Preserves: The Manitoba Food HIstory PODCAST

Episode 18: In Search of Ashkihk - Indigenous Cooking Vessels

EpisOde Credits

KENT DAVIES: You’re listening to Preserves: A Manitoba Food History Podcast. Exploring the rich, flavourful history of Manitoba food and the people who make it, sell it and eat it. From the packing table to the dinner table. From restaurant specials to grandma’s secret recipes. We consider the cultural, social, and commercial aspects of Manitoba food and what it means to us. I’m your host Kent Davies. As per usual, I’m joined by Manitoba historian, Professor Janis Thiessen.

JANIS THIESSEN: Hi, Kent. What’s in the pantry for us today?

KENT DAVIES: This episode is special because it was created by guest producer KC Adams, a renowned Manitoba artist. Adams has received numerous awards and recognition for her thought-provoking and socially engaging artwork which explores themes of identity, representation, and Indigenous experiences. If you haven’t seen her exhibits or artwork, I implore you to do so. Needless to say, I was a bit star struck meeting with her. 

JANIS THIESSEN: It was great to get to know her and her work when she was a graduate student in my recent food history class. She was part of a group of very talented students and lot of great podcasts and soundscapes came out of that class that we’re excited to present in the coming months, starting with this episode on Indigenous cooking vessels, which are part of a rich culinary heritage of some of the Indigenous nations in Manitoba.

KENT DAVIES: Great. I’m very excited to hear it.

KC ADAMS: In search of Askihk: Indigenous Cooking Vessels.

Tan-si, kaa-kee-know too-tee-mak, ca-pi-pam-in-at mi-ki-sew is-kiw-ew ni-ti-si-ni-ka-son, nii-maa-maa Judi Taylor isi-dee-gas-o oche-ki-wi sípi nee-i-too-tee-mak. Noh-ta-wiy Leslie Adams isi-dee-gas-o Peguis Ojibway First Nation.

Hello, all my relations. My name is KC Adams, and my Cree name is Flying Overhead Eagle Woman. I come from my mother, Judi Taylor, whose family is from Fisher River Cree Nation, and my father, Leslie Adams, is from Peguis Ojibway First Nation. My Cree introduction is how I establish the people and territory I belong to, so I can insert and center my Indigeneity to whomever I am addressing.

When I feel out of sorts, I like to walk down to any of the waterways in Manitoba to ground myself in community. Because, in my Indigenous culture, water is considered a relative. This makes sense because much of our body is made out of water. My favourite season is the spring thaw, a time for new growth and an opportunity to safely walk along the water's edge.

You never know what you may find along the shorelines. I am on the hunt for pottery sherds. I grew up most of my life in Manitoba. Both my parents have familial and cultural ties to this region, and I attended public school in Selkirk, Manitoba, from grade two until grade twelve. That entire time I had no idea that the Red River shores, on the edge of town, had evidence of my Indigenous ancestor's cooking activities in the form of broken clay vessels or, as archeologists call them, pottery sherds. I first learned about this ancient cooking method back in 1999 when I took a workshop on Indigenous pottery at the Manitoba Museum. The class taught me about the woodland or late pre-contact period, about from twenty-one hundred to three hundred years ago, a time marked by archeologists when earthenware pottery was first introduced.1 What was strange to me was that archeologists' research of this region mainly focused on the design of the vessels. They studied the shape, decorations and texture to track cultural shifts over time, especially since most of my ancestor’s material culture was biodegradable. Clay was definitely sturdier. However, very little is known about how they were made or what was being cooked in them.

Finding my first pottery sherd along the Whiteshell River was a special moment for me. I felt connected to the woman who made the original pot, and I wondered what food did she cook in the vessel? Where did her and the community learn about clay pots? How did they make them, and what were the advantages of cooking in these pots? Most importantly, why did they abandon this technology? I decided to roll up my sleeves and experiment with making and cooking with them. But first, I needed to figure out the living conditions for those early potters.

KC ADAMS: Ok, come her son. Ok, to build a vessel, you need to source clay from a site that is clean. Because you don’t want your pot to leach toxins, like mercury, into your cooking. Let’s go down by this old riverbed where the land hasn’t been spoiled or exploited. That should be enough. Yup, that’s good. Now, Mac, uh, go grab the bucket and I’ll take the shovel so we can head home and prepare the clay for hand-building.

KC ADAMS: The Indigenous people from Manitoba’s northern and eastern woodland regions traversed between boreal forest, marsh land and sandy shorelines. The vegetation consisted of mosses, flowering plants, low shrubs, and coniferous forest, all favourable environments for small animal trapping and large game hunting.2 The numerous amounts of rivers, streams and lakes also meant an abundant supply of fish. Their knowledge was based on years of experience and observations of plant cycles and animal behaviours, which meant their survival in the harsh lands and climate. This symbiotic relationship with the natural resources meant they practiced an ideology that stressed respect for everything within their environment and was reinforced by social and spiritual gatherings.

These ancestors followed a seasonal pattern of harvesting with a semi-mobile settlement pattern to allow large, related groups to gather during the summer when more labour was required and would disperse into smaller family groups during the winter.3 They were optimizing the local resources for each season. But what kind of foods did they harvest?

According to Cree scholar Eva Linklater from Split Lake Manitoba, Northern Indigenous communities had an abundance of flora such as fireweed, muskeg tea, wintergreen, clubmoss, and wild berries including bearberry, pin cherry, blueberry, cranberry, gooseberry, raspberry, strawberry, and saskatoons. The faunas available were moose, caribou, bear, rabbit and many species of waterfowl and birds.4 Chris Baker a Métis man from South Indian Lake, Manitoba remembers the type of food his family would trap.

CHRIS BAKER: They trapped beaver, muskrat [inaudible] all fur-bearing animals. That they could, that they, that they can, you know and they, that they trap— foxes, mink, wolf, marten, mink, mostly.5

KC ADAMS: The ancestors were able to fish all season long, but the spring and fall was a time when a variety of fish such as pickerel, suckerfish, and whitefish was caught in large quantities.6

CHRIS BAKER: During the summer they fished, come early fall everybody would go up North to their traplines and stay there until near Christmas. And sometimes they, we’d stay out there all year until summertime, and come back, and my dad would go fishing again.”7

KC ADAMS: The people of this region mostly relied on fauna, the animal migration for food security over the short growth seasons of the flora. How did the ancestors from the Woodland region start making pottery?

KC ADAMS: Ok, uh, Mac, now that the clay has been processed, it is time to start building the vessel. Grab that over there. I like to start with coils. Take that piece of clay and roll it with both hands into the shape of a snake, make it the width of the tip of your pinkie finger. Yeah, that’s it. So, I make a circle with the first coil and continue to stack the coils until I get the vessel into the shape of a bullet. And then you start smoothing it out. Reach over and hand me that mollusc shell. Do you remember when I found it at Grand Beach? Yeah, it is my favorite tool for scraping the insides. This allows me to um, thin the walls, it compact the clay particles, and finalizes the shape of my cooking pot. Because you want those particles to be nice and tight. Ok, now that the shape is done, help me put on the designs and then we will be finished. The next step is to let it dry.

KC ADAMS: It is unclear how pottery came to the woodland region, but thanks to archeology and the study of ceramic decoration, archeologists have a few theories. One possibility is southern tribes travelled north along the Red River and brought this technology with them. There is also the thought that ceramics were introduced through marital connections between distant communities from the eastern regions of Canada. What is clear is that the introduction of pottery meant that they could cook tough meats, or carbohydrates such as chard greens, root vegetables, and wild rice to a softer consistency through stewing.8 We have an idea of what foods they were cooking with thanks to residue analysis on pottery sherds found in Winnipeg at the Forks area, where the Assiniboine and Red River meet. It is theorized the food cooked in the vessels were native, cultivated, and imported plants products such as wild onion, nuts, beans and maize. They also included animals such as bighorn sheep, deer, pronghorn, bison, bird, rabbit, and fish.9 What were the other advantages of cooking with clay pots?

Before pots were introduced, cooking food meant heating up hot stones and dropping them into either a hollowed-out stump, birch bark baskets or a hide of a large mammal filled with water. The moment the rocks hit the water; it would instantly boil. While this method was ingenious, the problem was that you couldn’t use it for stewing because the receptacle would eventually burn. Thanks to the introduction of clay vessels the ancestors could slowly cook tough meats and starches. The stewing method continued to be an important tradition in Indigenous food preparation. We get a glimpse of it when Métis elder Isabell Simard from Powerview Pine Falls, Manitoba describes the types of foods her mom prepared when she was growing up in the Manigotagan region.

ISABELL SIMARD: My mom used to, you, ah, roast ah, rabbits and chickens and then there was ducks too, that they used to make, we used to have, for sometimes soup, sometime roasted, eh. Oh, nice things like that. And ah, I don’t know how they used to clean, ah, porcupine I guess, that was the hard thing to clean eh, but the meat was really nice. I never, we never had that very often, but, just sometimes, eh.

LORRAINE FREEMAN: Did they roast that?

ISABELL SIMARD: Yeah.

LORRAINE FREEMAN: Ooh.

ISABELL SIMARD: Mmhmm. And the rabbits and chickens just used to be so nice that time, yeah, they were fat, now that they are so skinny, [you] don’t know if you should eat them or not. [laughs] Yeah, anyways, when she’d ah, make soup, she would put some pork in to give it taste, oh, she would make good soup.”10

KC ADAMS: Clay vessels were great for slow cooking, but the technology also meant that vermin couldn’t chew through the material, which meant safer food and storage practices. Making vessels became popular because around eighty percent of Manitoba’s topography has clay, thanks to the shifting tides of the ancient Lake Agassiz. The massive lake once covered most of Manitoba and the ancestors were able to make ceramics almost everywhere they went. Since they were semi-nomadic, they could leave their pots in different locations and build new ones when they were establishing new territories. But why did people stop making clay vessels?

KC ADAMS: Ok, son, uh, grab that pot that was drying. Place the clay pot against the side of your cheek. When you pull it away and you don’t feel cool moisture then it is ready to be fired. Uh, I already dug up a shallow pit to help block out some of the wind and your dad chopped up some wood into thin sections. Take those um, strips of birch bark and the pile of sticks and start a small fire. Notice how I am putting my vessels next to the pit to climatize it to the heat? Once the vessel becomes hot to the touch, we can place it into the fire. We need to raise the temperature to anywhere between 780 degree Celsius to 980 degree Celsius to vitrify the vessel. Once the firing is done, we can pull the pot out of the fire and immediately start cooking!

KC ADAMS: The disappearance of clay pots can be explained in a number of ways. When the explorers descended into Indigenous territory, disease spread like wildfire and wiped-out communities. I imagine that scenario included knowledge keepers who knew how to make the clay pots. I believe the biggest reason was due to the fur trade. Making pots required community participation, and the fur trade negatively impacted Indigenous communities' social, political, and seasonal structures. Instead of practicing typical roles and responsibilities, many groups focused on trapping and trading furs. This meant many traditions were abandoned, and new technologies were adopted. Fewer people participated in the making of the vessels, and the pursuit of furs caused communities to travel beyond their usual territory. Lighter equipment, such as metal pots, could be stacked and were easier to travel with. Also, not all clay was ideal for use, and sometimes good clay was traded and transported between communities using birch bark canoes. With the introduction of metal pots, it no longer made sense to source clay when metal pots were durable and didn’t break like ceramic vessels. The assumption by archeologists and anthropologists were that pottery disappeared because it was an inferior technology compared to metal pots.11 Then why should people care about this outdated technology?

KC ADAMS: Ok Mac, we are going to cook wild rice with the uh, moose meat that my friend Brennan brought over. Let's heat up the pot a bit and pour in some fat to coat the sides and the bottom. [ambient sounds of cooking on a fire, with fat sizzling in the background] Yeah, pour in our water along with my wild rice and meat stock. After an hour we can put in our moose and cook until the meat is tender.

KC ADAMS: There are so many modern methods to cook our food, why should people care about Indigenous pottery? A few years ago, I had a conversation with Métis archeologist Kevin Brownlee about why should we study Indigenous clay vessels, and this is what he had to say.

KEVIN BROWNLEE: I mean, that the other thing that I, you know, that I was going to school, I was told, you know like, when European copper kettles came in, the primitive pots were sort of tossed out and you know the Indigenous People followed this one. Now I, uh, have a subsequently, sort of, cooked inside of clay pots and looked at many of these things [studied clay vessels], and you know, we cooked a moose stew, uh, for three hours on an outside campfire, and when we were serving it, not a single bit of burnt food was on the inside of it. Which is remarkable. If you had one of those, like, super thin metal pots, they would burn in an instant. If anyone’s had gone out camping and using small thin metal pots, they [food] would have a tendency to burn in [it]. So, the idea that there is, the sort of, like you know, the primitive versus uh, sophisticated technology, really gets, sort of, turned on its head. And yes, eventually, they were, sort of, adopted these ones [metal pots], but it was a more nuance to the process of saying, “like, well, my food [cooking with metal], now my food doesn’t taste as good and burns.” It does have the luxury of being lighter, being able to stack a whole bunch of these to insert to [to carry] one another and they were certainly advantages, of those won out. But it wasn’t this, sort of, like immediate, so the process [abandonment] of all this is primitive technology and I think that’s really speak to it. Also, one of the interesting things, some of the earliest copper pots are hammered out to have these round bottoms. And it is interesting one of the questions we always have from kids when they see these clay pots, are like “Why are they round? Don’t they know how to make flat bottom pots?” But if anyone has camped, cooked on a campfire, having a round bottom pot fits so nicely in the, the wood and into the coals, and you know, the last thing that you want is to have this [a flat bottom]. When the European started trading in these copper kettles, you know, one of the first thing they [Indigenous people] did when they did adopt them, was hammer them, and make them, improve them by giving them these round bottoms. And again, it is sort of Indigenous perspectives as to how they can improve this [metal pots].12

KC ADAMS: The abandonment of clay vessels due to their negative traits was only one part of the story. It turns out that clay pots were a superior cooking method in pit fires over metal pots. Their rounded bottoms helped distribute the heat and in turn, didn’t burn the food. I found that the pots conduct heat better which means you require less fuel. I noticed that if the water is boiling, I can take it off the heat and the liquid will continue to boil for another five minutes. Plus, the porous makeup of the vessels soaks up the flavour of the food every time you cook with it. The more I use it, the better the food tastes. Was there anything else to clay pots that I was missing?

KC ADAMS: Mmm, smell that? Oh, I think the food is ready! Son, grab the bowls while I dish out the food. Yum. Do you notice how tasty it is? The fat, salt and food residue get trapped into the rough surface and it builds up flavour like a cast-iron pan. Yum.

KC ADAMS: The woodland ancestors practiced an ideology that stressed respect for everything in the universe. But what did that mean for clay production? An example of enacting respect, according to Anishinaabe elder Gary Raven, the community from the eastern region would have a ceremony and a big feast before harvesting of wild rice. They would honour the Creator and offer prayers for a good harvest; it was essential to practice ceremonies before harvesting anything such as trapping, fishing, and blueberry picking. I suspect there was a ceremonial element to the harvesting of good clay as well as the making and firing of vessels. The evidence of ceremony could be interpreted thanks to an excavation site by archeologist Virginia Petch, where she found samples of pottery sherds with burnt wild rice kernels mixed in the clay material to construct the vessel.13 Coincidently, before I read about Petch’s findings; I added blueberries and tobacco to the construction of my vessels, not because they were needed but because I wanted to add medicine, a spiritual element, to my pot. Perhaps the ancestors building pots added those wild rice kernels for the same reason. So, why is bringing back the making and cooking of Indigenous pottery so important?

KC ADAMS: Mac, come sit next to me. You know, I was taught by Cree elder William Dumas, “To know where you are going, you need to know where you come from.”14 I want you to have a future where you have that kind of foundation. Something changed in me when I first picked up clay, my blood memory kicked in and I felt like I had come home. Revitalizing Indigenous pottery has forged a stronger relationship I have towards the land and waters. Every time I make a vessel or find a pottery sherd, I feel connected to the people who came before me, and I don’t so feel lost. That is what I hope for you, son.

KC ADAMS: Bringing back the making and cooking with Indigenous pottery is more than just learning history. It is about contributing to the health and welfare of the Indigenous community. Because teaching the next generation traditional Indigenous knowledge helps them understand where they come from, what are their gifts and strengths, which uplifts up their dignity and self-respect, and they become positive contributors to the larger society.15 The making of clay vessels is embedded in traditional Indigenous knowledge. It requires principles of Indigenous approaches to education, builds a relationship with the land and waters, and teaches the strength and ingenuity of the ancestors. To cook with the clay vessels is also important in how it can contribute towards the Indigenous food sovereignty movement. Food security and access to healthy foods have been a problem with Indigenous communities on and off the reserve in Manitoba. Indigenous food sovereignty supports these communities to have access to hunting and gathering, land-based teachings and food security. The opportunity to acquire traditional foods for them means improved health, connection to the ancestors, and emotional well-being.16 Elena Arguello, an Indigenous food advocate, who is Apache and Chicana, brings up the importance of traditional foods to Indigenous people.

ELENA ARGUELLO: There’s so many things that we continue to, to find out about food that is so processed that it’s damaging us in so many ways. You know, the diabetes, you know, um, epidemic, heart disease, obesity, all those things, are a result of us stepping away from our land and our cultures and our community food systems. So that’s, that’s really a very sad thing, when you look around your community and those foods that were such gifts, you know, from the creator they’re, they’re just everywhere, you know, aren’t being used, and instead we’re eating things that are killing our people.”17

KC ADAMS: The well-being for Indigenous communities is possible if they have could have access to traditional foods and I would argue the same could be said about the making and cooking with clay pots. To harvest, to build and to fire clay vessels is to show Indigenous communities their gifts and strengths so that they can survive, thrive, and contribute to the broader community in a good way. Perhaps the reclamation of clay vessels could help connect us to our traditional knowledge so that we could move towards our future in a good way.

KENT DAVIES: You have been listening to Preserves: A Manitoba Food History Podcast. Hosted by myself Kent Davies and Janis Thiessen. This episode was written, narrated and produced by KC Adams. Our theme music is by Robert Kenning. Preserves is recorded at the University of Winnipeg Oral History Centre. You can check out the OHC and all the work that we do at oralhistroycentre.ca. For more Manitoba Food History Project content, information and events, go to manitobafoodhistory.ca. We’re also on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. If you have a Manitoba food story and you want to share it, contact us by clicking on the contact link on the website. Preserves is made possible from a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks for listening.

SOURCES

1Eva Linklater, “Archaeology, Historical Landscapes and the Nelson House Cree,” Archaeology Today 7 (1): 8.

2Linklater, 5.

3Linda Laracombe, Virginia Petch, Leo Pettipas, and Shawn Tester, “Manitoba Model Forest Archaeological and Anishinabe Pimadaziwin Data Base Project,” unpublished report (1997), 28.

4Linklater, 4.

5Chris Baker, interviewed by Lorraine Freeman from the Cultural Heritage Committee of Metis Women of Manitoba, May 17, 1993, in South Indian Lake, MB, digital audio recording, “Metis Women of Manitoba Inc. Oral History Project Records.” Location Code C2434, Manitoba Archives, 00:05:23-00:05:40.

6Laracombe, 26.

7Baker interview, 0:0:0 9:21-00:09:44.

8Laracombe, 8, 21.

9Linda Scott Cummings, Chad Yost, and Melissa K. Logan, “Ceramic and Organic Residue (FTIR) Analysis on Ceramics and Protein Analysis on a Biface from Site DLLG 33, Manitoba, Canada,” 740.

10Isabel Simard interviewed by Lorraine Freeman from the Cultural Heritage Committee of Metis Women of Manitoba, 4 June 1993, Powerview, MB, digital audio recording, “Metis Women of Manitoba Inc. oral history project records,” Location Code C2447, Manitoba Archives, 00:17:55 – 00:18:55.

11Conversation with archeologist Kevin Brownlee, head curator of the Manitoba Museum, June 2016.

12KC Adams and Kevin Brownlee, interviewed by Alyssa Fearon from the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, May 14, 2020, “Ancient Technologies with KC Adams and Kevin Brownlee,” 00:17:22-00:18:35.

13Laracombe, 26.

14William Dumas and and Paul Leonard, Pīsim Finds Her Miskanaw (Winnipeg: High Water Press, 2020), 3.

15Linda M. Goulet and Keith N. Goulet, Teaching Each Other: Nehinuw Concepts and Indigenous Pedagogies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 5.

16Jaime Cidro, Tabitha Martens, and Lance Guilbault, “Traditional Indigenous Food Upskilling as a Pathway to Urban Indigenous Food Sovereignty,” in Indigenous Perspectives on Education for Well-Being in Canada, edited by Frank Deer and Falkenberg (Winnipeg: Education for Sustainable Well-Being Press, 2016), 41, 43.

17Elena Arguello, “Traditional Food Ways of Native America: Oral Histories of Native Food Revitalization,” The Cultural Conservancy (2008), digital audio recording, 00:00:00-00:01:05.