Following the Smoke
Basket Camp 2001
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
http://www.pamrentz.com/pampage/fts2001/fts_01_3.html