Photographer: Annie Sahlin Date: 1991 Negative Number: HP.2013.12.085

Frybread 😋😋😋😋😋

ndn things

My spouse and I adore frybread tacos, so for the festival of lights and oil, I make them. Frybread is easy to make as long as you have lots of oil. It doesn't take long. This year, as I was making the frybread for our tacos, I was thinking on frybread and its history. Often called 'Indian' or 'Navajo' frybread, the food is associated with First Nations/Native American peoples in the USA. It consists of flour, water or milk, oil, salt, and baking powder. You fry it in a pan of oil until it's golden brown and puffy. It is often mistaken for a traditional food, but it is a post-colonial food and this is an important distinction to make. It comes from the days of government cheese--the days when US agricultural stockpiles were given to low-income families instead of food stamps. The ingredients are all things that would have come from those stockpiles. The bread was created out of necessity after the peoples were moved onto reservations without access to traditional foods. It is a bread of affliction, though it is often eaten with joy today. It is a bread of forced displacement. It is a bread borne of a great evil visited upon a people. It is a bread of forgotten histories and forced cultural changes that have changed the face and traditions of a people in substantial, immense ways. In this way, is frybread any different any different from matzah in its purpose and history? Frybread is the matzah of peoples who are still living in their period of displacement and also under the rule of a monstrous pharaoh (aka the US government that took so much from these peoples). Frybread to the First Nations peoples as matzah was to us and it is the resonsibility of every Jew to remember that one of our primary objectives is repairing the world. Not rebuilding it in a new image. There is no freedom for any of us as long as anyone is under an occupation. Yes, this is about Palestinians as surely as it is about the First Nations peoples, make no mistake. Yes, I will block anyone who tries to tell me that Israel is in the right for the occupation of Palestinian land just as I will block anyone who tries to deny the American occupation of First Nations lands.

Back to foodposting i made frybread tacos and rez dogs today :D

Reposted with permission from jacobshije

Marcie Rendon, Resilience