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Inuit carving of a sea lion - Native American food

Native American food: Inuit carving of a sea lion

Hunting and gathering wild food


More about gathering
Paleo-Indians in North America
All our Native American articles

Salmon, wapato, pine nuts and acorn flour


More about the Inuit
History of fishing
North American environment

Chinook people, who lived a little further south in the Pacific Northwest (modern Oregon and Washington) ate a lot of salmon, and wapato, which was a lot like potatoes. Further south, Californian and Paiute people ate a lot of bread made from pine nuts or acorns.

More about Chinook food
Californian people
Who were the Paiute?

Bison, birds, cactus fruit, and sunflower seeds

Smoking salmon on cedar sticks set upright around a small fire - Native American food

Smoking salmon the Chinook way, on cedar sticks

In the south-west (modern Arizona and New Mexico), Pueblo people ate cactus fruit and pine nuts, and hunted rabbits and birds for meat. The people who lived in the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, like the Blackfoot and the Ute, ate a lot of mammoth, at first, and then when the mammoth all died out, they started to eat a lot of bison meat.

What are bison?
More about Pueblo people
And the Blackfoot


What are sunflower seeds?
More about the Ute

Wild rice and chestnuts

Corn on the cob - three yellow ears of corn lying on bark chips - Native American food

Native American food – Corn on the cob


Early Cree history

Venison, pigeon, and turkey

And on the East Coast, the Iroquois and the Algonquin ate venison (deer meat) and fish, and also pigeon and turkey and rabbit. Sometimes they ate bear, which was important even though it was hard to get, because it had a lot of fat, and the deer and fish didn’t. Like the Californians, they gathered acorns to make bread, and they also made bread out of sunflower seeds and chestnuts.

More about chestnuts
What the Iroquois ate

Honey, maple sugar and sweet potatoes

To sweeten their food, East Coast people used maple sugar and maple syrup, and also wild honey. Cooks put maple sugar in bread, stew, tea, and vegetables, and people sprinkled it on top of their berries. In the south-east, Cherokee people ate a lot of turtle, fish, and venison, sweet potatoes and also acorn and chestnut bread.

Cherokee food
History of honey
Where do sweet potatoes come from?

Pine nuts - a golden pile of small seeds - Native American food

Pine nuts – Native American food

What was pemmican?


How to make pemmican

Native American farming: corn, beans, squash, and peppers

But around 1000 BC, people began to eat very differently in North America. The Pueblo people began to farm about this time. They got corn and beans and squash from the pre-Olmec people of Mexico, and they began to eat a lot of these three crops (the “Three Sisters“) instead of the wild foods.

The Three Sisters
History of corn
Where do beans come from?
What about squash?

People made corn into a flat bread, like modern tacos and tortillas, and rolled up mashed beans inside these wrappers (The beans were the same pinto beans we eat in enchiladas today, but they also had kidney beans and lima beans), with other vegetables like green peppers.

Where are green peppers from?

Farming sweet potatoes, peanuts, and sunflower seeds

Farming soon spread to other parts of North America, and by 1000 AD most people in the Mississippi Valley and along the East Coast were eating a lot of cornbeans and squash (the Three Sisters) along with their wild food. The Cherokee and Mississippi people grew sweet potatoes and peanuts, too. Along the East Coast, people also ate a lot of sunflower seeds that they grew, and used sunflower oil.

History of peanuts

What was succotash?


Succotash recipe
How to make popcorn

People also ate roasted or boiled corn on the cob, popcorn, bean soup and squash soup. A lot of the food Americans eat today is the same as Native American food.

What did Native Americans like to drink?

Whether they were farming or not, everybody’s main drink was water. When they could, though, many people liked to drink herbal tea better than just plain water. People made tea with sassafras, or added pumpkin blossoms or corn silk to thicken their water. People in California added lemonade berries to their water to make a sour drink like modern lemonade.

Did you find out what you wanted to know about Native American food? Let us know in the comments!

Learn by doing: eating pemmican
More about the Three Sisters
American Food after the Europeans invaded

Bibliography and further reading about early Native American food:



Later American food
More about Native Americans home