If Devon A. Mihesuah had her way, American Indians would abandon their love of fry bread, quit drinking so much, and embrace a healthy, active lifestyle like that of their ancestors. As a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a professor of global-indigenous-nations studies at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, she has made it her goal to educate her fellow tribe members about the importance of nutrition and fitness.
Mihesuah has long sought to empower American Indians through her academic work. For nine years she edited the journal American Indian Quarterly. She has also written numerous books about indigenous people, including Choctaw Crime and Punishment, 1884-1907 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), an account of the murder of a Choctaw ancestor.
But if American Indians are to survive to tell their stories and fight for their rights, Mihesuah says, they need to take back their health. So began the American Indian Health and Diet Project, a Web site she runs (http://www.aihd.ku.edu) that encourages tribes to learn about traditional Indian foods and activities. Colorful photographs accompany dozens of recipes and display the bounty of Mihesuah’s garden and kitchen. The project is a family affair: Her husband proudly grills elk steaks in one photo; in others, her son fills and folds tamalelike chahta banaha and her daughter clears weeds from the family’s garden.
She hopes the site will inspire people to take pride in their heritage—and their bodies.
“Native people are just suffering from unprecedented health problems—obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure. This is a manifestation of being colonized—by moving from eating unprocessed foods and always being active, whether you’re a hunter or gatherer or an agriculturist, to sitting around eating processed foods. In my tribe, even little children are grossly obese. It’s really hard to watch that. A lot of native tribes find it easier to eat junk food because it tends to be cheaper. Native people have lost touch with how to save seeds, how to even cultivate seeds in the first place. They don’t know the traditional ceremonies associated with food. A lot of that was beaten out of them in boarding schools run by the Europeans in the 1800s. The idea was to separate native children from their families and turn them into imitation white people. They lost their language, their ceremonies, their culture. At these schools, a big part of their diet was gravy and biscuits and lard and canned peaches, and they got used to it. Wheat is not indigenous to this hemisphere.
Some native people like to say that fry bread is indigenous, and it isn’t. Being confined to reservations, Native people were given commodities like big bags of white flour. What are you going to do with all that flour? Well, one thing they did was to make bread and fry it. Now you see it at powwows, and everywhere tribes gather. It’s just as deadly as can be, and it’s not our traditional food. I have a bumper sticker that has a picture of fry bread with a line through it that says, Decolonize Your Diet.
I have native students in my class on indigenous food and culture, and I try to emphasize that they could have a real sense of pride in eating traditional dishes. It’s a connection to the past, to their culture. It could be a political statement. There’re a lot of things that native people simply cannot control: racism, stereotyping. But they can control what they eat. Even growing a little container of peppers, maybe, or just a little patch of corn—that can be really symbolic.”
