This was far more difficult than it should have been. My family has lived in Oklahoma since it was a territory, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with several tribes. However, I am not familiar with the tribes in Kansas. Here's what I learned:
*The State of Kansas didn't create a government office to work with Native American tribes in Kansas until 2011.
My 12 yr old daughter is older than this office.
There is not a lot of easy-to-find information on tribal food cultures in the Midwest prior to colonization by white people if you look directly at tribal web pages. Native American food blogs tend to have plenty of fry bread and Indian tacos, not things that their ancestors would have had access to. It wasn't until I stumbled across the Decolonization Food Project at the University of Michigan that I finally had some luck. This Moodle was created by Dr. Martin Reinhardt to see if eating foods that more closely resembled the foods people ate prior to the colonization of this country could help lower the rates of diabetes, obesity, and other modern illnesses that impact Indigenous People at a much higher rate than their white counterparts. It includes:
Some really cool stuff. But what I wanted was something closer to home and then I found:
Dr. Devon A. Mihesuah, Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at KU and an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation.
In other words: pay dirt.
They created the American Indian Health and Diet Project. This project includes their book, "Recovering Our Ancestors' Gardens: Indigenous Recipes and Guide to Diet and Fitness", a Facebook community, information on gardening, health, and most importantly FOOD!
According to Dr. Mihesuah's research, the Plains Indians(25 separate tribes) consumed a variety of foods including buffalo berries, plums, turnips, buffalo, deer, ducks, and prairie chicken. There is also information on ten geographic areas and the different foods those tribes ate.
Their recommendation for people wanting to eat a decolonized diet isn't restricted to the food lists for only one geographic area. They recommend using the entirety of the land the tribes inhabited in the now United States.
A Few Plains Recipes:
Cultural Stuff
Dr. Tai Edwards article, "Osage Gender: Continuity, Change, and Colonization 1720s-1870s" discusses how the Osage saw men and women as complimentary; both are needed in order to achieve balance. Edwards goes on to show that the Osage women primarily were tasked with those works that would have been performed closer to the home while men did the hunting and raiding. Therefore, women would have been tasked with preparing the meals for the group including preservation.
Linguistic Stuff
The Osage Indians belonged to a family of languages called the Siouan Languages. The Osage version broke off into a subset grouping called Dhegihan. According to the Osage Nations website, colonization changed the Osage language as did the use of boarding schools to separate families. Children born after 1940 are considered to speak English as their native tongue. However, continuing efforts are made by the Osage people to encourage the use of the language including the introduction of language classes.
Osage via Osage Culture Dictionary This website has recordings of how vowels, consonants, and other individual letters sound like.
Apple: πΌπ°͘ππ· 1
Buffalo: ππ·2 1ππππ· 1
Cook, prepare: ππΉπ͘
Duck: ππ»ππ° 1
Eat: ππ°ππ͘π΄π· 1
Plum: πΌπ°͘ππ· ππππ·
Pound: πππ·
Devon A. Mihesuah
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