig out of the soil in the early springtime, while awaiting the halibut season, numbers of Indians really would starve to death.”
Portlock mentions the root of the wild lily as very much used by the Tlingit. Crab-apples are found, but are scarcely edible. Wild parsnips are abundant and palatable. Many years ago an American ship captain gave the Indians potatoes, and they are now regularly cultivated, and form a considerable item in the winter food supply. Other vegetables may be and are grown, near all the villages now may be seen patches of ground planted, however, principally in potatoes.
Oil
Fish is eaten dried by breaking it up and soaking the bits in fish-oil or grease, having the consistency of uncooled jelly. This oil is obtained from seals, porpoises, herring, salmon, eulachon, goat, deer, bear, and the livers of the dog-fish, shark, and other vertebrates. It is the odor of this rancid oil which permeates everything Indian, and renders a visit to a lodge on the northwest coast somewhat of an ordeal.
Invertebrates
Invertebrates and several species of marine algae or seaweed are eaten. Of the former there are clams, crabs, cuttle-fish, and mussels or oysters, the last named being often poisonous at certain seasons. The clams, echinoderms, and seaweed are gathered at ebb tide. The shellfish are usually eaten in the winter months.
Seaweed
The seaweed is dried for winter’s use and pressed into a kind of cake, like plug tobacco. A species of it, quite black when dried, is used for making a dish called sopallaly, of which the Indians are immoderately fond. This is made by breaking up a very small piece of the pressed sopallaly cake into little bits in a bowl or dish and adding warm water. It is then beaten with a wooden spoon and sugar is added. It froths and foams like the white of an egg or like soap, and gradually turns from a terra-cotta color to white.
Berries, fresh or dried, are sometimes added, and the mixture is consumed with avidity by old and young. Langsdorff (1805) says in spring and summer the Tlingit gather several sorts of seaweed, which, “when cooked, make a bitterish sort of soup.”
He mentions also “a sort of square cake made of the bark of the spruce fir, pounded and mixed with the roots, berries and train oil.”
Bark
The inner bark of the spruce and hemlock forms an important part of the food supply of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian. The southern Indian eats pine bark. Plate xx. Fig. 79a, shows a stone scraper used by the northern Indians for removing this inner bark from the trunk. The scrapings are molded into cakes about a foot square
Birds
The Indians are remarkably fond of wild fowl, but the difficulties of shooting and entrapping them with their ordinary implements and means have made them a very inconsiderable source of their food supply.
At certain seasons, however, they capture them by strategy. Wild geese they catch after they have shed their large wing feathers and are unable to fly. At other times they hunt wild fowl by night with torches and fell them with clubs. Pooie (1864) thus describes bird slaughtering amongst the Kwakiutl:
“The birds, which are small but plump, burrow their holes in the sand-banks on the shores. When the slaughtering season arrives the Indians prepare torches composed of long sticks having the tips smeared with gum taken from the pine trees. Armed with handy clubs, they then place these lighted torches at the mouths of the holes, and as soon as the birds, attracted by the glare, flutter forth, they fell them to the ground.”
Birds’ Eggs
Birds’ Eggs are collected, wherever possible, in early summer. The Haida derive their supply from the outlying rocks of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Kaigani make trips out to Forrester and other islands. Each location is pre-empted by particular families, and considered hereditary property, which is handed down from generation to generation.
Cooking and Preparation of Food
Dried fish, bark, roe, etc., are eaten with grease or oil, as before stated. Salmon roe is buried in boxes on the beach, washed by the tide, and eaten in a decomposed state. The heads of salmon and halibut are esteemed a great luxury when putrefied in the tide or salt water.
Meat is either broiled on a stick, roasted on hot stones, or boiled in a kettle. Before the introduction of kettles, meat was boiled in a wooden dish or water-tight by means of red hot stones added to the water.
Fresh fish and cuttlefish are always cooked. Oil is extracted from the livers of dogfish and stranded sharks and whales, to sell to the whites. Oil is obtained in different localities from salmon, herring, eulachon, and pollock.
The fish is usually allowed to partially putrefy and then boiled in wooden boxes by means of hot stones dropped in the water. The grease or oil is skimmed from the surface. The refuse is squeezed in mats, and the grease obtained is stored in boxes.
Sometimes this grease or oil is run into the hollow stalks of giant kelp, which have been tanned or prepared beforehand as follows: The stalks are soaked in fresh water to extract the salt, dried in the sun or in the smoke of the dwelling, and then toughened and made pliable with oil, rubbed thoroughly in. In this form of storage the oil is as portable as in bottles, or in jars, with less danger of breakage.
Birds or wild fowls are toasted on a stick before a slow fire without any previous plucking or cleaning, and the feathers and skin removed afterward. The entrails are supposed to add a decidedly better flavor to the bird.
When the salmon or halibut are caught, it is the duty of the women to clean and dry them. The head is cut off, the fish slit down the back, back-bone and entrails removed, and the tail and fins cut off.
The cleaned fish is then cut into long flakes which are hung on a wooden frame and cured, without salt, either in the sun or by means of a slow fire beneath. Sometimes they're are dried in the smoke of dwellings.
The fish when dried are either wrapped in bark or stored in chests or boxes, and stowed for future use out of the reach of the dogs and children
When bear, deer, goats, or other game are killed, the skin is not generally removed from the carcass until most of the flesh has been eaten. In this way the skin forms a wrapper to preserve and protect the flesh. Grease obtained by boiling the meat is skimmed from the surface of the water and esteemed a great delicacy.
Albert P. Niblack. The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia. US National Museum. 1890.
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