Chími Nu'am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen

By Sara Calvosa Olson

• The first cookbook on Native Californian cuisine, a touchstone amid a growing interest and overall revitalization in Native foodways.
• The book is organized into seasons with both traditional and contemporary recipes, and it also contains a gathering guide and instructions on traditional harvest and preservation methods, setting it apart from a standard cookbook. Examples include an acorn guide and nettle dehydration techniques, as well as an equipment guide. 
• Around 70 recipes in total including acorn miso, wild boar pozole, wildflower spring rolls, and pine pollen cacio e pepe.
• Absolutely for the audience that adores The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman. 
• The entire book is written in context, and with deep concern for, land preservation and diet decolonization, which the author outlines in the book's introduction. 
• There is a lot of interest and popularity in the subject of native plants, foods, and traditional healing practices. This book project also appeals to the public urgency for sustainability.
• Offers something for readers who are interested in foraging, cooking, or simply learning about California Indian culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597146166

Book preview

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View from the top of Bald Hills Road, facing North.

Ayukîi

This book was written from my home on Huimen Coast Miwok lands. I’m profoundly grateful for the advanced and skillful stewardship of the Miwok people—their strong reciprocal relationship with the land is why this area is so beautiful and abundant. Because of their energy, immense amount of scientific knowledge, compassion, and commitment, I know the land still retains a deep love for people. Yôotva, I am glad to have had the opportunity to walk among your original ancestors.

Most people tend to bisect the state of California into two distinct cultural factions: Northern California and Southern California. But this land of rivers, deserts, mountains, valleys, prairies, wetlands, lakes, and more than 800 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline is home to a vast number of different tribes with unique and separate identities and cultural lifeways, in addition to waves of diasporic cultural influences.

Even if many tribes are still unrecognized by the U.S. government, their impact on the abundance of this land is evident in every nook and valley of this state. Many of our foodways intersect and seamlessly blend with one another throughout the state while still maintaining dynamic and unique cultural differences. If our foodways are bookended by acorns, a food eaten by people in both the north and the south, then there is an entire library of food combinations in between. This book is meant to be inclusive of but not representative of that library. I hope people from all parts of California (and beyond) will be able to connect to some portion of this book. I have deliberately held back traditional and ceremonial recipes in an effort to draw a line between how we prepare our ancestral foods versus the foods Native people make in their modern kitchens using ancestral ingredients. These recipes take a new look at some of the oldest foods in California, in an effort to connect to a greater holistic picture that includes everybody.

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About Me

I grew up on the Trinity River in northwestern California, spending most of my childhood on Hupa lands. I am Karuk on my mom’s side, an Aubrey, descended from my grandmothers Nancy Sepatan, Bessie Albars, Ellen Aubrey, Dolly A-Cha-Wish Sap Tan, Agnes Charlie, and Lucy Charlie. I am an American of Italian and German descent on my dad’s side.

I first became truly keen on the connection between food and community through family gatherings. The first work of art that I ever fell in love with was my grandpa Al Calvosa’s manicotti: the tenderness of the pasta, the aroma of simmering family sauce wafting through the house all day, copious and glorious mouthfuls of cheese. It was the birthday meal of my life. And knowing how much work went into that masterpiece, I realize how deeply my grandpa-artist loved me. Simultaneously, a boundless delight in new cookbooks and a gluttonous reading habit were being nurtured by my grandma, Lorraine Calvosa, a woman to whom I owe my entire imagination. And, coincidentally, my name, Sára, means bread in Karuk, which definitely wasn’t intentional, but perhaps an ancestor quietly whispered into my mother’s ear on a sacred wind and said, Name her after our word for carbs and she will never be hungry.

Family celebrations and special foods were formative to the way I now show love and connect to my identity as a flourishing matriarch. My dad’s side of the family brought that boisterous Italian family vibe to my life, and my mom fostered curiosity and artistic pursuit and imparted practical skills like gardening, canning, preserving, baking, and sewing. My senses are still deeply connected to my childhood home, and I remember the ferality of my formative years—so many days feeling the sun on my face, sitting by the river, living the lessons of the forest, and at night seeing a sky filled with every star. My childhood was unique and for that I am grateful.

We all interact with food in a very personal way. Most of us aren’t classically trained chefs, and we were taught to cook by a family member or learned by watching TV or by trial and error. And some of us are reluctant students who don’t enjoy quality kitchen time as much as an entire channel devoted to cooking would lead you to believe. The journey we take toward healthy foodways is often nuanced and complex. Growing up, I was given a small but sturdy foundation of knowledge about cooking techniques, preserving, and gathering. As I got older, I took a deep interest in our family recipes and understanding our connection to them, practicing with friends and taking on a larger role in the kitchen during family gatherings while seeking out opportunities to grow and learn.

When I had children of my own, I wanted to connect my sons to these family recipes and to being Karuk, as we were living away from Karuk community and traditional lands. By intentionally establishing this connection, I discovered a love for developing new and colorful recipes based on our old family recipes and traditions. Gathering wild foods, sharing, teaching, cooking, and tending have all been an opportunity to grow and heal in the nurturing way I didn’t know I needed. During periods of deep anxiety and depression, I would turn to my kitchen and to the ingredients that connected me spiritually to something bigger than myself. I discovered I loved studying food history and spent hours, weeks, and years poring over problematic anthropological records and research, not to mention making lengthy phone calls to relatives and elders. I can look back on my life as a montage of changes, child-rearing, heartbreaks, successes, low points, high points, but the one constant has always been my kitchen and the food.

So, it is in studying food through this lens that I’ve followed my own path toward healing and became a conduit for my children to learn our family traditions and culture. It is through food that I pass my knowledge, stories, language, and love to my sons. It is through food that I fight for a better world for the people that will call me an ancestor, and for the elders that we all truly answer to—the oak trees, the river, the salmon, all the plant and animal relatives and ecosystems that rely on us to protect them.

I wrote this book because I want to be in service of my people, of all tribal peoples and elders and my great-great-great-grandchildren. Though this book is about starting slow, I want to impress upon everybody the urgency with which we must act to keep our ecosystems healthy and our air clean and eliminate our dependence upon fossil fuels and other extractive industries. I want us all to wake up wondering how we can be of service to our communities every day; in small ways and in big ways, being in service to one another and this planet is the highest calling.

This book is curated for people who want to recalibrate their lifeways to the natural rhythms and cycles of the plant and animal relatives we were put on Earth to care for. I believe that we all need to work together to address the inequity in our food systems, community food apartheid, water protection, and climate change. There is a story in Ararapíkva by Julian Lang that I’ve found to be profoundly prescient. It is about the Old People and the way they saw the coming of the corruption of our food systems when the men with the little wide hats arrived.

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When the white people all came, the Old People said

that they were eating food poisonous to Indians.

kemisha’ávaha, ithivthaneentaiha’ ávaha

Poison-food, earth-coming-to-an-end-food

It was poison food, world-come-to-an-end food.

—Julian Lang, Ararapikva, Heyday Books, 1994

Today when I see how many diet-related diseases are affecting our communities, and the corruption and overextraction of resources that U.S. agriculture has inflicted on our lands, I feel it is more important than ever that we wrest control of our food systems back from these settler-colonial systems. Food is inherently political; we cannot separate our foodways from our past, present, or future, and this book is gently infused with historical context, activism, and calls to action to work toward securing a more equitable and sustainable future for all of us.

This work is also an act of resilience. Adaptability is one of our most powerful attributes as Native people. I have found that non-Indigenous people often succumb to a Chicken Little’’ perspective: the sky is falling, climate change has won, we just can’t fight fossil fuel corporations and the government entities they own. They’re just too powerful, so we might as well give up and enjoy our lives in as much comfort as we can while stockpiling resources for ourselves because the Earth is going to right itself; humans are a virus and we ruined everything, oh well"—I hear it all the time.

Indigenous people on the other hand, even after enduring several waves of genocide and colonization, disease, land theft, pollution, and resource extraction, are found on every front line facing into the illest of winds, still fighting with each breath, fighting for a future that is balanced and harmonized with the world. We will never stop fighting. We will not abdicate our role as stewards and protectors. We know the fight is hard, but we have been through the hardest things and we are still here. We will not succumb to the notion that the fight is over, and some of us have been fighting for hundreds of years, mid-apocalypse. Don’t give up. Get on your pony and get in here.

Many of us are already actively decolonizing our diets in our own ways, each at our own pace to varying degrees of success—often running into problems with ingredient accessibility, as most of us are no longer oriented to gathering or do not live in an area where traditional foods are accessible. But every season is a new opportunity to share knowledge and to offer a light in the dark for those who are in various stages of connection or reconnection with their traditional ways; it is a chance to introduce one another to our plant relatives, to begin forming or to keep nurturing a relationship with our cultural biomes, and to support one another in our journeys.

I hope you will begin to see the interconnectedness of storytelling, art, ethnobotany, climate change, agricultural practices, and how they all come together to provide context for our traditional foodways. In collecting, creating, and compiling recipes using some of the oldest foods in California, I hope it is a first step in restoring the rhythms of sustainability that our ancestors have refined since time immemorial.

How to Use This Book

Or maybe a better section title would be "How Not to Use This Book." This is a very inconvenient cookbook, admittedly. But I am hoping that it will meet you wherever you’re at in your journey. I have divided it by seasons, beginning with autumn, which is also when the Karuk new year begins. I generally move through the order of recipes the way we move through meals in a typical day, with some sidebar suggestions for variations. Because most of my recipes do not require precision and are fairly forgiving, I have chosen the conventional measurements by volume rather than weight. Suggesting you use standard measuring cups and spoons rather than asking you to weigh the ingredients seemed like the most accessible way to go. Many of my recipes are customizable to your own tastes and preferences, so feel free to add or substitute ingredients. Unlike baking, cooking the way I like to cook does not require strict fidelity to quantities, so I encourage touching, feeling, tasting, squeezing, poking, smelling, and developing your sensory connections to the process.

Think of this as sort of a reverse cookbook. It isn’t the type of book in which you find a recipe and then run to the store for the ingredients you need to fulfill your weeknight dinner grind. This book requires a connection to nature and food gathering that you will need to nurture, to become inspired by your role as an environmental steward. But there are many store-bought substitutes to help you get your journey started.

When it comes to gathering wild food, I recommend starting slow. Choose one thing you’re interested in, one thing that may be growing nearby that you’ve generally taken for granted—maybe it’s nettles or acorns, or maybe you live near a prolific bay laurel tree dropping peppernuts every fall. Once you begin to notice and access the natural rhythms of this food you’ve chosen, learn everything about it—its growth cycles, what kind of soil it likes, how much water it needs, and so on. Then search for stories that feature your ingredient and Native artists and teachers in your area. Learn all the names of your ingredient in Indigenous languages. Discover how local Native people tend this ingredient, if they use fire or seed mounds or dip nets or specialized tools. Is this ingredient part of other foodways in other parts of the world? How are the preparations different or the same? Are there Native elders in your community that could benefit from your labor first? Once you have done all that and you have these well-earned ingredients, then it’s time to use this book. I’ll be here waiting for you to help incorporate these foods into your everyday lives, to begin a transition that leaves the processed, high-fat, high-sugar, high-sodium foods behind while incorporating a vital stewardship piece into the holistic cycle of your foodways.

And to be clear, this book is for everybody, and especially for those in the beginning of their journey, for those who need a place to start, to acquaint their palates to new tastes and textures. On a scale of zero to the works of the incomparable and inspiring Sioux chef and author Sean Sherman, this book is just north of Betty Crocker. It is not meant to be 100 percent decolonized right out of the gate. It is the moment in which we decide that substituting 1 cup of all-purpose flour with 1 cup of acorn flour means 1 fewer cup AP flour that we’re putting into our bodies. And those cups add up. Many of these recipes may cumulatively take many months to prepare if you are gathering and preserving through the seasons. The mushrooms you dry in the autumn months may season a stock or sauce in the summertime. Or the mast of acorns you’ve preserved could be called upon to use in community support for births, mourning, celebrations, or ceremony. Food security conversations must include being prepared to contribute to these community events with as much generosity as our spirits feel.

Because we are all colonized and starting at different places and paces in this journey, I am sharing this glimpse into my own family and identity with the understanding that I also have so much more to learn. My process for recipe development is almost always grounded in appealing to the palates of my sons in a way that gently pushes them to develop an appreciation of textures and flavors beyond hot Cheetos, Pepsi, and frybread. I want them to value bitterness and fishiness, the fleeting sweetness of seasonal berries, to know how to tend and gather in a good way. I want them to recall the memories of our gathering trips when we sit down to dinner, and to be capable and generous enough to share their knowledge and abundance in community.

This book is a compilation of my own recipes. I’m not a chef, but I’m a passionate home cook, sharing the foods made at home to help our family stay connected. It is my dearest hope that everybody will outgrow this book—that people will stand on this book