In a recent note, I mentioned “comfort food”. That’s what it is now, but for a good while, I was quite happy to leave those foods in my past.
Growing up, we were, on a certain scale, quite poor. I use that term, “on a certain scale,” because where my family and I lived, on the Gila River and Salt River reservations, where for the most part, everyone was in the same boat. Native American reservations have historically been among the poorest communities in the country. Until the early 90’s, our O’odham reservations vied with places like Pine Ridge and Rosebud in South Dakota for the rank of “poorest” reservation, but the race was always a close one - time were hard ALL over Indian Country.
When everyone is struggling, however, everyone (or mostly everyone) also ends up understanding and helping one another, and the perception of wealth and want deviates away from the modern (as in, since 1776 or thereabouts) American perspective.
My “tribe”, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, recently started recording podcasts, and I was among the first to be invited to be interviewed. One of the questions I was asked was what it was like growing up in Salt River. I qualified my answer by specifying my life’s timeline as BEGINNING in Salt River before spending my preschool and elementary school years living, along with my parents and brother, in my grandmother’s house with my grandma, my two aunts, one uncle - married to one of my aunts, and one blood “uncle” (really my second cousin, but decades older than me). When I started junior high, my parents, brother, and I qualified for a house in Victory Acres II and returned to Salt River. The interviewer, who it turns out is related to me through my dwindling grandfather’s family line, knew through his mom that I lived at VA and asked, specifically, how that was. My response - “HOT.” I went on to clarify - living in cinder block construction HUD houses that absorbed heat like a brick oven, had limited air circulation, and evaporative “swamp” coolers as the only cooling made them just livable.
As a hopefully small tangential note, Salt River is a somewhat historic living ground for our tribe, but our own creation stories identify multiple social disruptions occurring about 700 years ago that led to a general abandonment of the area now encompassed by the Salt River reservation. As a consequence, however, when folks started “re-settling” the area in the mid to late 1800’s, around the time the U.S. Government established Fort McDowell and began recruiting the numerous O’odham men in the area to help fight the O’odham’s natural enemies, the Apache, tribal family homesteads were sparse and dispersed. (My thoughts on the “appeal” for certain young O’odham men of the then newly established and notably polygamous Mormon church in Mesa near the reliable waters of the Salt River can wait for another time.) Whereas, Gila River did have organically developed villages, Salt River had few natural larger collections of residences. Attempting to fulfill the need for houses, HUD established low income housing in somewhat dense configurations; Victory Acres I and II were two of those subdivisions.
Growing up with limited financial resources, our food supply was, quite honestly, sourced significantly out of the U.S. government’s “commodity” program, and as the program attempted to supply foods related to the local recipients’ “traditional” foods, we received lots and lots of beans. We also received large blocks of American cheese - a food (“Commod” Cheese) often remembered fondly by many Natives but one which I reluctantly admit, never really liked. Take the beans and cheese and combine them with “Fry Bread”, or “Popovers” as we, O’odham, called them (another “traditional” Native American food that was really the consequence of making something tasty out of the government issued flour and lard), and you have what my family ate probably three or four times a week (fried potatoes and tortillas filled our plates two or three of of the other nights - Sundays were reserved for dinner feasts of beef roasts, roasted potatoes and other vegetables, and freshly made tortillas).
By the time I got to college, I was more than happy to exercise my meal plan on a variety of new, or at least not often eaten, foods.
Not long after I started college, the state of Arizona acquired properties on the Salt River reservation for a freeway. My family had “ownership” of a number of “allotments” (allocated in 1914, and given both their close proximity to “White” Scottsdale and distance from gravity-fed irrigation canals for farming, were considered among the “least valuable” of reservation lands at the time) in the path of the freeway alignment. One day we were “poor” and the next, numerous members of my family, including my mom, her two sisters, and her “cousin” (my aforementioned “uncle” who was really my second cousin) were millionaires.
After college, I lived for a few years with my girlfriend’s family on the Navajo Nation at a location on the New Mexico portion of the reservation, and by the time I returned to Salt River to live and work, Arizona had entered into gaming agreements with tribal communities. Salt River is the closest Native reservation to the largest non-Native populations in the state. With the receipt of gaming revenues beyond the imaginations of our ancestors, the Salt River Community, as a whole, started a new chapter.
Life was definitely different for me as well - especially my diet, but as my family and our community proceeded away from we “had to do” toward the tempting and desirous (and sometimes even luxurious), the supply of past menus combined with an increasing personal nostalgic recollection of familiar and delicious tastes for now set aside.
It seems a little funny to go on about something as basic as food, but are there many things more critical to life?
So, nearly two decades after I bid “good riddance” to bean and cheese popovers, I started to have a craving for them. (It was really only a passing craving, though. Truthfully, my heart and my tastes always kept a fondness for “red chile stew” and popovers, but the fact that I even entertained a passing desire for bean and cheese popovers after eating so, so many for so long was always remarkable to me.)
Wrapping up the podcast recording at the “Creative Ki” at Salt River’s Two Waters government complex the other day, the interviewer, my friend and relative, and I talked about tradition and community. We both agreed that our history and our future as a tribal community consists really just of people doing the best they can for themselves and for their loved ones.
Our past is our guide, and it was populated by our ancestors who were both simply trying to survive as people and who, for the benefit of the best interests of those they loved, embraced decency and virtue, as best they could, to be good humans. What our ancestors were to us living now, we may be, we are, to those young and not even yet born.
Once, not long before my mom passed, I was visiting with her, and I made the comment how we were “really and actually incredibly poor” when I was a kid. I rarely saw disappointment in my mom, but I saw it that day. She responded to me, a little tersely, with, “We always had love and laughter, though.” Then she continued, a little more softly, with, “We had so many more smiles than tears. We always had a roof to live under, and we always had food - even if it was just popovers and beans a lot of the time.”
She was right.
Food is life - as is water and shelter - and family. Our lives emerge from the love of family and community, and our souls return to it when our physical selves expire, but memory persists and preserves, and it inspires on-going creation.
Our future is an unwritten story - composed of new, amazing myths just waiting to be discovered and shared. I would be blessed to play a small role in that endeavor, but regardless, I am excited to see what will be revealed.
I am completely and absolutely certain that remarkable web of the past experiences of many will recombine, with appropriate communal care and consideration, into a masterpiece of human experience beyond the limited ability of individual imagination.