Bertha Etsitty spoke in the Navajo language about using traditional cooking methods to mix blue corn meal, water and ash from burned branches and needles of the juniper tree into mush.
Blue corn is a staple in traditional Navajo food. It can be used for mush, dumplings or bread. Etsitty demonstrated each of them during her presentation at the Food Gathering Summit that Diné College’s Land Grant Office held in late November in Shiprock, New Mexico.
As she showed how to cook the mush, she talked about traditional food practices in relation to the season. Certain foods, like dumplings, are only made in winter, she said. Cooking these in the summertime will bring freezing weather, she explained.
Those with knowledge of traditional foods need to share that information because it maintains the Diné way of life, Etsitty said. In their traditional language, the Navajo identify themselves as Diné, meaning “the people.”
Talking about the traditional food systems of the Diné, and sustaining the practice of such foods, was the purpose of the food summit.
Daryl King grew up eating chiiłchin—a pudding made from crushed sumac berries—that her grandmother cooked. King also makes jam from the berries. It’s a product that sells quickly, she said.
“When I’m selling jam, I hear a lot of stories about chiiłchin,” King said. “It’s been in our generation as medicine, just like corn pollen.”
The Fort Defiance Indian Hospital Board has a video on YouTube that shows the recipe for chiiłchin and describes the food as high in fiber, calcium and phosphorus.
Sumac is a shrub that can grow up to nine feet tall and can be found on the Navajo Nation in canyons, sand dunes, forestland and sometimes near streams, according to the Diné Native Plants Program, part of the tribe’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.
King, a Shiprock resident, picks sumac berries in the wild. Occasionally she travels to Arizona or away from the tribe’s land to Colorado to gather them.
But summit attendees who collect plants in the wild or farm crops like corn are noticing the effect of climate change on these food resources.
“I think the plants are talking to us these days,” King said, noting that sumac berries are smaller and less vibrant than in previous seasons.
Louise Benally is originally from Big Mountain, an area on Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation in northeast Arizona.
“My first farm is foraging in the woods. And then my garden is at my home,” she said before her presentation on chokecherry pudding.
This year, Benally planted beans, squash, melons, corn, tomatoes and eggplants. Her garden is now growing winter crops like snow peas and cabbage. She explained that climate change is affecting both wild-foraged and cultivated foods due to heat, drought and a declining abundance of pollinators.
“There is less rain out there, so you can see in the leaves of those plants that they’re struggling,” she said. “They’re not as big. They’re not as juicy.”
Benally highlighted the importance of preserving traditional foods like chokecherries and banana yucca.
She picked the chokecherries from the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado and mixed them with currants collected from southern Utah to make pudding.
Banana yucca, known as Tsá’ászeh in the Navajo language, is one of the first foods the Diné had and it remains sacred to them, she explained.
That value was evident as attendees lined up to taste sample-size servings of her banana yucca.
It is important for her to pass these teachings on to the next generation, Benally said.
“They’ll at least know,” she said. “Because that’s where our teaching lies, within those foods and our land.”
More than one presenter noted that the Diné diet changed after their confinement from 1863 to 1868 at the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
It was during this time that the Diné were introduced to foods like white flour, sugar and coffee beans, which are still used in Diné homes.
“My interest and my teaching are before all this,” Benally said. “That’s what I try to share and let people know that we don’t just start from after 1868. We start way beyond that.”
Lorraine Jim, who lives in Shiprock, helped with the cooking demonstration on chiiłchin. There are tribal members who do not know how to prepare traditional foods, she said, but events like the food gathering summit gives space for sharing these processes.
“I’m glad that this presentation happened and let people, our people, know how it’s made,” Jim said. “They can learn and then they can teach their grandkids about that.”
