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lrom the tirst to the last Bite:
learning from the [ood lhowledge
of Our Anrestors
John Mohawk
The idea of Original Instructions and Indigenous Knowledge comes out
of a conversation that's been going on for at least thirty years. I'm going
to amalgamate history so you get a picture of what we're talking about
now.
Before there was a Columbus, Indian Nations and Peoples occupied
areas specific to themselves, something we might describe as a cultural
of things that they encoun-
eco region, and inside that, they had lots
tered: plants and animals and micro environments all over the conti-
nents, different landscapes, different seasons-a mind-boggling array of
things. Even in a given small area, one group sharing the same languagc
and having the same technologies would live in an area for a very long
time. In that area they had to make choices about how they were going
to expend their energies, how they were going to survive in the arcn
they lived in. There were hundreds of cultures in hundreds of thesc littlc
bioregions, cultural bioregions, ancl thcy all did things cliffcrcntly. llut
tlrcy rrll slrarccl orrc tlring in cornrnorr:'l'hcy stayccl irt tlrc srrrrtc plnce
TROM THE FIRST TO THE LAST BITE
re_
with the same animals and the same plants for sometimes hundreds of
generations.
They lived in these conditions before anybody thought of having a
money economy. That meant that their behaviors were predicated on
concerns other than money. So what were these other concerns? First
off, I'd like to propose that many Indian Nations lived in areas where
they had to make many choices about various things. These were two
essential areas that are also on people's minds today: they had to make a
lot of choices about what plants and/or animals they were going to use
for medicines and what plants and animals they were going to use and
possibly cultivate for food.
To my knowledge, no one ever found a plant that had a medicinal
use that the Indigenous Peoples who lived there (and lived with that
plant) didn't know about. Anywhere. No one ever found one. !7hen
'What's
they found something, they usually had to ask the locals, this
good for? The locals, if they felt like it, would tell them,'Well, you know,
that'll cure poison ivy or whatever, it is a medicine.
What did that mean in terms of their process of deduction, of dis-
covering that some rare plant was good for a particular use in medicine?
The only thing that we can be sure of is that they spent a lot of time
experimenting on that. You could assume some of them spent thousands
of years experimenting on it. If you have enough trials, once in a while
you'll have a success, right? If you're good enough at memorizing the
success, you have many choices to make. In medicine, the choices are
daunting. !7hat plant do you use? IThat part of a plant do you use?
When do you haruest the plant? How do you use it; do you swallow
it? Do you rub it on? \fhat do you do with it? Maybe you just dance
rrround it, who knows?
With any given illness, there would probably be thousands of plants,
fcns of thousands of parts of plants and numerous ways to treat with
thcm-from a poultice to an elixir to consumption of that plant. There-
krrc, a lot of decisions had to be made. Somehow they whittled those
tlowrr ilrrcl by thc tinrc rnost of us heard about them, they said, here's
Irow you usc tlris plnnt for this ptrrp<lsc, which l say is a vcrsion of
172 YOU /tRt WHtRt Y0U tAT: NATIVI t00DS AND TRADITI0NAL AGRI(ULTURI
Indigcnous Knowledge. They did all that experimentalwork for us, and
we inherited the end result of that experimentation, that native science.
And that is Indigenous Knowledge.
107hat I find most interesting is Indigenous Knowledge about food.
I'm going to look at a couple of specific examples, but please don't for-
get that there are thousands of Indians living in thousands of environ-
ments. These are the principles-the specifics are very diverse and very
interesting.
'$7here
I
come from, people were very vigorous horticulturalists.
They raised at least twenty different varieties of corn and probably more
varieties of beans. They had squash, gourds, and melons of many differ-
ent kinds. So at the time of the alleged contact, they raised a fair garden
of plant foods.
They had more choices than we have now. Today you go to the
grocery store and you're looking for corn. How many different kinds of
corn can you have? One or two, right? You can have white sweet corn
or yellow sweet corn, and the only other kind of corn you can get is
chicken corn. Most of you probably wouldn't eat chicken corn. There's
also popcorn. But thatt pretty narrow compared to what an Iroquois
gardener would have had to worry about because not only were there
twenty varieties of corn, but there were different ways of eating corn.
Sometimes you picked the corn when it was green, sometimes you
picked the corn when it was baby corn, sometimes you picked the corn
late. Then you dried the corn and processed it. You had to hull some of
it; you had to roast some of it. In my tribal tradition there are a lot more
varieties of corn and many more ways to process and cook corn than
you have today; certainly there are more varieties than the two you find
in the grocery store and more ways to eat it than just boiling ir. I'd make
a bet that f ust with our white corn alone, there are probably twenty-five
or more different ways to eat it. So my point again is that the tribes hacl
alot of choices to make.
Now with regard to beans, there was a whole array of beans. Today,
how many kinds of beans can you get when you go to the store ? In
California yoll can get more beans than just about anywhere, arnd yct I
IROM IHI IIRST TO IHT TAST BITI 17]
'We're talking heritage beans
don't think you can get ten in California.
here. But, generally speaking, if you're in the rest of the country, you'll
get your choice, you can have pinto beans or you can have kidney beans,
they'd have whites, but only about seven or eight beans'
Apart from beans, what about greens? A few years ago, you were
limited to about three or four, but now I see someplace you can get seven
or eight different greens. But just think about the Indians. The greens
were just about anything growing in the woods that you could eat and
keep down that wasn,t too hard to chew. You threw them in a pot,
boiled them, ate them, and many of these greens had not only nutritional
value but medicinal Properties.
So when you think about how many different foods the Indians ate,
I want you to know that they ate a daunting variety of vegetables and
grains. compared to the modern diet it is amazing to think of the vari-
ety of foods that they consumed. But what I was told in school was that
ntodern American agriculture brought us more choices than we had ever
had in the history of mankind. That was a huge lie'
The reality is that the pre-1491 Indians were living in a world in
which two things were rhe case. Number one is that nobody was whis-
pering in their ear telling them what to do, and number two was they
lived communally. In a society where the accumulation of knowledge
is one of the reasons why Elders are revered, it was a good idea for a
person who passed forty to start paying attention to things. If you're
going to be revered as you're getring older, you should know something
rhat's valuable to the survival of the people. So people, as they got older,
actually became more and more responsible for being the repository of
l<rrowledge of the grouP.
one of the things about Indigenous languages is that they have a
rvay of preserving knowledge in the language' The language would tell
you things that you might want to know, or you might need to know
ro survive. The knowledge in the language was often responsible for life
rrncl death. Sometimes tribal communities were in groups of forty or
fifty
pcoplc, sometimes they were in groups of four hundred, sometimes in
responsible for life
l',roups <lf two <tr thrcc thottsatrcl, l'lut thc group was
 ll4 YOu ARt wHtRt YOu tAT: NATtvt F00Ds AND TRAD|T|0NAL AGR|CULIURE
and dcath. From the moment you were born, they were responsible for
you. N.t your mother, but the whole group. From the moment you're
born, they're all paying attention; it's usually women who are paying
attention to you when you're very small. As you get older, especially if
you're a male, then the males take over at some point.
So everything that ever happens to you is watched. 'ril7hen you,re
small, if you don't thrive, they notice. If they feed you something and
you don't thrive, they notice. If they feed you something else and you
do thrive, they notice. Every single possibility that they have at their
fingertips can be tried; they are morivared to watch and see which foods
help people the most. Not which foods help people make moneS which
foods have the best biological impact, especially on young people, and
old people.
Here's a sociery that would rightfully consider the idea that food is
a medicine although to me this is obvious. I've been in a hospital and
they'll kill you from the kitchen. They clearly don,t believe that food is
a medicine. whatever medicine they're giving to you the food will
coun-
teract wharever good the medicine is doing. But this healthcare sysrem is
not about healing, it's about making money.
This 1491 sociery was morivated to find a diet that was the best diet.
As a group they only had so many resources that they could expand on
to produce their ideal diet. They could onry produce so much of some
thing, so they had to pick which corn they were going to produce, which
'beans
they were going to grow. Essentialry they had to be very strategic
about how they were going to spend their time and energy getting food.
It had to be proportionate to how they saw benefits coming from the
food- And the only benefit they were interesred in was the health of the
people. The only one. Health of the little people, middle-size people,
old
people, but always they're thinking about the health.
so here's a diet that's based on the premise that food is medicine,
that it starts on your first bite and ends with your last bite, literally, and
that the society learns where ir should spend its energy producing which
foods. IiThen the society was responsible for its own health, you had to
say that they were very careful what it was they gave you.
inou lnr nRsT T0 THr r.Asr 0rTr uj
I think this is why the food value in Indigenous, heritage foods is far
greater than the food value in commercial food. The food value in c<lm-
mcrcial food is weighed in dollars, and the food value in heritage foods
is weighed in something we might call life force. Somehow it was built
around life. Subsequently, you could live on and thrive on heritage foods
by actually eating quite a bit less vegetable matter than you would need
to eat of commercial foods to get the same nutrition and life force.
I want to share one story that was striking to me years ago back dur-
irrg the 1960s, when people were trying to get back to the land. Motber
Earth News ran an article about how Iroquois Indians lived pretty much
on corn and beans and squash. So, at the time, I had written some arti-
cles and was corresponding with people. A couple of people wrote to me
and they said the following thing. They said,'We tried living on corn. We
planted corn and all we ate was corn and beans and we almost got sick
doing that.
So I wrote back to them, What kind of corn and beans? Well, they
were planting essentially the kind of corn and beans you could order at
that time out of the seed catalogs. But the corn that you can thrive on
is the high-lysine corn and the beans have to be dense. It is the combi-
nation of dense beans and high-lysine corn hulled by lye that produces
all the amino acids you need to make protein. This has a remarkable
quality: it can be turned into something that a baby can swallow. It will
keep a baby alive when the mother's milk goes dry. Try to find that with
'With
any other vegetable-based foods. Iroquois Indians when a mother's
nrilk went dr5 they fed the baby a derivative of corn; it's the stuff the
corn bread is boiled in.
It's not that different from what will happen with animals. One time
got loose at this farm and he wandered off and passed by a quar-
rr horse
tcr mile of yellow corn to come over and eat white corn. The horse was
ir gourmet. He didn't eat just any corn, he wanted the best corn. Horses
rrrrcl cows can tell what's good for them. So can we if we iisten to our
bodies and our instincts.
But people can't follow those instincts anymore, at least individual
pt'oplc ctrn't. Bnt thcrc was a tirnc when tribes could, when ar group
 176 YOu /rRt lvHtRt YOu tAI: NATtvt rOoDs AND TRAD|T|ONA|_ AGRtcuLTURt
fROM IHT IIRST TO IHt I.AST BIIT III

living in a place for a long period of time treated food like medicine
and The next one is a new book that's just out. It's called The China
acquired a certain amounr of knowledge about this. After looking
at the Study; it's a 2005 book.2 The China Study is a study of eighty-six coun-
examples cited above, we ask ourselves again, what is Indigenous
wis- ties in Northern China done over a period of twenty years. It's the larg-
dom and knowledge? Indigenous wisdom and knowledge is that wisdom
est study of the relationship between nutrition and health ever done. It
and knowledge that our peoples had when they were in charge of
their was done with the cooperation of the Chinese government. There's one
own survival, and that they retained generation through generation.
county at least in China where there's no recorded incident of death
I want to point to two pieces of work that you can look at that
I find from coronary heart failure. No one ever died of a heart attack in this
very compelling about this food story. The firsr is wesron price's
book county in China. They've got records that go back forever. Nobody ever
on nutrition and degenerative diseases.l He was a doctor (dentist) who
died of that.
wrote in the 1930s. He noticed that when he was with primitive people,
In the other counties it's quite rare anybody dies of that. Very rare
he was quite amazed that they all had pretty good teeth. He
would have that anybody dies of cancer. Very rare that anybody dies of any cir-
thought that primitive people, not having dentists, wouldn't have good
culatory disease or diabetes-related ailments. He calls the diseases that
teeth. It turned out it was the wealthy people who had dentists
who had kill people in the developed world the diseases of affluence because the
bad teerh and the primitive people had good teeth.
people who live in China have very little money to buy meat. If you've
Then he went off to discover that primitive peopre who ate their
ever been to real Asia, you'll notice that their restaurants are not like
own foods didn't have the degenerative diseases that were common ro
Asian restaurants in America. You order a dish in America, say you have
people in the cities of North America-they didn,t have high
blood pres- Chinese food. What is it? It's a big pile of chicken. Or it's a big pile of
sure, they didn't have diabetes, they didn't get circulatory ailments,
they beef. When you go to China and order food, it's a big pile of vegetables.
did not die of coronary heart disease. So he wrote this up in a now clas-
You've got to dig around looking for the meat. It's like there's just the
sic book. If you're interested in this topic, you've gor to read
this book. one pig for one thousand meals in China.
Price was such a quaint character. He travered the world and
he The point being that in China they ate a lot less meat, and there is
found one group of Indigenous peoples after another, and investigated
practically no processed food there; they grow most of their food them-
their health. Het bothering them, he takes pictures of them, he makes
selves. So in China, you ask yourself, what's killing them? In China peo-
them show their teeth, and then he asks them questions abour how
they ple die from diseases that are associated with pathogens-bugs. Here,
live. He finds out that their cousins who move into the city get
all these we kill ourselves with our patterns of eating and stress.
bad diseases and he was the first to document that. He goes ro
one place If people have a long period of time to pay close attention to nature
after the orher, from Alaska to New Zealand to Africa to all over
the and they don't have any hierarchical authority figure telling them what
world. He dragged his wife all over the world to go look and see if
all to do, they will make choices in their diet that are based on the outcome
the Indigenous Peoples had good teeth, and he found out they did.
It,s a of their choices. Did the people thrive or did they not thrive? Vhich of
wonderful book. But, part of the reason it's so wonderful is because
he these foods did they thrive on best, and how can we take advantage of
doesn't have any agenda except to answer his question. Het not
work- knowing this?
ing for Monsanto. He's not working for any of the big drug companies.
We get back to North America and I especially like the agricultural
He's jusr trying to find out why people have good teeth and good
health. irrea of North America because I know it the best. You can look at the
How refreshing.
North American diets and you can see a real strong parallel between
 YOU ARt WHtRt YOU tAT: NAIIVE F00DS AND IRAD|TI0NAL AGRt(ULTURE
them and the Chinese diet; it's all rough food. If you ear real corn, beans,
and squash, that is a pretty dense, heavy meal. It's not salad. you don,t
need a lot to keep yourself going on that.
If you study Iroquois history or the Algonquin peoples around them,
they have a word in the language that means "a generation.,, It says
that in three generations, such and such would happen. So I once asked
a whole group of elder Elders, eighry-five years and older: How many
years would people live? The Seneca version of that was a life span of
about a hundred years.
When I first heard that, I thought that was kind of a long life span,
but I also spent a lot of my time studying history. Throughout history,
a lot of people lived to be a hundred years. A hundred years wasn'r
uncommon at all. Not only that, they were pretty vigorous in their nine-
ties. I always liked the story about this one chief, his name was corn
Planter. He lived on the corn Planter reservation, and he made a famous
speech. Everybody looks at the speech, which he opens by talking about
the Indian wars rhat went on in the West. He says, It,s getting harder
for me to get to these meetings. He days, I'm not sure I,m going to keep
coming anymore.
According to my calculations he was ninety-seven or ninety-eight.
He had walked from the corn Planter reservation to Buffalo creek,
about 110 miles. No bridges. S7hen you get to the stream, you have
to swim across the stream and the next place. He didn't have a horse,
according to the record. He walked. Now, a ninety-seven-year-old guy
who can walk that far, we ought to be listening to whar else he does.
\fhen we talk about Indigenous Knowledge and original Instruc-
tions, for it to mean something, we have to look at what were the behav-
iors that people adopted and what were the benefits of those behaviors
and what can we learn from studying how they lived and what they did.
In our times, with very high rates of diabetes and diseases, we're prob-
ably very motivared ro embrace that kind of knowledge.
During the period of forced assimilation, Indians were strongly
urged to believe that their people had no knowledge, that they couldn'r
think clearly, that they were savages, and so on. My experience is that
tROM IHt IIRST IO THI l.AST BIII
tlrc rcvcrsc is truc. Toc{ay thcy havc no knowledge and they've embraced
ir systcrn of faith: faith that the grocery store food is good food, faith
that the doctor says he knows what to do for you. You have a faith, but
you'rc not encouraged to do what you need to do to avoid getting sick,
,urcl you're not encouraged to do what you need ro do to stay healthy.
l)rcvention and maintenance are not there once you're in the accultur-
.rtccl world.
But now we're at a time when all of us can rethink this because
tlrcre's a general movement toward the idea that food is medicine. That's
rvhirt the Slow Food Movement is about. A really wide community of
pcople agrees with that. Today we can say things like: we should look at
t'rrting differently and maybe eating foods that we don't find in a grocery
storel maybe we have to grow some of our own foods. Today you don't
lt('t quite the derisive looks you used to get. So, I think that's what Indig-
t'rroLrs Knowledge means in action.
Because I spend so much time wandering around with traditlonal
rribal peoples, there's quite a lot of that accessible to us in allthese dif-
It'rcnt cultures. People left stories and they left records about how they
,lirl things, what they did, what they ate, how they prepared their food,
rvhcrc they got their food from, and so on. They talk about how they
rrst'tl medicine. It's available to us, it's not lost. It's just not being used.
llrr,, [11',,1'111x1i(nr t(x)k plrcc irt thc I]ionccrs Conference in 2006.