Food From Nature

Learning from the Choctaw of the Eighteenth-Century South

Reading a book on the Creole cookery of the Gulf Coast area is like leafing through an informal history, tracing dishes back to the eighteenth century when French and Spanish settlers, Africans both slave and free, migrants from the British colonies to the east, and the original Indian inhabitants of the region introduced their cooking habits and eating tastes to each other.

The foodways of the Choctaw Indians of the colonial Deep South, well documented by European travelers of the time, offer a rich opportunity to examine ways of using nature without destroying it. Probably more than any other North American region, this coastal area encompassing present-day Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana is home to a distinctive cuisine deeply influenced by the many groups of people who have inhabited it through the years. Identifying precisely how and when the various cross-cultural influences evolved into that cuisine is impossible — but nonetheless an engrossing exercise.

The French in 1699, like the Spanish at St. Augustine and the English at Jamestown in their “starving times,” desperately depended upon Indian supplies of food as they built Louisiana’s first post at Biloxi Bay. The Biloxis, Mobilians, and other Gulf Coast natives traded surpluses of corn and meat with the French. They taught them the cultivation and preparation of corn — proving especially important to the French, whose hopes of growing wheat were defeated by the local heat and humidity. And soldiers, sailors, and other voyagers from Mobile and Biloxi made long visits to Indian villages, where they learned intimately how Southern Indians procured and prepared their food.

The Choctaws — a large tribe of the interior pine-wooded hills of the South — entered the colonial food market gradually, as epidemics disastrously weakened Indian communities along the coast and the Mississippi River and as Louisiana advanced its trading efforts. In 1702 Choctaw dignitaries met at Mobile with Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, founder of the French colony of Louisiana, and established what would become one of the strongest and most important Indian/Colonial alliances of eighteenth-century North America. By the 1720s deerskins were the major staple of Choctaw commerce with Louisiana, providing the colony with a much-needed export commodity.

The tribe also regularly exchanged food items for European merchandise. They fed traders and other travelers who visited their villages and sold their farming and hunting products to settlers along the Gulf Coast and to soldiers stationed near their towns at Fort Tombecbe. Called the “nation of bread” by Bernard Romans, an eighteenth-century cartographer and naturalist, Choctaw Indians sold corn, poultry, and vegetables in the market at Mobile. On at least one occasion they shipped “six hundred Bushells of Corn besides a Considerable Quantity of Deer Skins” down the Pascagoula River. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, hunting parties of Choctaw men, women, and children made venison, bear meat and oil, and other culinary treats available to whomever they encountered across the Lower Mississippi Valley.

A closer look at eighteenth-century Choctaw livelihood reveals a rich diversity of foodways, some of which greatly influenced colonial Louisianans. The Chahta okla, as they call themselves, inhabited approximately 50 different villages over some 4,000 square miles of what is now eastern Mississippi and western Alabama. By 1775 their population had been reduced to 13,000, half of its precolonial size.

The Choctaws planted their crops on select bottomlands bordering their villages. Whereas the hills and bluffs of Choctaw country were covered by a mixed pine and oak forest, the lowlands supported a cypress and oak forest with thick patches of cane. The Indians cleared the canebrakes by cutting and burning, turning them into fertile fields.

A keen observer of Indian agricultural methods, Antoine Le Page du Pratz described how Indian farmers cut the canes and peeled a ring of several feet of bark off the bases of the trees. Two weeks later they would set the dry canes afire, and “the sap of the trees are thereby made to descend, and the branches are burnt, which kills the trees.” A field prepared in this way acquired high fertility without much labor and without animal fertilizers. The seeds of corn were sown directly into the nutritive ashes of burnt wood and cane. This system of agriculture did, however, require that the lowland fields be left fallow after several harvest seasons for new vegetation to grow, and thus led to periodic relocation of villages.

Groups of entire families planted and harvested these large fields, and in smaller household gardens Choctaw women grew beans, small corn, tobacco, and even vegetables adopted from Europeans and Africans. After the gardens were sown and as soon as bayou waters receded, usually by the beginning of May, the Choctaws planted their staple corn, pumpkins, and melons on the village bottomlands. From then until the harvest in August, the women generally weeded and tended to all of the crops, misleading some passing observers to believe that Indian men did not till the soil. As the eighteenth century proceeded, the traditional Choctaw horticultural produce was supplemented by chickens, hogs, and even some horses and cattle — many of which went into colonial trade.

Choctaw cuisine was an imaginative blending of cultivated and wild foods, characteristic of Indian economies across the land. James Adair, a trader who traveled extensively among Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw villages, expressed delight over “the great variety of dishes they make out of wild flesh, corn, beans, peas, potatoes, pompions, dried fruits, herbs, and roots.” One ingredient very special to the local cuisine was filé, a powder of ground sassafras leaves destined to be used as the base of the dish known as gumbo.

To make paluska holbi, their basic bread, Choctaw women stirred boiling water into cornmeal, pounded it into a stiff dough, and shaped the dough into small rolls. After wrapping these rolls inside clean corn shucks and tying them with strips of shuck, they then cooked the bread under hot ashes. Sometimes they added chestnut or hickory oil to the cornmeal for a richer taste.

The Choctaws also ate bunaha, a bread prepared by mixing dried beans, wild potatoes, or hickory meat with cornmeal, making rolls wrapped in shucks, and boiling them in water. Other processed foods included hickory meat and persimmon bread. But the most important item in the Indian diet was tanfula, called by the French “sagamite a la lessive” or lye hominy, which the Choctaws always had available for hungry travelers and even carried into the settlements.

Choctaw women made, and still make, tanfula by covering finely pounded and well-sifted corn with boiling water, mixing in some woodash lye, and maintaining a boil for a few hours. Eighteenth-century observers usually explained the use of wood-ash lye in terms of adding flavor, color, or bulk to sagamite. We now know, however, that high-alkaline lye derived from ashes actually enhances the nutritional quality of corn protein and protects people who eat a corn-based diet against pellagra. To produce an alkaline solution, Choctaw women pour cold water over clean wood ashes placed in a hopper. As the water seeps into the ashes, a yellow lye drips down the trough and into a small container. The mixture of this lye with cornmeal maximizes the concentration of essential amino acids.

During the winter months Choctaw villagers hunted for game in small, mobile camps. Hunting parties of 10 or so Indian families dispersed along rivers and bayous were such a regular feature of the colonial landscape that they rarely seemed noteworthy except to visitors like Bernard Romans. But Choctaw hunting camps played a signi-

ficant role in the frontier economy of the Deep South.

The procuring of venison and deerskins usually began with burning away the undergrowth in small patches of forest. With controlled fires, hunters both enhanced the nutritional quality of the plants the deer browsed on and eased passage for the animals through the woods. Southern Indians generally also set fires to prairies to drive deer and smaller mammals into hunting range. In another popular method of hunting, the men carried deer heads to decoy the animals and then shot them at close range. In the winter camps, skins were tanned for the pelt trade, plenty of fresh meat was eaten daily, and some venison was dried into strips of jerky for later use or sale.

Bear oil produced by Choctaw and other Indian hunters was a particularly important food item in eighteenthcentury Louisiana. Black bears hibernating along thickly vegetated waterways in mid-winter were smoked out of hollow trees and shot as they emerged. The Choctaws produced the oil by boiling bear flesh and fat together and stored it in plugged deer heads or dried bladders. Colonial and native inhabitants of the South used bear oil for both cooking and curing purposes. They boiled the fat in a kettle, sprinkling in some laurel and salt, and after a week of settling the clear oil that surfaced was ready either for frying food or for applying to rheumatic parts of the body.

Further rounding out their array of food sources, the Choctaws employed various methods of fishing. Besides using bone and wooden hooks, gradually replaced by metal ones, Indian fishers caught river and coastal fish, such as the salt-water trout known as nani shupik to the Choctaws, with spears thrown from the shore or from their pirogues. In ponds and small streams, the latter called bok ushi by the Choctaws and corrupted to “bayou” by the French, Indians sprinkled poisonous herbs that temporarily deadened favorite fish such as catfish and drum, causing them to float to the surface where they were seined by waiting fishers.

Well into the nineteenth century, Choctaw Indians furnished the town markets of Mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans with a variety of foods and other items. Some of these Choctaw peddlers came from settled communities formed along the Pearl River and Bayou Lacombe. Others lived in more mobile groups, resembling the older winter hunting camps. A large number of Choctaws and other Louisiana Indians gathered each year on the outskirts of Balbbancha, or the “place of foreign languages,” as they called New Orleans, peddling venison, water fowl, and other game, along with manufactures such as baskets, sieves, and cane blow-guns. They also sold kindling wood, wild fruits, medicinal herbs, and culinary spices.

The production and distribution of food holds great symbolic meaning in social and political relations, as many anthropologists have noted. Like other traditional societies, the Choctaws had ritualized foodways in their methods of planting and harvesting, hunting and gathering, eating and exchanging. The sharing of food was a means of defining and maintaining relationships with kinspeople and outsiders.

Indian villagers across the South bestowed plenty of food upon eighteenth-century travelers and expected reciprocity. Whenever on a diplomatic or trade journey to a colonial settlement, the Choctaws carried just enough food to reach their destina tion, expecting official hosts to provision them hospitably during the stay and for the return trip. Food shared helped maintain cordial relations; food denied could initiate hostile relations. A breakdown in the food-giving protocol occasionally resulted in acts of banditry by Indians against the livestock and crops of settlers.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, as Louisiana underwent the drastic changes in population, economy, and politics that culminated in its becoming a United States territory, the loss of valuable Indian lands and the disruption of exchange rituals reached chronic proportions. Reciprocity had given way to avarice as the newcomers sought to gain total ownership of Indian lands. Stingier provisions of food and drink offered by government officials and more frequent raids on the fields and herds of white farmers by Indian bandits signaled the decline of Choctaw political power in the rising Cotton South.

A series of treaties with the United States during the early nineteenth century reduced the territorial domain of the Chahta okla, greatly inhibiting their ability to produce enough food for survival. Finally, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830 forced the removal of the Choctaw Nation from Mississippi to less productive lands in what became known as the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Although the Choctaws as a political entity were forced out of the state and a majority of them migrated to the new land, many Choctaw people remained in the Deep South, continuing to produce and market food in both Louisiana and Mississippi.

Black and white Southerners learned useful foodways from their Indian neighbors and, furthermore, adapted them imaginatively to their own changing needs and tastes. For example, Afro-Americans found Indian techniques of hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants useful in supplementing their small rations and especially helpful in widening their economic activities beyond the control of the slave economy. Other farmers in the piney woods and backwater prairies likewise enhanced their economic self-determination by borrowing Indian land-use practices. The method of burning forests for farming, hunting, and herding, in particular, persisted in the South and became an increasing source of conflict between plain folk who depended upon mixed crops, wild foods, and livestock in their diet and investors who wanted to proscribe the traditionally diverse use of resources in favor of specialized purposes such as cotton and timber production.

The commercialization of agricultural production across the Southern states not only propelled the removal of Indian peoples from what would become the cotton belt; it also denied subsequent occupants of the region access to what were once places of plentiful and diversified food sources. As more land and labor were committed to growing single-export products, the effective techniques of farming, hunting, and gathering devised by Southern Indians were replaced by a greater dependence upon a capricious market and fewer plants and animals for sustenance. But their example in diversifying crops, replenishing the soil, using wild foods, and even in bartering produce need not be forgotten. In the time-tested foodways noted by eighteenth-century witnesses, the Choctaws demonstrated both the productive potential and the cultural richness of a mixed food economy. □