However, in the culture of the Lenape, the tribe that originally lived in New Jersey, on the Delaware River, and the area that now comprises New York City, fish and shellfish were a staple in their diet and it was such a revered part of the culture that there is a documented and still-practiced harvest dance called the Fish Dance. The Navajo believe that fish have a part in the story of creation, the Apache were in general afraid of water since they associated it with thunder, and the arid desert climate made fish a rarity.
For example, the Apache and Navajo peoples of the Southwest, whose territories each would have included swathes of New Mexico and Arizona, generally do not eat fish because in both cultures it is taboo, as well as often inconvenient. mainland.Īs with hunted game, the biome in which one lived often dictated what was available to catch. Many tribes would preserve their meat in the form of pemmican, needed on long journeys or to survive harsh winters.īlue crab was used on the eastern and southern coast of what is now the U.S. Northern tribes like the Ojibwe of what is now the state of Michigan and the peoples of the Wabanaki of what is now the state of Maine would stalk and hunt moose, whereas their Southern counterparts, like the Choctaw or Catawba, hunted snapping turtles and other testudines, possums, and young alligators in the subtropical swamps of Louisiana and South Carolina. The Cherokee of the Southern Appalachians used blowguns made of an indigenous type of bamboo to hunt squirrels. Wild game was equally a staple of nearly every tribe: generally, deer, elk, and bison were staples as were rabbits and hare. Other tribes were practicing an iteration of using the same three staples, evidenced by 100 years of archaeological investigations in every region. In the East, this was documented as early as the 1620s in Of Plimoth Plantation, evidenced by the pages William Bradford wrote regarding Squanto, who showed them the traditional regional method of burying a fish or eel in a mound with seeds for maize to improve the soil this itself is also part of the widely practiced phenomenon of companion planting. Many practiced a form of agriculture revolving around the Three Sisters, the rotation of beans, maize, and squash as staples of their diet. Prior to 1600, native peoples lived off the land in very diverse bioregions and had done so for thousands of years, often living a nomadic life where their diet changed with the season. Nearly all regions and subregions of the present-day cuisine have roots in the foodways of Native Americans, who lived in tribes numbering in the thousands. Diorama of Iroquois planting the " Three Sister" crops squash, maize and climbing beansĮarly Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods in early American cuisine that have been blended with the methods of early Europeans to form the basis of what is now American cuisine.
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