Native American Fry Bread is the Food of Our Oppression

By Simon Moya-Smith, writer, activist and professor of new media
NBC News

It's also delicious, so we're reclaiming it. The history behind this food is nothing short of racist and brutal, and begins with America’s first prison camps.

​Fry bread is considered Indian country’s “soul food,” because — just like barbecue ribs, which were borne during the evil enslavement and persecution of Africans in the U.S. — fry bread never had its place in Indian country until white, government officials 

A native American woman is making Indian fry bread in front of her house at the Taos Pueblo, which is the only living Native American community designated both a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and a National Historic Landmark, in Taos, New Mexico.Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket via Getty

forced Navajos and other nations and tribes into prison camps and began a commodity food program, which was meant to prevent starvation among the remaining Natives, since they could no longer farm the barely-arable land onto which they were forced.

​For years, the food program, was replicated across the prison camps, later called reservations, established on lands the white colonialists didn’t want for themselves — until later, when they discovered minerals and oil under reservation soil).

​Like what came to be commodity food boxes in the late 1970s, the rations consisted mostly of flour, lard, salt, sugar and canned goods — ultimately unhealthy staples and ingredients, but there was enough to make some fried bread. In many cases, it was either that or starve.

Chef Sean Sherman, 45 — a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation affectionately known as “The Sioux Chef” — said his diet primarily consisted of the artery-clogging, diabetes-inducing “commod” foods until he left the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (originally designated by the U.S. as Prison Camp No. 334), including fry bread.

It’s delicious. It’s fluffy. And yet the history behind it is nothing short of racist and brutal, and the story begins with America’s first prison camps.

“I won’t make [fry bread] that often,” she said. “It’s not entirely healthy, but it is good to have once in a while as a reminder of what white people did, what Natives had to endure, what we still endure,” she said.

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Work Cited
https://sioux-chef.com/
​https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/native-american-fry-bread-food-our-oppression-it-s-also-ncna991591

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