Food and the Harvest
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noteweek11.docxThough we definitely touched upon this topic a couple weeks ago, we’re going to spend a little more time with this unit talking about various kinds of harvesting: hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening, and farming. From catfish to wild ginseng, morel mushrooms (dry land fish) to hot garden peppers, it’s all fair game for this week.
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in the outdoors in the Upper Midwest, in an area with thousands of lakes and deep state and national forests. And our whole year was filled with subsistence activities. May and June are busy months for us: fishing for walleye, brook trout, and bass (in different kinds of waters), hunting for morel mushrooms, planting and tending gardens, harvesting ramps (or wild onions). There’s a subsistence activity for every season. In summer: wild berries (blueberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, blackberries, pincherries, chokecherries). In fall, grouse and deer hunting, wild ricing, fishing for muskie, and harvesting wild cranberries. In the winter, we’d ice fish, and most of my uncles formerly trapped for meat and fur until the early 1960s.
There are a lot of reasons why people might hunt, fish, garden, or gather in today’s day and age. These traditions aren’t usually essential for our own survival today, when we can buy food from the store—although some people (myself included when I was younger), really need the extra food. Yet these traditions remain extraordinarily strong in rural communities across the country (with ample regional variations). These traditions endure because they’re really important to a lot of people on a deep level.
There’s no one thing as “hunting” or “fishing.” There are many co-existing reasons people harvest their own food. One time, when I was in grad school and money was very tight for me, I drove north to visit my parents, and get a few days of fishing in so I’d have some fish to eat. I returned to Madison, Wisconsin, and was telling a friend that I was north fishing. “How great to have that bonding time with your father,” he said. I tried to explain that my family always considered fishing a form of work, since we relied upon the meat. He countered, “Yeah, but it’s all about the memories you make together.” Well, not for us, Steve... not for us.
What “Steve” was really saying is that he had a bad relationship with his dad, and that fishing brought them together. He then projected that emotion and experience onto me, and literally could not understand—no matter how many different ways I explained it—that we were fishing for reasons that differed from his own. Now, I’m not saying my fishing is somehow better than his... I’m only saying it’s different, and that it’s important to 1) always listen when people say that their experience is different from your own; and 2) give space to allow traditions to exist that are outside of your own experience.
You might mushroom hunt for fun. You might hunt ducks for sport. You might fish to bond with a family member. Your might pick blackberries because the ones at the store are too expensive, or grow your own tomatoes because the ones at the store have “no flavor.” You might harvest food because it’s what you grew up with, and it just feels wrong to not put in a garden during the summer. You might harvest food as an expression of your identity (or even spirituality), to feel relationships with your food sources, or even as a political act to support local food systems. Or maybe it’s a little bit of all of the above, all at the same time.
One of the best parts about working in folklore is working with primary texts, and this week we’ll be looking at a couple. Cully Gage (or Charles Van Riper) was the son of a doctor who
grew up in Upper Michigan in the early 20th century. He worked as a linguist at Michigan State University, and after retiring, he wrote memoirs about his childhood and the rich local culture of the region. Similarly, Mert Cowley is a “deer hunting poet,” who tends to write simple rhymed verse depicting comical situations surrounding hunting and outdoor life. These kinds of works are extremely popular, but only within a very small community. You might see them in local bookstores, or even for sale in restaurants and gas stations. Sometimes called folk literature, these authors tap into local themes for a local audience in ways that build and sustain community and identity.
Hunting, fishing, gardening, farming, and gathering aren’t just ways to attain food, but rather they are a way of life. They can represent how we understand place and time, how we communicate, how we understand life and death, and how we understand our own place in the world. People hunt and tell stories about hunting. They create art for their homes that reflect hunting themes, or even have their animals taxidermied to hang on their walls. People buy bass license plates, wear deer sweatshirts, and wood burn animal tracks on gun cabinets. They study ecology, weather, and traditional hunting techniques for fun. They learn how to process animals or tan hides on their own. They have special recipes for game, and serve the game to mark special occasions or to honor certain guests. People develop unique customs to ritualize the hunt: taking a bite from a deer heart, parading back to camp with a deer-liver on a forked stick, cutting shirt-tales off if a hunter misses a buck. Harvesting food is more than just a pastime. It’s how you live, how you think, and how you experience the world.
Cully Gage’s short stories are from a series of books called The Northwoods Reader. (Note that these scans are from many different books, so there are some scanned pages after the completion of a story that you don’t need to read.) Food is a recurrent theme throughout these series, and I’ve chosen a few examples that reflect some different ways people deal with food
“Wild Food” reflects the great diversity of foods that were regularly eaten in Upper Michigan, and the knowledge of local edibles that old-timers once possessed. When I first read these chapters, I was shocked by how many everyday plants I experienced were regularly eaten as a food source. Particularly, I began to wonder why we are not encouraged to forage
on these plants today, but rather are encouraged to be afraid of eating local plants. I still recall, when I was 4 years old and visiting a neighbor, I went into their backyard and was eating wintergreen berries. The neighbor parents (from Chicago) panicked because I was eating
berries. My mother was called, she came over, and there was much ado. My mom empathized with my neighbor, but I was somewhat defiant: “Learn your berries, Marge! This isn’t exactly rocket science.”
It does seem strange to me that people have forgotten how to eat edible plants that grow all around us, and instead depend on commercial food production. It seems a bit unwise from both an economic standpoint, and from a “survival of the species” standpoint... but maybe that’s just me. Like many outdoorspeople, Gage is interested in bushcraft and Native hunting and trapping technologies. Not long before his time, people made snares of telegraph wire or even inner basswood fire, they dug pit-traps with spears for deer, and used dead-fall traps to kill wild game without suffering. Some Native friends of mine still use traditional traps. They’re ingenious and probably more humane than steel traps.
If you look at Gage’s stories, you’ll see a lot of recognizable themes. There is discussion of poaching deer (and acceptable and unacceptable poaching). There’s a disdain for store-bought blueberries (since the wild ones are so much better), or the refusal to serve wild strawberry jam to city people who won’t appreciate it, implicitly dividing community insiders from outsiders.
The final two selections show how oral genres of stories emerge from hunting and fishing as a practice. The first describes a storytelling session, in which people are story-swapping at a bar, telling increasingly more unbelievable stories, until they become tall tales. Tall tales are much like legends (or stories that are told as if they are true), except tall tales are told mostly for the amusement of the teller. If I tell a whopper of a fishing tale, I’m testing you to see how far you’ll believe me as the story becomes increasingly outlandish. It’s almost a game more than a story.
Did I ever tell you about the time my uncle was fishing and a 36 inch muskie jumped into the boat with him? This was actually witnessed by a game warden (so we know it actually happened), and my uncle released the muskie because it wasn’t legally caught.
One time your uncle was fishing for bass, and there was a little red cap on his new reel that looked like a jewel. This was in the 1960s. And that little jewel just popped right off when he was reeling it up, and it fell into the lake. Well, he was fishing that same lake later that summer... 3 months later... and he caught a bass, and when he filleted it and opened its stomach, there was that same jewel he lost.
True or not? I’m told these stories are true. But I don’t really know.
The final story involves pranks. A Norwegian and Finn, Emil and Eino, are best friends who enjoy pranking each other. Eino decides to tap a telephone pole, as if it’s a maple tree. Emil thinks Eino to be a fool. When they find liquid in the sap bucket the next day, Eino is excited and Emil is confused. When Emil decides to prove it’s not maple sap, he takes a sip, only to realize the bucket’s actual contents.
Often people play pranks or jokes on each other in the woods as a sort of test of one’s awareness. One fishing guide uncle of mine was asked by a tourist: “Whenever I’m casting, the fish are striking short. They’re hitting the end of the lure, but it’s behind the hook. What should I do?” My uncle said: “Put a longer leader on it.” (For non-fishers, this means basically using a longer line, which would have no impact on where a fish strikes. I think it’s funny.)
Or, when a tourist saw a robin, she asked him how to lure the robin closer to her so she could take a photo. He said: “Just make a noise like a worm.” These jokes encourage one to pay attention to their own surroundings, lest you face a teasing or joke at your own expense.
Mert Cowley’s book In Camps of Orange is about deer hunting in Wisconsin. The book is a hodgepodge of photos, reflections, stories, and more, and what’s excerpted here is an excerpt from a deer camp’s journal that describes 3 different years of hunting in their deer camp.
Many hunters go to a deer camp. The camp itself can be many things (including just being in an ordinary house), but often the camp occurs in a fairly rustic building, sometimes lacking electricity or running water in the backwoods. Deer camps are filled with folklore. There are stories, jokes, and pranks. There are recipes made year after year, and some men assume “women’s roles” as cooks and caretakers within the camp space. There are card games, flowing alcohol, good luck charms, art made at camp, and lots of laughs. Not every camp is like this, of course, but many are. I even had one former student whose family would watch Bambi the night before the hunt, and root for the hunters.
In many places where hunting is important, school is canceled, local radio shows report on who shot and registered deer in the area, and radios play a small collection of hunting-themed
songs by local artists on the radio like “The Second Week of Deer Camp” and “Da 30- Point Buck.” (Give each a quick sampling.) Actor Jeff Daniels, who is originally from lower Michigan, wrote a stage play which he adapted to a film about these camps called Escanaba in Da Moonlight, featuring fart-jokes, incomprehensible dialects, aliens, and homemade moonshine. Perhaps it also had something to do with deer, as well.
Cowley is a fairly serious hunter, and that reflects in the reading. Camp life balances serious hunting with good eating, dealing
with weather, nicknames, jokes, “camp records,” and the “two who tend to tipple.” You can see changes as the week goes on, from the excitement of the night before the hunt, to initial focus on the hunting (with precise times marked), to a retreat into the more social aspects of camp later in the week.
The camp journal is both a serious record of the hunt, as well as a place to enshrine tomfoolery and misdeeds. Lots of camps have them, but not all do. I also know people who have kept records of the hunt carved into the wood of their deer stands. After a lot of years in the woods, the memories tend to blend together.
I’d like you to watch an episode of the 25 minute program, “Wisconsin Foodie.” There are two halves to the episode. The first involves Native-inspired festival foods at Milwaukee’s Indian Summer Festival. The second involves the revitalization of a very old cooking technique, cooking a stuffed muskie underground and wrapped in birchbark. This tradition hasn’t been practiced in perhaps more than a century, until a few people in the community decided to bring it back. It’s worth asking, which is the more authentic tradition? Baking a muskie in a way that hasn’t been done in a century? Or eating the tasty festival foods you likely grew up with, but with a Native twist?
There are important lessons to learn here about how we understand authenticity. Authenticity is perhaps rooted more in our perceptions and personal values than in historical reality. Some people speak of authenticity being bound to a year. Are potatoes authentic Irish cuisine, or is
tomato sauce authentic to Italian foods? Well, if you’re talking about today, definitely. But if you go back 500 years, both foods were only present in the Americas. Were these cuisines more authentic in the year 1400? Well, many of the agricultural practices during the Middle Ages were imported from the Middle East. So, was Irish and Italian cuisine more authentic in the year 6000 BCE, when people were hunting, fishing, and gathering—before most of these languages and territories were even established in a contemporary sense? It’s an absurd game you can play when you try to link authenticity to the past. Everything comes from somewhere.
After all, is it more “authentic” if you ate foods from 1900, dressed in the latest styles of that time, or expected farmers to give up tractors? Of course not! We’d probably feel ridiculous doing so. Authenticity is sort of a paradox. At once, nothing is really authentic, yet everything is authentic in its own way. Thinking of Indian Summer & the muskie bake, I think we can find certain aspects of authenticity within both traditions. Each tradition has authenticities within it. We maybe retcon the entire imagined notion of “authenticity” into the past, in order to understand the present, or in order to showcase historical continuity of shared community values.
The last two readings turn towards plants. How we garden can say a lot about us as people. How do you arrange a garden? Do you separate different species? Do you plant everything in nice, neatly arranged rows of evenly spaced plants? This is the norm in Western cultures. But in Native cultures, where circles are more culturally important than lines and grids, seeds were often intermixed and planted in circles. Three sisters gardens, for instance, mixed beans, corn, and squash. The beans vined up the corn stalks. The squash’s prickly vines protected the beans. The beans provided nitrogen for the corn. It remains a really effective way to plant. So why isn’t it more common among non-Native people?
Hoover’s journalistic piece on the Oneida farm Tsyunhehkw^ also engages the question of authenticity. Though it’s often overlooked, Native American peoples were some of the most sophisticated agriculturists across the globe, who through careful selective breeding were able
to cultivate wild plants into the domesticated foods that humans depend on today, including staples like corn, tomatoes, and potatoes. The Tsyunhehkw^ garden is traditional in its selection of crops and some of the harvesting activities (like braiding corn to dry). But it also integrates concepts of farmer’s markets, educational tourism, and country stores into its business model. Like the television episode above, we can see that there are certain authenticities within the farm that date to certain historical eras, although it is a modern operational farm which is authentic to our lives today. Once again, this is an outstanding example of how tradition involves static and dynamic elements, and how cultural practice is always creolized and hybrid in nature.
Hufford makes a point about “the commons” at the end of her essay. The commons is essentially a term that’s used to describe a kind of public land that people can use for their own subsistence and livelihoods. The drive to privatize this land, to restrict it in other ways, or to industrialize it destroys important economic, environmental, and cultural resources for the people who depend on it. Whether you’re taking away ginseng habitat, or whether you’re trying to protect ginseng by restricting its harvest, you’re hurting people who have harvesting ginseng there for generations, and you’re damaging an entire way of life for ginsengers.
