Editor's note: Check back on August 7 for the audio version of this story.
When I cut into a glistening steak — right out of the oven, so tender it practically melts when I bite into it — I have the warm feeling of sitting at a childhood dinner table enjoying grandma’s cooking. The same is true for a Chipotle burrito, evocative of the staples my parents served me growing up. All those meals tell the story of who I am, what my family has been through.
For Leland Swain, an enrolled member of the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, those stories are told through stews, karate bread, and beans — “a lot of beans,” he says.
Swain was born in 1948 and raised on the Moapa River Indian Reservation. He was part of the new generation on the reservation, he says, a generation which began six years after his tribe gained federal recognition, in 1942. The tribe lived on land that the U.S. government gave to the Moapa Paiutes in the early 1870s, then reduced to only 1,000 acres by 1875.
Before that, the Southern Paiute had lived along the Muddy River and farmed traditional foods like maize, beans, and squash in the arid desert, where summer temperatures top 100 degrees. Earlier generations hunted and gathered to eat.
It was a tough life, Swain says. “We didn’t have to do that. We hunted and gathered our pine nuts.”
His generation saw the introduction of the grocery store. Today, most of the dishes cooked in Native communities are made with ingredients from those stores.
But that doesn’t mean traditional practices stopped. Moapa Paiutes still hunt and gather, just not out of necessity. And in the generational overlap between Swain and his grandmother, Topsy Chappo Swain, there are dishes he grew up eating and still makes today.
Gathering
When Swain was growing up, on the reservation, there were no refrigerators. People cooked meals fresh every time they wanted to eat. This made beans a practical dish.
“Out at home on any given weekend, you go through our valley out there, and that’s all you can whiff … (the) smell of beans in the pot,” Swain says.
The beans he remembers were cooked with onions and garlic, and often accompanied by Native breads.
One of those breads, Swain says, is what young Southern Paiutes call “karate bread.” Roughly 10 inches in diameter and two inches thick, it was baked in the hot ashes of a fire or in the oven.
“Grandma used to cook it especially when we went to the mountains to pick our pine nuts or whatever and go deer hunting,” he says. “She’d put it under the coals on a rock so it wouldn’t get all dirty … She’d pull (the bread) out, pull it out of … the hot coals, and turn it on her hand and give it a chop in the middle and fold it over.”
Picking pine nuts was one of Swain’s favorite gathering activities. He also enjoyed bringing in Mesquite beans, which can be ground into flour for the bread, giving it a cinnamon and roasted hazelnut characteristic. Mesquite trees also provide pods and flowers for tea. Creosote bush can be used to make tea, too, and, although not native to the land, drought-tolerant goji berry bushes can be found near the Moapa River Indian Reservation, left by the Chinese immigrants who built the railroad there.
Hunting
When fall began, it was time to eat stews. Although Swain’s family had access to a grocery store once or twice a month, storing raw meat wasn’t possible. This meant hunting cottontails and jackrabbits if they wanted meat.
Rabbit meat made for a good stew, Swain remembers. With a hardy broth, the stew also included beans, potatoes, carrots, onions, and greens.
Between September and October, he says, it was time to hunt deer — and time for deer stew. With the lack of refrigerators, the red meat would be removed from the carcass and dried on racks to make jerky and stored for the summer.
“We were always sneaking and getting the jerky as kids,” Swain says.
One of his favorite dishes was pine nut soup — ground pine nuts cooked in water.
“We lived a simple life back then,” he says.
Beyond being part of tradition, food connects communities. Swain still goes to luncheons on the Moapa River Indian Reservation for the seniors’ monthly birthday celebrations. At these potluck-style feasts, there are often a stew, beans, and Native bread … foods that take him back to his grandmother’s cooking.
