House 43 Digest Online

The Northeast Food

Introduction

I am studying the northeast foods and you will learn about hunting food, food they gathered, food they grew, and how they cooked their food. The region that I am studying is the northeast well it is in the northeast in North America and winters were mild and summers could get extremely hot. The time period I studied is around the 1500s. The Ojibwa and Iroquois are two of the tribes.

Hunting

In this paragraph you will hear about how the northeast Indians hunted their food. In this paragraph you will learn about what the men used to hunt and how the men made their weapons. They would use dead falls to catch big animals and used bows and arrows. Dead falls hold big and heavy things above where animals walk. When the big animal steps on the jig that pushes the big and heavy thing down, it falls down on the big animal and sckwash. The animal is still enough for them to shoot and it. Arrows and bows are used together. The arrow is shot by the bow. The bow launches the arrow and the arrow shoots in to the animal. They hunted fish, too.

At rivers and lakes, the men took a long stick and attached an arrow to the stick. When they saw a fish, they would stick the spear into the fish and bring the fish to the wigwam or long house, two kinds of houses. You can also read about these two in Laeo’s paper. Here is a fact about hunting. The Native Americans cared for the animals and would not kill the animal during the mating season or birth season. The men would also catch clams, oysters, and scallops. They  were found in the rivers and bays. The Indians that lived near the rivers would harvest thousands of shellfish. They would eat the meat in side and make big piles of the shells, like we saw at Inwood Park.  Some Indians would harvest freshwater muscles. They are smaller then ocean clams and oysters. They caught birds, too, with the neck trap. They would blend the rope into the bushes and it would be shaped in a loop for where the head of the bird would be. When the bird’s head went into the loop the Indian watching would pull up the loop and it would choke the bird. The bird would die. So the Native Americans were so smart they could catch big animals to tiny animals and make perfect traps and weapons to catch those animals.

Food they gathered

In this paragraph you will learn about the food the Native Americans gathered. They gathered lots of different foods. FUN FACT did you know that the women would cook and gather the food? They would gather lots of things, like corn, acorns, and wild strawberries. Sometimes the children would go to the woods and gather chestnuts that they would roast roots, mushrooms and fruits and all other kinds of plants. A lot of plants were eaten when they turned ripe. Food was stored for the winter, but not strawberries. They were most ripe in the late spring. In spring there are wild strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and the root of the cattail plant. Sometimes there were leftovers for winter from spring and summer.

Food they grew

Lots of food were grown and gathered. They would grow rice and this is how.  Two women would be in a canoe and collected rice stalks and pulled off the stalks in until the canoe was full. They would take the canoe ashore, and they would parch the stalks (when I say parch I mean heat over a fire) until the stalks dried. The heat loosened the husks or the case of the stalks. Once the grain were loosened, the grains had to be jigged. A man would dance on the stalks  to finish the rubbing off the husks. The women then put the rice in a shallow tray and threw the stalks in the air to dry the rice. They would also grow corn, squash and beans because beans need to grow up something and corn grows tall and squash grows around the bottom. They plant them near each other and they are called tree sisters!!  I really liked learning about all the different kinds of food Native Americans grew. And there were so many.

How they cooked their food

In this paragraph you will learn about most of the ways Native Americans cooked their foods and how they made their fires and what they used. They would take two sticks and rub them together until they made a fire. The fire was in the middle of a circle with rocks forming the circle. They put sticks in a cone shape over the burning sticks and that was their fire. They also hung clay pots over the fire. They would take two sticks and plant them in to the ground around the fire. They tied another stick on top of the two sticks. They would tie two sticks to the one on the top vertically hanging down. They would tie a piece of bark to the vertical sticks as a platform. They put a pot on the little platform and cooked it on there. There were foods that were not cooked, like acorns. They were sometimes roasted.

I liked this because it was very interesting and I hope you think so, too. I loved learning about the northeast food and I hope you enjoyed it, too. My thing that I found most interesting was food they gathered and the three sisters.