Food is community, food is history, food is home. Our foods connect us to the people and places we call home. But depending on the history of our relationship to place, this means very different things to different people. In particular, people who are indigenous to a place can experience the food-place connection in completely different ways from how people (like me) who are the descendants of settlers will experience it. When they migrate/immigrate/emigrate, settlers bring with them their foods and their foodways (think the iconic Conestoga wagon, loaded down with wheat flour, salt-pork, coffee, beans, sugar, with cattle and pigs following along behind—not only self-contained for the journey, but bearing within it a whole future of food). When people like my ancestors settled in a place, they imposed their foods and foodways upon it, clearing land to set their animals to graze, tilling the soil to plant the seeds they carried with them to transform the land into home.
To migrate is not the same as to be migratory—to live generations within a place where you and your ancestors and descendants follow a pattern of seasonal movement that is shaped by the foods that the land provides. To be migratory is the very opposite of settling, even as it roots human people to the land and its systems in the most profoundly intimate and reciprocal ways.
Paiute elder Wilson Wewa and I were both born in the same decade in the middle of the twentieth century; I was born in Portland, where my parents, one from California, one from Georgia, had just moved. Wilson Wewa was born a little over 150 miles away on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation near where his parents, grandparents, his ancestors had always lived. Four generations back, in 1872, Wilson Wewa’s great-great-grandfather Weahwewa and my great-great-grandfather James R. Johnston were both in southeastern Oregon, only about 60 miles apart from each other, but on opposite sides of history, and on opposite sides of the huge 9,7000 foot fault-block escarpment known today as Steens Mountain that runs between the Catlow and Malheur Basins on the west, and the Alvord Basin to the east, all of it traditional Paiute homeland. Weahwewa, who had spent much of his earlier life as a resistance fighter against the encroachment of white settlers, was there at the very end of that life to negotiate with the U.S. government for the establishment of the Malheur Reservation. James R. Johnston, needless to say, was there with his wife Lizzie, four children, brother Jack, 130 head of cattle, numerous horses and wagons, to settle.
Wilson Wewa describes how as a boy in the 1960s he would travel with his grandmother and grandfather “over our food migrations” across central Oregon from Warm Springs to Shaniko and then a few weeks later, “when that season ended we’d move to Prineville which was further east and we’d dig roots there and my grandpa would hunt and kill groundhogs there, finally ending up near Bend “to finish off our food migrations.” Later, when he was older and could drive, he took his grandmother to ceremonies and gatherings and funerals all over Paiute country where they reconnected with elders and relatives, everyone sharing food and telling stories. Throughout their food migrations his grandmother told stories; the relatives they visited told stories; his grandfather would teach him the names of plants, of animals, of medicines; his grandmother would point out the places where “we have people buried out here in the desert.” So that today, Wilson Wewa tells us, “I’m always vigilant when I go out into the desert to gather our food and medicine. And as a part of my wanderings during the food cycle, I remember the many legends my grandma told, and the geographic names in Central Oregon of our mountains and our canyons and our pictograph and petroglyph places which were our holy places.” (Storytelling)
This way of life is a food-way in the most literal sense—following the path of food sources across the seasonal landscape, a migratory pattern of pathways which are also stories, histories, holy places, relationships to ancestors. Wilson Wewa is today teaching this way to his grandchildren and it has been how the Northern Paiute lived for a very, very long time before the arrival white settlers: small family groups following the seasonal appearance of their foods in a pattern of migration over the vast, dry, high, open, varied ecosystems of the Great Basin. Food, the land, and identity were part of a single system of being. And this found direct expression in the way Paiute bands named each other by the foods they ate (many of them local to particular areas). People were known as Freshwater Crab Eaters, Summit Lake Trout Eaters, Groundhog Eaters, Sucker Eaters, Deer Eaters, Wild Onion Eaters, Pinenut Eaters, Yapa (Indian carrot) Eaters, Grass Seed Eaters, Jackrabbit Eaters, Wada Seed Eaters. (Kelly; Wewa).
In this way of being, the food one eats identifies you with the place and landscape upon which you live, upon which you literally depend for life; knowledge, understanding, story and history are taken in through the experience of place/food.
Following this Paiute practice of naming people by the food they eat, the settlers who came into Paiute land should probably be called white-flour eaters, sugar eaters, beef eaters. Sarah Winnemucca (her Paiute name was Thocmetony) describes how as a little girl at her very first meeting with a white person she was given “something white” to eat: sugar. And how her grandfather was given “four boxes of hard bread and a whole side of beef” by “some white people living in large white houses” (Winnemucca 23). When they came down into California, Sarah was brought some white people’s food by her brother: “It was cake, and I ate so much it made me sick. . . my poor mother thought I would die” (30).
My own settler ancestors, it turns out, should probably be called potato eaters. When the Johnston family arrived on the eastern slopes of Steens Mountain in 1873, in true settler fashion they immediately turned their stock loose to graze on the lush native bunch grasses, started building a stone house, dug an irrigation ditch and planted a garden with “our last spud that Mother had saved for a test. . . And how that garden did grow. . .we had radishes, peas, lettuce that I remember, and when the frost had killed the potato vines we had all the little spuds you could imagine. . .and that showed the ground would raise a good garden.” (Johnston Story 62).
Meanwhile, on the other side of Steens Mountain, Indian Agent Samuel Parrish was busy encouraging the Paiute to settle down, to build dams and dig irrigation ditches and cut timber for fencing on their new Malheur Reservation, with assurances that the government would provide a school and a grain mill. Sara Winnemucca tells how he promises them, “We will raise a little something this summer. We can plant some potatoes and turnips and watermelons. We will not plant wheat, because we have no mill; but we can raise barley and oats” (Winnemucca 106-7). The Paiute had already endured over a decade of military violence and many were facing starvation as their migratory food patterns over the land were broken—tens of thousands of emigrants had overfished and overhunted the land in their passage like locusts across it, and those like my ancestors who settled on the Paiutes’ traditional lands and food places–the root meadows, seed grass lands and riparian zones— had fenced them off, tilled them up, set their voracious herds of cattle and horses to overrun them, and would protect them with their guns. The Malheur reservation was large, big enough to allow for potatoes and for traditional root harvest; for cattle and for deer hunting. By 1878, there were hundreds of Paiutes living on the reservation.
As for my ancestors, in 1878 they pulled up roots and left. They were settlers but apparently not very settled. They lived on the land below Steens Mountain for less than five years, although during that time they seem to have thrived, raising tons of potatoes each year, hiring Paiute people to harvest them, and then selling them to the U.S. army at Fort McDermitt; the cattle herd had tripled in size, and the family itself increased by two more children. In May of 1878 they headed back east on the emigrant trail with a herd of 450 horses they had traded for their cattle. They would later blow back west to Wyoming and Colorado and eventually California, where my great-grandmother would die and where my mother would be born.
In May of 1878, despite the efforts of Sarah Winnemucca, Weahwewa and others, the promise of the Malheur Reservation evaporated when what white people called the Bannock War broke out; it was a complex conflict, but it started over food—settlers allowing their stock to graze and dig up the Bannock’s camas fields; it spilled over west into Oregon and swept up the Paiute—and at base, as Wilson Wewa puts it, “The war was a result of the federal government not following through on the promises it made” (xxxviii).
The treaty to form the Malheur Reservation had never been ratified by the federal government; the Bannock war ensured it never would be.
In January 1879, as my ancestors settled safely for the winter with relatives in Missouri, some 543 Paiute men women and children—among them Wilson Wewa’s ancestors, Sarah Winnemucca and her family members–began a brutal three-week forced march through bitter cold and deep snow away from their promised Malheur reservation to exile on the Yakama Reservation some three hundred miles to the north. The Malheur Reservation was dissolved by executive order in 1882; the land was opened up to settlement. Over the next decade the Paiute refugees would make their way back south, back home, some settling on other reservations, like Warm Springs.
In Paiute stories there is a cannibal named Numuzoho. He’s there right at the beginning of everything, killing and eating people. Elder Billy Steves, who in 1938 was living at Summit Lake, Nevada, when he agreed to share this story with ethnographer Isabel Kelly, tells us: “Some kind of man happened after the water [that covered the mountains a long time ago] dried. He was called Numuzoho. He was a big man who ate other men. He had a big kettle of rock, and in it he ground all the Indians that he killed. He ground them just like sausage; he put in a whole Indian and mashed him” (Kelly 365-66). In the story there is also a woman who tries to warn everyone that Numuzoho is coming, and when he does come and kill everyone, she survives by burying herself: “That woman had some kind of hole where she kept seeds for winter. She hid there and covered herself with a basket tray. She covered herself in that hole” (366). Later when the cannibal returns looking for her “She pulled out sagebrush and got into the hole” (366). After repeatedly escaping the Cannibals with the help of other beings, the woman eventually finds a man she has heard of who lives on top of a mountain; together they have children who populate the world.
When Sarah Winnemucca was a very young child, maybe 3 or 4 years old, she remembers how “fearful news” was coming from all over that white people were “killing everybody that came in their way,” and “Our mothers told us that white people were killing everybody and eating them. So we were all afraid.” (Winnemucca 11). Her family fled up into the mountains to hide, but in the Fall they came back down to the Humboldt River to gather food. “The women,” she tells us, “went to work gathering wild seed, which they grind between the rocks. The stones are round, big enough to hold in the hands” (11). And she describes how the women then stored the seeds by covering them with mud and then grass.
On one of these seed gathering trips, news arrives that white people are coming. “Every one ran as best they could. My poor mother was carrying my little sister on her back, and trying to make me run; but I was so frightened I could not move my feet, and while my poor mother was trying to get me along my aunt overtook us, and she said to my mother: ‘Let us bury our girls, or we shall all be killed and eaten up’” (11). The two women proceeded to bury the two little children, piling grass and sage brush over them. Under the cover of night, the family at last returned and brought the terrified girls home.
Later, as winter closes in, they hear about “a whole band of white people [who] perished in the mountains. . .We could have saved them, only my people were afraid of them (13).” And she recounts how later she listens to the old women talking about the white people: “Yes, they do eat people, because they ate each other up in the mountains last winter.” (15)
In the winter of 1846-7 the Donner Party was trapped for months in the eastern Sierras trying to cross from the Humboldt basin over into California. Accounts describe how prior to ascending into the mountains and getting trapped there by snow, they travelled along the Humboldt River, where the group lost dozens of horses and oxen to Paiute Native Americans. One man who had lost most of his cattle decided to cache his wagon by burying it there in the Humboldt Sink. Two other members of the party stayed behind to help him, only to return later without him, reporting that they had been attacked by Paiutes and he had been killed. (“The Donner Party”). Since infighting and factions had already led to murders within the Donner party, it’s worth questioning who might have actually killed whom. It was easy to blame the Indians.
There is no question, however, that once the party had been trapped in the mountains by the snow, the white people in the party deliberately killed and the ate the two young Miwok men who had been conscripted to help them. They also ate white members of their own party, though probably only after they had already died (Severn).
Wilson Wewa tells how the elders he grew up with had stories about the settlers who “were dying and there were all kinds of chokecherries growing all around them, next to the creek. But they weren’t eating them. And there were a lot of roots on the hillsides. But they wouldn’t eat them either. That’s why they died, because they didn’t know how to live out here. And when our people tried to help them they shot at us” (Wewa xxxiii).
There’s a lot of land in the west, but us settlers are pretty much done—we’re all out of frontier now. Techno-billionaires can fantasize about new frontiers for settlement on other planets. The rest of us can keep on consuming everything we brought with us until we run out and there’s only us left; we become cannibals. If this way of living on the earth is heading us toward mass starvation, towards mass migrations of climate refugees, then it might be a good practice to start listening to the wisdom of people who have always understood how to be migratory, how to find abundance in a desert landscape, how to listen to the land and hold to its stories and patterns and foodways, how to never settle but to always know where the roots are.
Works Cited
“The Donner Party,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party
Severn, Carly, “Endless Winter: A Fresh Look at the Donner Party Saga,” KQED. 29 Oct 2020. https://www.kqed.org/news/11844011/donner-party-pt-1
Kelly, Isabel T., “Northern Paiute Tales,” The Journal of American Folklore 51: 202 (Oct. – Dec., 1938), pp. 363-438.
The Johnston Story, ed. Ursula Le Guin. Unpublished, 2016.
Storytelling with Wilson Wewa, Nov. 17, 2021, Confluence Library. https://www.confluenceproject.org/library-post/storytelling-with-wilson-wewa-november-17/
Wewa, Wilson and James A. Gardner, Legends of the Northern Paiute, Oregon State University Press, 2017.
Winnemucca, Sarah, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, University of Nevada Press, Reno, 1994.
