Following the Smoke - Basket Camp 2001

Following the Smoke
Basket Camp 2001

Fish Lake Casey brought some peppernuts to camp. He roasted them and gave them to Verna because she wasn't feeling well. Someone advised that you not eat too many or might experience, um, digestive distress.

I tried one and they tasted sort of like coffee.

One of the weavers brought a bushel of acorns. Everybody worked on processing them and it still took forever. Step one is to take a rock and give the acorn a good crack and then peel the outer layer off. The next part is to put a small handful of the inner part on the grinding stone and grind with a rock. You use the hopper to keep the ground acorns from spilling off the grinding stone.

The end result is acorn flour. The bitterness has to be leached from the acorns and the traditional method was to use a sand pit. I think this acorn flour was leached with a more modern method involving cheese cloth, a colander and a dripping faucet -- but I wasn't there so I can't be sure about that. On our final feast night we had acorn soup to go with our salmon.

We collected two different kinds of bark and I didn't keep very good notes on these. On the second page there's a photo of Mom, Jan and Laura pounding alder bark. This was used to dye the woodwardia fern red. In this picture, you can hardly see, but Holly is peeling maple bark which is processed and used to for ceremonial skirts. Virtually everything had to be processed in some labor intensive way. In ancient times when the young women were goofing off some older Indian woman probably scolded them with an expression about idle hands and put them back to work.

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Posted: 10.07.01
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