Native American food: Inuit carving of a sea lion
Hunting and gathering wild food
Early on, until about 2000 BC, people in North America ate only wild foods that they could hunt or gather.
More about gathering
Paleo-Indians in North America
All our Native American articles
Salmon, wapato, pine nuts and acorn flour
These foods varied according to the environment where each group of people lived. Inuit people, who lived in the far north along the coasts of the Arctic Ocean and in Alaska, ate a lot of fish and seal meat, and gathered seaweed.
More about the Inuit
History of fishing
North American environment
Chinook people, who lived a little further south in the Pacific Northwest (modern Oregon and Washington) ate a lot of salmon, and wapato, which was a lot like potatoes. Further south, Californian and Paiute people ate a lot of bread made from pine nuts or acorns.
More about Chinook food
Californian people
Who were the Paiute?
Bison, birds, cactus fruit, and sunflower seeds
Smoking salmon the Chinook way, on cedar sticks
In the south-west (modern Arizona and New Mexico), Pueblo people ate cactus fruit and pine nuts, and hunted rabbits and birds for meat. The people who lived in the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, like the Blackfoot and the Ute, ate a lot of mammoth, at first, and then when the mammoth all died out, they started to eat a lot of bison meat.
What are bison?
More about Pueblo people
And the Blackfoot
They dried and smoked the bison meat so they could eat it for a long time after a hunt, making beef jerky. Ute people also ate a lot of pine nuts, which they gathered from the trees, and sunflower seeds.
What are sunflower seeds?
More about the Ute
Wild rice and chestnuts
Native American food – Corn on the cob
Further east, along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, people also ate a lot of fish and gathered nuts and berries. Along the Great Lakes, Cree people ate fish with wild rice that they gathered in the wetlands around the lakes.
Early Cree history
Mississippians
Venison, pigeon, and turkey
And on the East Coast, the Iroquois and the Algonquin ate venison (deer meat) and fish, and also pigeon and turkey and rabbit. Sometimes they ate bear, which was important even though it was hard to get, because it had a lot of fat, and the deer and fish didn’t. Like the Californians, they gathered acorns to make bread, and they also made bread out of sunflower seeds and chestnuts.
More about chestnuts
What the Iroquois ate
Honey, maple sugar and sweet potatoes
To sweeten their food, East Coast people used maple sugar and maple syrup, and also wild honey. Cooks put maple sugar in bread, stew, tea, and vegetables, and people sprinkled it on top of their berries. In the south-east, Cherokee people ate a lot of turtle, fish, and venison, sweet potatoes and also acorn and chestnut bread.
Cherokee food
History of honey
Where do sweet potatoes come from?
Pine nuts – Native American food
What was pemmican?
An important food for people who were travelling or hunting was pemmican, a sort of energy bar made of berries and chopped meat, that people could eat without having to stop and cook anything.
How to make pemmican
Native American farming: corn, beans, squash, and peppers
But around 1000 BC, people began to eat very differently in North America. The Pueblo people began to farm about this time. They got corn and beans and squash from the pre-Olmec people of Mexico, and they began to eat a lot of these three crops (the “Three Sisters“) instead of the wild foods.
The Three Sisters
History of corn
Where do beans come from?
What about squash?
People made corn into a flat bread, like modern tacos and tortillas, and rolled up mashed beans inside these wrappers (The beans were the same pinto beans we eat in enchiladas today, but they also had kidney beans and lima beans), with other vegetables like green peppers.
Where are green peppers from?
Farming sweet potatoes, peanuts, and sunflower seeds
Farming soon spread to other parts of North America, and by 1000 AD most people in the Mississippi Valley and along the East Coast were eating a lot of corn, beans and squash (the Three Sisters) along with their wild food. The Cherokee and Mississippi people grew sweet potatoes and peanuts, too. Along the East Coast, people also ate a lot of sunflower seeds that they grew, and used sunflower oil.
History of peanuts
What was succotash?
One important food that these farming people ate was succotash, which was a kind of stew made of lima beans, corn, meat, and bear fat.
Succotash recipe
How to make popcorn
People also ate roasted or boiled corn on the cob, popcorn, bean soup and squash soup. A lot of the food Americans eat today is the same as Native American food.
What did Native Americans like to drink?
Whether they were farming or not, everybody’s main drink was water. When they could, though, many people liked to drink herbal tea better than just plain water. People made tea with sassafras, or added pumpkin blossoms or corn silk to thicken their water. People in California added lemonade berries to their water to make a sour drink like modern lemonade.
Did you find out what you wanted to know about Native American food? Let us know in the comments!
Learn by doing: eating pemmican
More about the Three Sisters
American Food after the Europeans invaded
Bibliography and further reading about early Native American food:
Native North American Foods And Recipes, by Kathryn Smithyman (2005).
Turkeys, Pilgrims, and Indian Corn: The Story of the Thanksgiving Symbols, by Edna Barth (2000).
Did the Native Americans in Florida eat salmon in the 16th century?
No, salmon aren’t native to Florida. Salmon like cold water.
Hey! this is pretty good. it helped me with my project due 2morrow, but do u know about any more MEATS they ate?
Hmm. All across the South, people ate a lot of turkey, because they had domesticated turkeys. In California, they ate a lot of fish, and wild bighorn sheep. In the Pacific NW (Oregon, Washington, Idaho), it was salmon and elk and deer, and rabbits. In the Plains, people ate bison steaks. In the Midwest, they ate fish from the Great Lakes, and deer, and there were also a lot of deer along the Atlantic coast. Maine and Massachusetts had a lot of lobster and oysters and cod. Further south, Manhattan was known for its oysters, and Maryland for its crabs.
This is good
Thanks!
can you give me information on Native American Wars?
Sure! Do you mean wars between two groups of Native people, like this war between the Iroquois and the Algonquin? https://quatr.us/history/iroquois-revolutionary-war.htm
Or do you mean wars between European people and Native people, like this one?
https://quatr.us/nativeamerican/pueblo-revolt-american-history.htm
How many different Native American Tribes grew the Three Sisters?
It would be hard to say: lots of them. Plus, many people who lived in states and not in tribes. By 1500 AD, when the first Europeans arrived, most of the people who lived in North America lived on corn, beans, and squash as staples. The percentage went down after that, as more and more Native people were pushed off their farmland and forced to move to places where you couldn’t grow the Three Sisters, like Oklahoma or Wyoming. That’s when they started to live on the bison (the buffalo).
I enjoyed this article… But wish that they would have included how they cooked or baked without metal.
That’s a great question, Chad! There were a lot of different methods. People roasted meat and vegetables on sticks over the fire, or they wrapped them in green leaves and put them in the coals to bake. Or they boiled water by putting hot stones in a basket. Many Native people used pottery, and then they could boil water in a clay pot hung over a fire, or set in the coals. And they could bake bread on flat stones set in or near the fire. People also dug pits in the ground and built fires in them, put a layer of stones or leaves over the coals, and then used that as an oven.
Even in Europe, many people couldn’t afford metal cooking pots until the invention of cheaper methods of making steel in the 1800s. So they cooked in clay pots in Europe, too.
you do realize that their pots were literally pottery. like CLAY. they didn’t even know about metal for a long long time.
Sure, just like most people’s pots until about a hundred years ago. In India, even today, many people cook in clay. I have clay casseroles at my house that I cook in.
They do know about metal – they trade copper from Lake Superior as far as both the Pacific and the Atlantic coast, and they make it into knives and jewelry. They don’t melt it down and shape it into other tools, but they know more about metalworking than you do, probably.
Very interesting article but I don’t think honey was available for a sweetener until European colonists brought honeybees to North America. There are hundreds of species of native bees in North America but they do make honey.
Sorry – I should have typed that Native Bees do NOT make honey.
It’s true that modern honeybees are originally from Eurasia, but Native bees did make honey: https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/native-recipes/the-origins-of-golden-honey-and-its-gastronomic-and-medicinal-uses/
when was this published
Information for how to cite this article, including the publication date, is at the end of the article, right above the ad.
i agree but what city state and publisher of the book
The publisher is Quatr.us Study Guides; the city is Portland, Oregon.
Did they acquire some clout back then, if so how did they
Sorry, I don’t think I understand your question?
Do they eat fish
Yes, they ate a lot of fish! In fact, Native Americans first came to North America probably following schools of fish along the Pacific coast.