The Time of Food : Preserving the Past: Dining With a Living Treasure

For the Skokomish people at the south end of Puget Sound it is Pedkwatiephlat right now: Time of Food, a sacred time. Elk and deer migrate from the high country to the lowlands, major salmon runs provide fish for the smokehouses, grain-fattened waterfowl fly south, shellfish come into their prime, hazelnuts litter the ground, mushrooms push up out of the forest floor.

“I associate particular smells from my childhood with this time,” says Skokomish ceremonial leader Bruce Miller, “huckleberries drying, the smoking of salmon and venison. A happy time for me.”

He is a big man in his mid-40s, a master weaver known throughout the world for his baskets (he has been designated a Living Art Treasure by Washington state), a man with the gentle presence of a yogi.

Before the Time of Food has passed and winter has taken hold, Miller (his Skokomish name is Sobiyax) will have smoked deer and elk meat and sides of salmon in a small smokehouse near his home on the Skokomish Reservation at the southern end of Hood Canal. The kwas , or hard-smoked salmon that has hung in the smokehouse for a week, will remain edible for up to two years. Miller cans talope, the salmon smoked only for two days. There are at least five grades of smoked salmon among the Skokomish, starting with fish barely kissed by smoke, and they each have a name that sounds like a song.

The fish, the clams and oysters and crabs, the venison, the waterfowl as well as all manner of wild herbs and food plants and mushrooms and roots and berries and nuts: these make up the diet rich in protein, carbohydrates, Vitamin C and cholesterol-defeating fish oil traditional to the Skokomish. Yet of the 600 or so Skokomish living on or associated with the reservation, Bruce Miller figures that only 25% of those under 30 are familiar with their native foods.

“Gathering periods used to last weeks and months and involved the entire family,” Miller explained. “Now that has changed to the occasional weekend. In the face of the time and labor it takes to collect and preserve this food, the grocery store up the road with its salt- and sugar- and fat-heavy food has become truly convenient. When HUD helped make modern housing available to us, we became separated into individual family units and lost the overlap of generations traditional in the long house. As a consequence, we started losing the information of the elders.”

Miller, unusual among his people, lives on a daily diet of native foods. He is one of the last of his people to know the Skokomish names for these foods, as well as when and where and how to harvest them. He knows how to cook for the ceremonial feasting in the long houses of the Skokomish, a style and way of cooking that reaches beyond measurements, ingredients and kitchen techniques.

Miller was the last of 15 children. He grew up in a big house on the Skokomish Reservation with 25 family members spanning several generations. His grandfather was a state representative, and the family often prepared feasts of native foods for visiting dignitaries.

“Other times my grandparents would leave us kids on the beach all day telling us that everything we needed was right here. We’d dig clams and gather oysters and mussels and crabs and build a fire to heat rocks, then bury all that food in seaweed and let it steam.”

After graduating high school in the early 1960s, Miller left his home for Sante Fe, where he studied at the Institute of Indian Arts. He moved from there to Oakland and the California College of Arts and Crafts. He also studied anthropology at UC Berkeley. He eventually dropped out of school and returned home to study with Skokomish elders, whose numbers were diminishing. But within two weeks he was drafted and sent to Vietnam.

“They told us over there not to eat anything, that the food would make us sick,” Miller recalls. “But I must have tried some of everything.”

Miller returned to the Institute of Indian Arts to teach design and painting and to be director of performing arts. When Hanay Geiogamah took over, creating the Native American Performing Arts Ensemble (now called the Native American Dance Theater and located in Los Angeles), the Ensemble moved to New York and spent five years in residence with La Mamma ETC. Miller performed as both an actor and director with the Ensemble. He lived in Europe for a time. But no matter where he was or who he was with, his native foods were never far from his heart.

“My sisters would send me packages of elk meat and smoked salmon, dried berries and the like. I’d get hungry for my native foods and I’d put on a small feast.” He cooked for Andy Warhol and Geraldine Page in New York. “And,” he says, “I cooked for fellow students in Sante Fe whose cultures had no connection whatever with salmon or wild ducks stuffed with wild onions and cranberries. As I traveled, I learned that the number of ways of preparing food are limited only by the imagination.”

Miller returned to the Pacific Northwest in 1975 to work in Seattle with a Native American theater group called Red Earth Performing Arts. He also worked in the Seattle public schools as a human relations specialist, developing bicultural education materials. He is currently developing drug and alcohol addiction prevention materials using the Indian perspective and drawing on tribal legends.

He also works with the Skokomish Tribal Council to preserve knowledge of the foods and the songs and the ceremonies and the ways of cooking, both traditional and contemporary.

At a recent lunch he served venison that had been braised with huckleberries and wild ginger, wild rice steamed with herbs, Hubbard squash cooked with wild mint, and most delicious of all, smoked salmon cooked in a light, fluffy white sauce made with sword fern root flour.

“You don’t have to go to all the trouble of making the sword fern root flour,” Miller allowed. “You can make just a standard white sauce. It’s different. But it’s not that different.”

A bowl on the table was filled with dried elk meat pounded together with dried huckleberries and sword fern root. “This was our snack food when I grew up,” Miller said. “A bowl was always around.”

The abundance of food associated with the Pacific Northwest, the farm and garden products displayed and sold through spring, summer and fall at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, pales appreciably before abundance as Bruce Miller understands it. He uses various leaves to add flavor to a dish, wild meats wrapped in skunk cabbage leaves in summer, for example, changing to maple leaves in fall. He will cook meats between layers of sword fern leaves, add seaweed to soups, or rely on the parsnip flavor of Queen Anne’s lace.

He gathers and buries in the ground tiny crab apples, waiting for the first freeze to sweeten them up. Nettle sprouts and red clover sprouts and thimble berry sprouts announce the coming of spring, a spiritual time called the “Breaking of the Canoes,” when the people who have come together for winter go their various directions. The gathering and hunting and fishing, a continuing harvest, can be tasted in wild meats flavored with huckleberry leaves, or steamed clams dried over cherry wood smoke. Breakfast might be fish hash crumbled with wild onions and fried with potatoes, while dinner could easily be finely diced elk and venison served with a drippings gravy over potatoes or flat bread.

The abundance of salt- and fresh-water foods includes salmon, flounder, halibut, rock cod, ling cod, perch, hake, Dolly Varden, sea-run cutthroat, steelhead, salt-water eels, the plethora of shellfish. The abundance of the Pacific Northwest as Miller understands it, is free of additives, free of fat, free of salt and sugar, free of cholesterol. It is a lean, high-protein, clean abundance, a native abundance.

Cooking in the traditional way can be another story. “If I were to take diced butter clams and saute them for you with a little seaweed--you can use the kind that comes in flat sheets in Asian markets--I’d probably incorporate white wine and butter in the dish as opposed to using hooligan oil, which would be traditional. The oil from the candle fish can get a little like Limburger, an acquired taste.”

Miller describes the kitchen of his childhood as a joyous place. “We believe that your feelings affect the food you cook. So if you are depressed or angry or feeling hurt, we encourage you to avoid cooking and leave it to someone who is happy and doesn’t feel pressured. That’s why the kitchen was such an ‘up’ place, lots of joking around, having a good time. For special feasts in the long house we always sought out the cooks who felt great, who could add that extra uplifting spirit to the food while they were doing it.”

The real meaning of food in Miller’s world reaches beyond the seasons of gathering and preserving--the spirit of the harvest; beyond the ability to name the foods with the words of his elders; beyond the cooking and the nutrition implied in the ingredients and the spirit the cook brings to bear upon them. During Pedkwatiephlat, this Time of Food, Miller will smoke and preserve over 1,500 salmon. In one way or another, in the Skokomish long house or in the long houses of other tribes, in his own kitchen, as a specific ceremonial act or simply as a meal, Miller will give all this fish away. He will share his food.

“Sharing food,” Miller said, “is sharing your own survival with other people. When you share your food with other people, you support their survival.” In the spirit of the harvest can be found the spirit of giving thanks.

These recipes of Miller’s were printed in the recently published “Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang: $35), a celebration of Indian foods from tribes throughout the nation.

SKOKOMISH HUCKLEBERRY-GLAZED ROAST WILD DUCK

3 cups huckleberries or blueberries

2 tablespoons water

1/4 cup sugar

2 ducks

2 medium onions, each quartered

Salt, pepper

Combine 2 cups berries, water and sugar in saucepan. Bring to boil, stirring constantly, crushing berries as sauce cooks. Boil 2 to 3 minutes, stirring constantly, until thick.

Stuff each duck with 1 quartered onion and 1/2 cup huckleberries. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Place ducks on rack in large roasting pan and roast at 500 degrees 20 to 30 minutes per pound depending on desired doneness. Baste with berry sauce during last half hour of cooking. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

471 calories; 106 mg sodium; 73 mg cholesterol; 25 grams fat; 46 grams carbohydrates; 17 grams protein; 1.10 grams fiber; 48% calories from fat.

SKOKOMISH STEAMED SEAFOOD

1 to 3 pounds seaweed

1 to 2 dozen steamer clams

1 to 2 dozen oysters

2 pounds halibut fillets or steaks

1/2 to 1 teaspoon sea salt

Melted butter

Pour water for steaming into large steamer pot. Heat until boiling. Place layer of seaweed on steamer rack. Place clams and oysters on seaweed. Add another layer of seaweed, followed by fish. Cover with seaweed.

Sprinkle lightly with sea salt. Cover and steam 10 to 15 minutes, until fish flakes easily and clams and oysters have opened. Serve with melted butter. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Each serving without melted butter contains about:

111 calories; 677 mg sodium; 49 mg cholesterol; 2 grams fat; 2 grams carbohydrates; 19 grams protein; 0.00 grams fiber; 19% calories from fat.

HONEY-GINGER BAKED BEETS

8 medium beets (about 2 pounds)

3 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup honey

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Salt, pepper

Scrub beets well, but do not peel. Place beets in large saucepan, cover with water and bring to boil over high heat. Reduce to medium-low heat and simmer 40 to 50 minutes, until just tender.

Cool beets, then peel and place in oven-proof baking dish. Melt butter in small saucepan. Mix in honey and ginger. Season to taste with salt and pepper and pour over beets. Cover and bake at 350 degrees 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until beets are well-glazed. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

172 calories; 212 mg sodium; 23 mg cholesterol; 9 grams fat; 24 grams carbohydrates; 1 grams protein; 0.86 grams fiber; 46% calories from fat.