Recovering our Ancestors’ Gardens: Indigenous Recipes + Guide to Diet and Fitness
Taste your way to history
— Nina Mukerjee Furstenau
Each time of year provides tempting flavors to savor, and the delightful book, Recovering our Ancestors’ Gardens: Indigenous Recipes and Guide to Diet and Fitness, gives all of us a clear path to cook up the season. The fact you can dive into this way of eating more fully, as well as understand the roots of U.S. indigenous food history, gives this book a uniquely tasty pull.
There are many avenues to foodstory. Devon A. Mihesuah, author of Recovering our Ancestor’s Gardens, takes the path of old wisdom. The book, which contains delicious and accessible recipes using ingredients such as quinoa, squash, lima beans, cranberries, blue corn and more, also includes details of health and history in 384 pages bursting with intrigue. Her perspective on pre-contact foods of Native Americans reaches into all of our lives with warm language that celebrates food and culture.
Mihesuah, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation as well as the Cora Lee Beers Professor of Humanities at the University of Kansas, reveals the braided story of the native people of the U.S. More, she points out issues of food sovereignty, traditional diets and their link to health, social inequities, and ecological concerns.
“All of us can be activists when it comes to food,” Mihesuah says, and this applies whether or not you are Native American.
One effective change is to resist “treating the natural world as a commodity,” Mihesuah says. The indigenous foodways of Choctaw and other tribes, reliant on not over-fishing, or depleting land resources, saving seeds for the next season, and leaving some bounty for foraging animals, has been replaced by commerce. (Here for a story on a native-run business usurped by big food companies). Keeping humans in equilibrium with the rest of the world is a priority in Native life.
Native farmers, she says, are aware of the issues surrounding not doing so, especially as temperature changes, flooding, rising coastal waters, raging fires, and more cause displacement of flora and fauna. “As animals move north for cooler weather, or away from coasts, they will eat the plants as they go, and birds will drop different seeds.” More and more resources of the land will disappear in stressed environments. Even people not responsible for growing food can help by becoming educated.
“Not all Natives were farmers yet they had respect for the natural world and environment,” Mihesuah says.
Good foods are dependent on that respect.
Find Recovering Our Ancestors Gardens at your favorite bookseller, or order a copy directly from the University of Nebraska Press.