THE AMAZING PEOPLE OF THE PLAINS AND PRAIRIES!
This paper is about the food of the Native people in the plains and prairies of North America before European contact. Some of the tribes of the plains and prairies are Souix, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. For the plains and prairies people their main food source was the bison, and wherever the bison traveled, the people traveled with them. Food is not plentiful on the plains and prairies because it is a very barren place in the grasslands. You will first learn about what the bison was used for. Secondly, you will learn about how to cook bison. Finally, you will learn about how to properly store food. Studying the plains and prairies and its people was a lot of fun because I learned about something I never even thought about. I hope you learn a lot.
The bison had several different uses for the people. Bison is the most popular animal on the plains and prairies. The bison is mostly hunted by being scared off cliffs or being pushed into an easier place to be hunted, like into a wide closed off space. First the whole tribe gathers for the hunt so everyone knows what’s going on. Then the hunters leave and try to track down the bison’s herd. Sometimes the hunters disguise themselves as different animals to blend in wherever the hunters are. Once the arrival of the bison’s herd comes many tribes like Souix, Cheyenne, and Arapaho hold dances and parties to bring the buffalo herd to them. Bisons don’t have good eyesight but they have excellent smell and their horns are extremely dangerous. The hunters use this advantage of bad eyesight so that they can sneak up behind the bison and kill from behind. The bison was not all used for food. It was used for clothing and houses, and its bones were sometimes used as tools. After European contact hunting was a whole lot easier because the Europeans brought horses. Horses helped Native Americans because they could be right beside the bison instead of being behind them. But with horses, the bows and arrows had to be smaller, shorter, and less heavy. The bison was a really important food, and it was cooked in several different ways with several different side dishes.
Cooking a meal took a lot of steps. The fire drill (a skinny piece of wood) had to be rubbed quickly in between both of your palms until the tinder (bark or bison droppings) caught on fire. Rocks were getting hot in the fire. The hot stones were lifted out of the fire and dropped into the bison skin receptacle filled with water. The water is boiled in the bison skin pouch. The meat could be boiled in a pot, roasted on a stick balanced over the fire, or it could also be grilled over the hot coals. This all could not be done if the meat was not stored properly.
You must store your meat properly or else the meat would rot. The plains and prairies people stored their food by making it into pemmican. The people started by first drying the meat under the sun on a log drying rack. Then a woman pounded it with a stone to make it thin. Then, another person boiled the bison fat from cracked bones. Then, it was packed into a raw skin envelope mixed with the boiled fat and berries. Pemmican helps store food by keeping it fresh. The food has to be stored properly or else when you cook the meat it won’t taste as good or the meat might go bad.
I hope you noticed that Native Americans had to do a lot of hard work to stay healthy. Hunting was not so easy because first they had to travel a long, long way. The people of the plains and prairies did not have a refrigerator to store their food and there were no ovens and fancy cookbooks to help them cook their food. The most interesting part of the research for me was learning how to cook a Native American meal because it is nothing like how we cook meals today.
