If you grabbed dinner from a Bowdoin dining hall on October 10th or October 17th, you participated in a four-year-old campus tradition celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day! Thanks to the efforts of the Native American Student Association and the Bowdoin Dining staff, you may have been enjoying some fluffy fry bread, a sweet blueberry wojapi, or perhaps one of the other amazing dishes served to honor the ingredients and meals eaten by indigenous peoples across the country. I certainly was. But as that last bite of bison burger went down, what came up was a realization that I know so little about the culinary traditions of the Native peoples whose land we currently reside on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the iconic features of Maine’s modern cuisine were born from the natural knowledge and practices of its original inhabitants.
Long before those who would name it “Maine” arrived here, this land was home to a great number of Native people divided into several tribes. Today, five of the largest tribes located throughout Maine and southeastern Canada share the collective identity of the Wabanaki, or People of the Dawnland: the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot. In their near 12,000 years of coexisting with the land and that brought them toward and away from the coast with the seasons, the Wabanaki became experts on the food sources around them. Their cooking and eating were ingredient-focused, making full use of what was available to them when it was at its best.
Even after the arrival of waves of European colonizers forcibly altered their access to certain resources, and, thus, their culinary toolkit, Native food traditions still contain that same philosophy. Here’s a look at some of the major elements of Wabanaki cuisine that have made their mark on their communities of origin and on the rest of the state of Maine:
Seafood
While on-land hunting was a major source of sustenance for the Wabanaki, especially in the colder months, even their winter camps were stationed by bodies of water for fishing. Salmon, shad, and shellfish of all kinds were central to Wabanaki foodways, something reflected in the ubiquitous fish chowders and clam bakes of today. In fact, clam and lobster bakes have their roots in a celebrated indigenous summertime custom. When the various bands of a tribe previously scattered across the land in the late autumn and winter joined together on the coast to begin their spring and summer living, they would spend days together digging for clams and catching fish and crustaceans. Using large pits made with heated rocks and layers of insulating material, they would steam their catch on the beach and enjoy the delicious product right by the water it came from. While the cooking methods themselves may have changed with time, gravitating towards smaller-scale pot-based alternatives, the communal nature of the clam bake lives on.
Berries
The Wabanaki have always made the most out of the produce in abundance around them, using the earth’s grown gifts to make everything from fiddlehead fern salad to creamy sorrel soup. But one Maine beauty, which features heavily in not just food traditions but in medicinal and spiritual ones as well, is the berry.
The diversity of berry species in Maine is accompanied by an equally diverse array of benefits that those most familiar with the region’s flora have come to know well. The shadberry, so named because it ripens just as the shad fish migrate into local waters in spring, was a historical indicator for tribes to begin moving their camps toward the coast for the warm season. The strawberry plays a key role in maintaining reproductive health and featured in ceremonies celebrating young women’s coming of age. And of course, no mention of berries can be made without reference to the iconic wild blueberry. The Wabanaki were the first to utilize the wild blueberry and have for a millennium employed it in cooking, trade ventures, and community rituals that enforce its great value to indigenous living. Though the appreciation and harvesting of wild blueberries has become a state-wide pastime, the Wabanaki continue their own blueberry-focused traditions today. Check out the work of Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Co. to see how the Passamaquoddy People are continuing the harvest practices of their ancestors with delicious results.
Bread
The advent of bread in the Americas may often be associated with the arrival of Europeans, whose supply of wheat flour became fundamental for baking in its most popular western forms. Native Americans, however, had long been baking without any access to wheat or its by-products.
Most pre-colonial breads were made with cornmeal, including the classic cornbread still consumed in the south and beyond nowawdays. When wheat flour did come along, corn-based breads didn’t disappear, but the imported flour was at times an easier option for Native cooks to employ. So, they took the breadmaking practices they’d already been utilizing and combined local ingredients with the new arrivals to create an array of now-traditional breads.
For the Mi’kmaq, one such classic fusion is lusknikn, a type of bannock made from mixing a few simple ingredients (including flour) together and baking until the product takes on a scone-like texture. Breads like lusknikn, often served alongside soups or with some butter and jam at breakfast time, have become modern comfort foods in the households of Native American families from the northeast to the southwest.
Big Red’s Cooking, a blog run by a member of the Qalipu band of the Mi’kmaq, has a basic recipe for lusknikn that is endlessly customizable, but for more imaginative takes on the classic bread, try one of their twists like lusknikn strawberry shortcake for a sense of how the traditional foods of the Wabanaki are shared and celebrated today.
This is only a brief overview of some of the ways the Wabanaki’s deep ties to the land we call Maine have influenced their foodways and, in turn, ours. Even after being forced to undergo changes in location, lifestyle, and ingredient access, each tribe has worked to bring elements of its food gathering, preparation, and consumption practices into the modern era and the heart of Maine cooking. There are so many more ins and outs—so many intricacies to Wabanaki cuisine and culture and their impact on life as we know that I can’t even begin to do justice to in this short article, but there are so many people who can.
If you, too, are counting down the days until you taste your next wojapi or can make some sorrel soup of your own, try checking out the official websites of the tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy to learn more in the meantime:
Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians
Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik