Article by: Dale Carson / Indian Country Today 

The more connected you are to your roots, the better your diet probably is. The foods of your youth, or your parents' and grandparents' childhoods, are likely to be healthier than what you eat today unless you are vigilant about your eating habits. If you go home to visit and eat kneel-down bread or bannock or whatever is, and has been, a tribal staple, but stop at a fast food place on the way back, that doesn't cut it.

It is very hard to watch everything you eat; in fact, it is nearly impossible. There is, however, one food that we as Native people can always rely on for health, and that is corn. It is the one staple grain indigenous to both North and South America.

Although corn pollen discovered below Mexico City in the 1950s was carbon-dated as 80,000 years old, it took centuries for the cultivation of the golden grain to cover all of Indian country from the bottom of South America to Canada. There is corn oil, corn syrup and corn starch; and between them, food manufacturers provide a touch of corn in some way to everything in the supermarket. The lone exception may be fresh fish. Even frozen fish and meats have a light corn starch coating on them to keep them from drying out.

Photo courtesy usda/Alice Welch

Sitting Bull was born in the Grand River area in present-day South Dakota, at a place the Lakota called "Many Caches" for the number of food storage pits they had dug there; Sitting Bull was given the name Tatanka-Iyotanka, which describes a buffalo bull sitting intractably on its haunches. It was a name he would live up to throughout his life.

Picture of Sitting Bull 

Geronimo (means "one who yawns"), was born in 1829 in what is today western New Mexico, but was then still Mexican territory. He was a Bedonkohe Apache (grandson of Mahko) by birth and a Net'na during his youth and early manhood. His wife, Juh, Geronimo's cousin Ishton, and Asa Daklugie were members of the Nednhi band of the Chiricahua Apache. He was reportedly given the name Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, although few agree as to why. As leader of the Apaches at Arispe in Sonora, he performed such daring feats that the Mexicans singled him out with the sobriquet Geronimo (Spanish for "Jerome"). Some attributed his numerous raiding successes to powers conferred by supernatural beings, including a reputed invulnerability to bullets. Geronimo's war career was linked with that of his brother-in-law, Juh, a Chiricahua chief. Although he was not a hereditary leader, Geronimo appeared so to outsiders because he often acted as spokesman for Juh, who had a speech impediment. Geronimo was the leader of the last American Indian fighting force formally to capitulate to the United States. Because he fought against such daunting odds and held out the longest, he became the most famous Apache of all. To the pioneers and settlers of Arizona and New Mexico, he was a bloody-handed murderer and this image endured until the second half of this century.

Photo of Geronimo

The Nez Perce are a tribe of Native Americans who inhabited the Pacific Northwest region of the United States at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Nez Perce's name for themselves is Ni-Mii-Puu (pronounced nee-mee-poo), which means simply "the People." The Nez Perce territory covered parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, in an area surrounding the Snake River and the Clearwater River. The Nez Perce, as many western Native American tribes, were migratory and would travel with the seasons, according to where the most abundant food was to be found at a given time of year. This migration followed a predictable pattern from permanent winter villages through several temporary camps, nearly always returning to the same locations year after year. They were known to go as far east as the Great Plains, hunting American Bison and fishing for salmon at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River.  

Probably the best known leader of the Nez Perce was Chief Joseph, who led his people in their struggle to retain their identity in the face of U.S. encroachments on their land. Chief Joseph’s name meant, "thunder coming up over the land from the water". Referred to as the ‘Nez Perce Warrior of Peace’, he was known for his strong stance against the U. S. Government to segregate his people onto reservations. He was born near Oregon's Wallowa Valley in 1840 and died in exile on the Colville Indian Reservation in North Central Washington in 1904. 

Chief of Nez Perce, Chief Joseph

The Lakota are closely related to the western Dakota of Minnesota. After their adoption of the horse in the early 18th century, the Lakota became part of the Great Plains culture with their eventual Algonkin-speaking allies, the Tsitsistas (Cheyenne), living in the northern Great Plains. Their society centered on the buffalo hunt with the horse. There were 20,000 Lakota in the mid-18th century. The number has now increased to about 70,000, of whom about 20,500 still speak their ancestral language. After 1720, the Lakota branch of the Seven Council Fires split into two elements, the Saone who moved to the Lake Traverse area on the South Dakota-North Dakota-Minnesota border, and the Oglala-Brulé who occupied the James River Valley. By about 1750, however, the Saone had moved to the east bank of the Missouri, followed 10 years later by the Oglala and Brulé (Sicangu).

The large and powerful Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages had prevented the Lakota from crossing the Missouri for an extended period, but when smallpox and other diseases nearly destroyed these tribes, the way was open for the first Lakota to cross the Missouri into the drier, short-grass prairies of the High Plains. These Saone, well-mounted and increasingly confident, spread out quickly. In 1765, an Saone exploring and raiding party led by Chief Standing Bear discovered the Black Hills (which they called the Paha Sapa). Just a decade later, in 1775, the Oglala and Brulé also crossed the river, following the great smallpox epidemic of 1772-1780, which destroyed 3/4 of the population of the Missouri Valley populations. In 1776, they defeated the Cheyenne as the Cheyenne had earlier defeated the Kiowa, and gained control of the land which became the center of the Lakota universe.