What Did The Navajo Indians Eat

Another aspect to Navajo culture that is well worth studying concerns the sorts of foods the Navajo people ate hundreds of years ago and continue to eat to this day. The foods that make up the traditional Navajo diet are still widely prepared and served within the tribe and elsewhere. There are numerous ways to study and be engaged by the history of the Navajo tribe. The food that has been prepared and consumed for hundreds of years is just one of the ways to accomplish those goals.

Navajo Food Then And Now

If you want to find an answer to the question of what did the Navajo Indians eat, here are a few pieces of information that can help build your understanding:

1. The main items you’re going to find in a traditional Navajo diet are boiled mutton and corn. The corn can be prepared in a wide range of different ways.

2. In the traditional Navajo diet, flour is obtained, taken through a slight leavening process, and then made into the type of cooked-over-the-embers small cake you’d find with the Mexican tortilla.

3. Tons of coffee with sugar and goat milk have also been popular components to the Navajo diet for quite some time.

4. The time spent at Bosque Redondo decades earlier figures heavily into the modern Navajo diet, which is combination of traditional foods with certain American influences. The coffee mentioned above is one example of this.

5. Mutton and Sumac Berries Soup is a good example of a popular, long-established Navajo dish.

6. Pork and bacon are largely disliked in the Navajo community.

7. Goat meat is another well-known aspect to the Navajo diet.

8. Some of the foods eaten by the Navajo prior to American/European influence include acorns, antelope, cottontail rabbits, elks, grapes, pinon nuts, wild potatoes, yucca fruit, rats, pumpkin, and much more.

9. Wild plants in general played a large part in what the Navajo peoples prepared and consumed in early times. Large parties would go out into the mountains to gather acorn, walnuts, and pinyon nuts.

10. In the early times, if a drought ruined the Navajo crops, pinyon nuts would prove to be a lifesaver in terms of providing a steady food supply to the tribes.

11. Small wild potatoes were easy to grow in many places, so they were another major component to early Navajo diet.

The food traditions of the Navajo people continue to this day, but with some interesting, modern variations to things that have worked for centuries.