SANTA FE—You walk into a pow-wow in your best traditional boogie down gear. Your roach is on straight, or your jingles are flowing free. The MC makes another bad joke while all your aunties and uncles stake out their own plot of gymnasium with folding chairs and coolers. You wade through a row of vendors and trip over a rowdy group of tiny-tots to find your way to the concession stand. You look at the menu written with a magic marker on the back of a soda pop carton, and…NO FRYBREAD!?

Can you even imagine Indian Country minus the frybread? In a Jan. 20, article, Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, a regular columnist for “Indian Country Today,” promised to give up frybread and other fatty “Indian” foods as a New Year’s resolution. She urged others to do the same.

Harjo said, “Target number one: the ubiquitous frybread—the junk food that’s supposed to be traditional, but it isn’t, and makes for fat, fatter and fattest Indians.”

Frybread, a mixture of flour, milk, baking soda, salt and oil is deep fried in lard or oil. It’s sure to be found at the flea market, on the pow-wow sidelines, and in Native homes on the rez and in the city. There is little nutritional value in this bread, but has frybread become a modern day scapegoat for unhealthy, sedentary lifestyles?

NoWay to Avoid the Fat

At a recent Indian taco and frybread sale here on campus, Nancy Strickland, a Lumbee student in the IAIA museum studies program, recommends alternatives to make frybread healthier. “You can use vegetable oil, whole wheat flour or stone ground unbleached flour and skim milk,” Strickland said. Good suggestions to consider. “But, she said, “the fact that you are frying the flour, there’s no way to avoid that.”

Back home in Alaska, we call frybread, uqsrukuaqtaq (oo-krook-qwa-tuk) or Eskimo donuts. I tend to think of frybread in this way: It’s a donut. As long as you eat them in moderation, get out and enjoy a walk outside once or twice a week, then you won’t wind up with a “commod bod, ” which is, according to Harjo, “the round, doughy physique that results from the high-starch, high-calorie, high-fat and low protein food.”

A Creative Response to Starvation

Glenda Kodaseet, Kiowa, a.k.a. IAIA’s “Intergalactic Frybread Princess,” said, “Frybread came about as a necessity to keep Indian people alive in times of starvation. They got creative with the rations that were given them when everybody was starving.”

She addressed the nutrition content and health implications, saying that diabetes is on the rise in Indian Country. “I must agree that frybread kills, though it’s so tasty! You can’t just pick on frybread though. You have to pick on all Indian bread, ayyy. Pueblo bread has a ton of lard in it,” Kodaseet said.

Big or small, whole wheat or white, frybread is what it is. Tasty. It is also a staple in many Indian homes and a must-have at powwows, unless you want an angry crowd on your hands. Personally, I enjoy my frybread hot, small and greasy. I agree it is unhealthy, but until Atkins comes out with an equivalent that tastes as good as the original, I’m a pro-frybread-kinda-girl.

South Dakota Makes Frybread “Official”

On a more serious political note, on Jan. 28, state legislation was introduced in South Dakota, “HB1205.” This bill designates frybread the official state bread of South Dakota. It passed through the House with a vote of 64-3. The Senate State Affairs Committee in turn approved the bill, 9-0. It passed again in the final Senate vote, 25-7. HB 1205 was signed into law by Governor Mike Rounds on Feb. 25.

Frybread has now become official bureaucratic business. Is this just one more thing appropriated by the government? What else is left to take? The rez car? The rez dog? Or, is this a symbol of esteem for Indian culture and heritage?

Either way, it’s one small step for commodities, one giant leap for aspiring frybread princesses across Indian Country.

Copyright © IAIA CHRONICLE 2005