Shiprock, N.M.- McDonald’s supersized fries, snack icon Twinkie and Atkins antagonist Krispy Kreme Doughnuts create controversy, but when it comes to inflaming passions, Indian frybread is in a food group by itself.
This platter-sized, inch-thick, deep-fried, puffy, chewy flatbread is ubiquitous in Indian Country and has inspired native art, music and poetry – ranging from the comedic to the tragic.
“Frybread Power” and “Will Work for Frybread” are popular T-shirts at festivals across the country where the great flat doughnut is always served.
Keith Secola, who is Anishinabe from Minnesota, and whom music critics have called
the Indians’ Bruce Springsteen, has a song with his Wild Band of Indians called “Frybread” that is now a standard at tribal gatherings.
The treat that launched a thousand roadside stands, powwow booths and family gatherings had even become a symbol of intertribal unity.
Not anymore.
Washington, D.C.-based Indian-rights activist Suzan Shown Harjo, who is Muscogee and Cheyenne, took the bread from the frying pan into the fire early this year when she vowed not to touch the stuff – flour, water, baking soda, salt (and sometimes dried cow’s milk) fried in lard.
These were the commodities that the U.S. Cavalry made available to dislocated tribes in the mid-1800s. And Indians took them and made frybread.
Deadly cultural icon?
Harjo, a columnist for Indian Country Today, called it “junk food that’s supposed to be traditional, but isn’t, and makes for fat, fatter and fattest Indians.”
Her wickedly funny yet pointed piece jolted Indian Country and inspired a long-running flood of reaction in American Indian for- ums, from airwaves to blogs. In fact, several Internet forums are named for the food itself, such as “The Frybread Hut” and “Our Daily Frybread.”
Harjo, president of the national Indian- rights organization called the Morningstar Institute, says frybread has replaced “fire-water” as the stereotypical Indian staple in popular culture.
“You can’t touch on people’s personal and family mythologies and not expect a strong response,” Harjo said by phone Monday from a hotel in Santa Fe. “But people are talking about how to make it better (cooked in vegetable shortening, taken with exercise). Just the conversation makes it better.”
But Harjo deeply disdains frybread on several levels. She talks about its weight approaching that of “a lead Frisbee” and, if not eaten at once, she says, it has “the consistency and taste of a deflated football.”
Less funny are her references to the health consequences of overindulgence in a food that can be used like a tortilla in cheese- and bean-smothered Navajo tacos or enjoyed as a dessert when covered in powdered sugar – or slathered with butter and jam.
“Diabetes is a plague among natives,” Harjo says. “Frybread is out of my life.”
Joining Harjo in making this point, Native artist Steve Deo, who is Euchee and Muscogee, has made a poster with the image of the grease-blistered bread and the inscription “Frybread Kills.”
“But, yes, frybread is so, so Indian,” Harjo wrote in her infamous column. “Yes, some people have built their Indian identity around the deadly frybread and will blanch at the very notion of removing it from their menu.”
South Dakota state bread
Andy Harvey is one of those who wince at the thought of Indian Country without frybread. You can’t blame frybread for Indian ills, says Harvey, a Navajo and native of Shiprock, N.M., who now works as a television reporter among the Sioux in South Dakota. There, frybread has been designated the official state bread. And, Harvey says, the Sioux make a smaller, sweeter disk than the Four Corners variety that he also likes very much.
Every tribe has its recipes. Alaskan natives call it uqsrukuaqtaq, or “Eskimo doughnuts,” and sometime use it as a salmon wrap. In Canada, it’s called bannock.
“Frybread is not our sole health problem,” Harvey says. “In my hometown of Shiprock, just count the numbers of fast-food restaurants. We have all of them. And it’s just a small reservation town.
“And Navajos don’t walk miles to herd their sheep anymore. If they even have sheep, they ride ATVs.”
Frybread is no different from any other treat, continues Harvey, who can make it from scratch like many good Navajo sons and daughters.
“You can overdo it,” he says. “But people love their frybread and won’t give it up. It’s a cultural icon.”
Almost every culture, Indian and non-Indian, has a flatbread, and many are fried, says Tom Hughes, a founder of the Albuquerque-based Food Museum, a virtual museum dedicated to preserving food heritage. He understands better than most how food stirs human passions.
“We don’t do anything important in our lives without food. Well, we don’t do anything without food,” he says. “We don’t often reflect on it, but when we do, everybody knows about it, has experience and opinions.”
Harjo says that truly native dishes, such as the corn-based sofkee of the Muscogee and the Hopi piki, as well as everyone’s cornbreads, “remind us why most native people consider corn one of the highest gifts of creation.”
“In great cultures, traditional breads stand for health, well-being and wealth, literally and figuratively,” Harjo wrote. “Traditional native breads and foods stack up against any of the world’s greatest.”
The food of tragedy
And here’s the dark heart of the frybread matter, for Harjo and others: Frybread has a bloody history. Its origins lie in unspeakable tragedy, the U.S. genocide of Indians in the 19th century.
In 1864, scout Kit Carson and U.S. troops drove more than 8,000 Navajos from their lands by destroying their livestock, crops and shelters. They forced starving Navajos on the “Long Walk” to Fort Sumner, some 300 miles away in New Mexico. Thousands died of exposure, exhaustion, malnutrition and bullets.
Their rations included flour, water, lard, salt. They were given iron pots and learned a new way to cook, by frying.
They lived near the fort for four years before soldiers gave up on the concentration camp and let the survivors return to the Four Corners region.
Many tribes were forced into lethal relocations across the United States.
“Frybread is emblematic of the long trails from home and freedom to confinement and rations,” Harjo wrote. “It’s the connecting dot between healthy children and obesity, hypertension, diabetes, dialysis, blindness, amputations and slow death. … Frybread was a gift from Western Civilization from the days when native people were removed from buffalo, elk, deer, salmon, turkey, corn, beans, squash, acorns, fruit, wild rice and other real food.”
It is food for thought. An Alaskan native at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, Cathy Rexford, wrote about it in the student paper, the Chronicle. She said her Kiowa friend, Glenda Kodaseet, sees frybread as a means of Indian survival. Natives were creative with their rations, Kodaseet said. Perhaps frybread is a symbol of their strength and endurance.
But Harjo sees it as the “gift” that keeps on killing.
Tourist trappings
Harvey says he can’t argue frybread’s origins, just its legacy.
“It wasn’t a traditional food, but now it is,” he says. “It wasn’t part of Indian culture, but now it is.”
In the heart of Navajo country, where the states of Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico meet, the small monument marking the site is bustling in mid-August with tourists posing for pictures with one limb in each of the Four Corners.
But the biggest bustle is at the small stand where Indian frybread is made and sold as a sugar-dusted dessert, $2, and also used as hot dog buns, hamburger wraps and the enormous envelope for Navajo tacos, $6 each.
Darlene Kady, a Navajo whose mother-in-law has run a frybread stand here since the 1960s, is standing over three sizzling frying pans heated by propane inside a tiny round metal trailer that itself acts like one big oven out here in the desert.
She hands over some hot bread to Ossy Yalis, a native Cuban but 40-year resident of New York City. He says he has sampled every kind of ethnic fried flatbread known to man in the city except this Navajo variety.
“This has such a soft, lovely quality,” he says.
Luella Francis and her freckled family from Salt Lake City are here for their frybread fix, she says. She’s tried making it at home – it’s just a few simple ingredients – but it just isn’t the same as on the reservation.
“Yeah, it doesn’t taste right,” husband Tom agrees.
Kady, who can make frybread in her sleep, says she hadn’t heard that it has become so controversial.
She’s not familiar with Harjo’s writings, but, she says with a shrug and smile, she sounds like another nice intellectual “worried about us poor Indians.”
“People shouldn’t eat frybread all the time,” Kady says. “It’s for special occasions.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or at edraper@denverpost.com.
