Chapter 2. Insect Foods of North American Indigenous Populations ...

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Chapter 246 of 68 9/20/2012 1:34 PMCoville, F.V. 1897. Notes on the plants used by the Klamath Indians of Oregon. Contrib. U.S. Nat. Herbar.5(2), p. 104. (Tettigoniidae)Cowan, F. 1865. Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions. Philadelphia: J.B.Lippincott & Co., pp. 99, 255.Cowan quotes (p. 99) Simmond’s Curios of Food, p. 304, which quoted the Empire County Argusregarding the harvest and preparation of grasshoppers as food by the California Digger Indians. Cowan cites (p.255) Collinson regarding the use of Cicada septendecim by North American Indians “who plucked off the wingsand boiled them.”Cowan, R.A. 1967. Lake-margin ecologic exploitation in the Great Basin as demonstrated by an analysis ofcoprolites from Lovelock Cave, Nevada. Rpts. Univ. Calif. Archaeol. Surv. No. 70: 21-35.Cowan reports (pp. 24, 31, 33) that prehistoric dried human feces in Lovelock Cave contained "insects,"but they were of less importance in the diet than in post-contact times.Cushing, F.H. 1920. Zuni Breadstuff. Indian Notes and Monogr. 8, pp. 562-563.Cushing, who lived with the Zuni for five years and is sometimes quite euphoric in his descriptions of Zunifoods and their preparation, mentions insects as follows:Finally, most curious of all the eatables of these motley meals, are parched locust-chry, or chum'-al-li. These insipient, though active insects are industriously dug in great numbers from the sandysoil of the canon woodlands, by the women, who go forth to their lowly chase, like berry-pickers,in merry shoals. They are then confined in little lobe-shaped cages of wicker, brought hometoward evening, and at once both cleaned and 'fattened,' by immersion over night in warmishwater, of which, if they be a lively lot, they absorb so much as to increase in individual bulkbefore morning to more than twice their natural size. Then they are taken out and treated to a hotbath in melted tallow, which causes them to roll up and die, after which they are salted andparched as corn is, in an earthen toasting-pot, over a hot - very hot - fire.Cushing continues: "Such a meal as this, eaten as promiscuously as it has been described, is not to beseen every day; but if one eliminate from it the locusts and other fancy dishes, retaining the meat and bean-stews,he'-we, and some other varieties of breadstuff, he will have the representative dinner, or evening meal, of everywell-to-do Zuni household almost every day (except during melon and green-corn time) throughout the year."The mention of digging by Cushing suggests that these "locusts" may actually have been cicadas.Daguin, E. 1900. Les insectes comestibles dans l'antiquite et de nos jours. Les Naturaliste (reprint), 27 pp.*(Vespidae)Davidson, W.M. 1919. Life history and habits of the mealy plum aphis. U.S. Dept. Agric., Professional Paper,Bull. No. 774.* (Aphididae)Davis, E.L. 1962. Hunter-gatherers of Mono Lake. The Masterkey 36(1): 23-28. (Introduction)Davis, E.L. 1963. The desert culture of the western Great Basin: a lifeway of seasonal transhumance. Am.Antiquity 29(2): 202-212.Davis emphasizes that "each local enclave exploited the full range of available food products, huntingwhen possible, but concentrating on collecting and processing of more reliable vegetal and insect crops. . . .Paiute who lived near Mono Lake relied on pinyon nuts, on biennial harvests of pine-tree caterpillars, andparticularly on lake-fly larvae which washed ashore in windrows along the margins of the lake." Daviscontinues: "The Mono Lake families took their group name, the Kuzedika or Fly-larva-eaters, from thisparticular crop." She notes that, in a good season, hundreds of pounds of caterpillars of Coloradia pandora werecollected, dried, and stored. After the fly larvae, called kutsavi, had been collected, they were sun-dried, husked,and stored in baskets.According to Davis, before the coming of the Europeans disturbed the varied ecosystems of the highlandarea in the vicinity of Mono Lake, a great variety of animals was found in meadow, wood and grassland,
Chapter 247 of 68 9/20/2012 1:34 PMincluding rodents, hares and rabbits, deer, antelope and mountain sheep. Although the Paiute hunted, big gamewas not their staff of life. Relative to ethnological confusion occasioned by the fact that different types ofartifact assemblages occur at different types of sites, Davis notes that: "Projectile points are numerous onpinyon-grove sites where the game moved seasonally, but are seldom found in the climax Jeffrey-pine forestwhere caterpillar harvesting was a brief but full-time activity."Davis, E.L. 1965. An ethnography of the Kuzedika Paiute of Mono Lake, Mono County, California. Misc.Papers No. 8, Univ. Utah Anthropol. Papers No. 75, pp. 1-55.Davis (pp. 12, 26, 29-33, 35) reiterates many of the points covered in her 1962 and 1963 papers, and addsmore detailed information. She states, regarding the harvesting of Coloradia pandora (p. 32):When the 'hatch' began, families went into concerted action. Trenches were dug in circles aroundthe bases of selected trees. . . to trap the caterpillars, and the families worked together very muchlike Vermonters sugaring off in a maple grove.After the caterpillars started migrating down the trunks, smudge fires were built under the trees tostupify the larvae remaining in the branches. These were picked up as they fell to the ground.Meantime, the trenches, which had under-cut sides, filled with caterpillars, which were alsocollected from time to time. Some were barbecued on willow sticks and eaten at once. The restwere tossed into hot ashes to kill them, then sun-dried and stored in fiber bags in the shade of barkshelters. . . where they kept cool and dry. The caterpillars, being the feeding instar of thecreature, were very rich and greasy and therefore subject to spoilage. If the weather wasfavorable and the gathering went well, a hard-working family could garner bushels of sun-driedworms, shriveled and hard as twigs. Later on, these were added to soups and stews, where the hotwater plumped them out again. . .Regarding the harvest of the shore fly, Ephydra hians, Davis says (p. 33):These kutsavi were a staple, a delicacy and an important item of trade. We were able to observesome of the process of preparing this food. The larvae, which are about the size of grains ofbrown rice, had been dried on a canvas, the husks rubbed off between the palms and thenwinnowed out by tossing in a tray in the breeze. The kutsavi were then more thoroughly sundried and stored in bags or baskets. They have a novel but not unpleasant taste, like shrimpflavored with Epsom Salts (the flavor of the lake water). Like the caterpillars, they are extremelyrich and required similar care (and good luck) to prevent spoiling. They were added to all mannerof dishes -- berries, pa:pi or pinenut gruel, soups and stews. Whether the supply of this staplefluctuated in the past is impossible to say. Today, the flies have disappeared almost entirely fromthe shores and only a scraping of larvae are to be found.Other insects mentioned by Davis as foods of the Mono Lake Paiute include locusts, [Mormon] cricketsand ant brood.Davis, J.T. 1961. Trade routes and economic exchange among the Indians of California. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.Archaeol. Surv. Rpts. No. 54, pp. 21, 28. (Need several pages prior to p. 21 and also the first page of Table 1)Davis reports that the Chumash received grasshoppers from the "Interior" (possibly the Mojave Desert orthe San Joaquin Valley, according to Sutton (1988), suggesting that these insects were involved in trade. Also, theEastern Mono apparently conducted a lively trade in pandora moth caterpillars and pupae, trading them to theCentral Miwok, the Tubatulabal, and the Western Mono. According to Davis, the Eastern Mono also tradedkutsavi (Hydropyrus hians) to the Central Miwok, the Tubatulabal, the Western Mono, and the Washo.DeFoliart, G.R. 1989. The identity of grasshoppers used as food by Native American tribes. Food InsectsNewslet. 2(3): 3, 5, 8.Drawing from the literature, primarily Essig (1931), the author lists eight species in four genera.DeFoliart, G.R. 1991. Toward a recipe file and manuals on "How to Collect" edible wild insects in NorthAmerica. Food Insects Newslet. 4(3): 1, 3-4, 9. (Acrididae)
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Chapter 2. Insect Foods of North American Indigenous Populations ...

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