Hello. My name is Rachel Beth Sayet or Akitusut (She Who Reads).
I am from the Mohegan Nation, and I will be reading a piece from the late Mohegan elder, Faith Damon Davison, who was born 1940 and passed away in 2019.
Faith Davison claims to be a late bloomer. She and her youngest son received their Bachelor’s degrees in the same year but from different colleges. She has worked at a multitude of jobs, from selling live bait and pumping gas to arranging and cataloging over 100,000 images that were digitized at a major American museum to driving oxen.
Having earned a Master of Library Science degree, she built the Mohegan Library and Archives, including rare books, documents, (and) map collections, and the tribe’s three dimensional collections. She has been a frequent contributor to the tribal publication Wuskuso, and has published numerous historical pamphlets for the Library and Archives, as well as several essays in the Norwich Historical Society’s Nine Mile Square.
Davison retired in the summer of 2010 with plans to start work on her Ph.D. and tend to her luxuriant garden. Her selections here belong to a long regional indigenous tradition of food and recipe writing. The recipes below are being published here for the first time.
I, Rachel Sayet, knew Faith pretty well. I also worked in the Mohegan library and archives from 2013 to 2018 as the library assistant. Even though Faith had already retired, she never actually left the library. She was there all the time, whether it was to tell us the latest news or research she was doing or to participate in our monthly book club that myself and the librarian co-facilitated. Her memory lives on through her many writings, her teachings, and her sense of humor. I ran the Mohegan native food discussion group from 2017 through 2021, and Faith was an active member.
One of the things that Faith and I shared was our love of food. We went on trips together and ate many meals together, and I cherish those memories.
Here is Faith’s piece, “Mohegan Food.”
As you probably know, before the settlers came, we didn’t have butter, milk, cheese, beef, or lamb or pork. Nor did we have chicken. But we did have turkey, duck, geese, and venison, other game birds, and a whole lot of fish and shellfish. We lived on the shore in the summer, so we even dried and smoked fish and shellfish to preserve them for the winter. This saltwater bounty contributed the most protein to our diet. We would plant our corn near our summer villages so that we could care for the fields even while reaping the river’s and ocean’s reward. Massapeag was one of the sites of our old cornfields.
We gathered fiddleheads and early sprouting skunk cabbage. We also dried the blueberries and wild strawberries and “fox” grapes to make our foods sweet. We collected cranberries from the area known as Miller’s Pond and also from near the Ashbow cemetery.
We grew pumpkins, corn, field beans, squash, and some sunflower seeds. We also dried corn and parched acorn meat for a kind of flour. We had hazelnuts, butternuts, walnuts, and chestnuts. We also ate the roots of the Jerusalem artichoke and the water lily.
For seasoning we had juniper berries and sassafras, as well as sweet bay, black birch, and many wild plants that most people today no longer use. We did not have salt in the abundance that is used today but we often used maple and birch sugar to make our meat and cakes tasty, as well as the rendered fats from raccoons and bears.
We made clambakes using hot rocks and seaweed for the steam; we boiled our meats by using hot stones dropped into watertight vessels. And, of course, we roasted and broiled things over an open fire. We made our corn cakes on flat rocks near the hot coals from our campfires. Our popcorn was roasted on the cob, but we had no butter to make it doubly tasty.
Breakfast was our main meal, but we’d eat it after being awake for a few hours, and it could be of anything filling —not just cereals. Then we’d snack all day and have a light meal before bedtime. We always had a pot of some kind of food on the fire in case guests dropped in. If there was any food to be had in a village, no one would go hungry. Along with succotash (beans, corn, and whatever else we could put in the pot), we made yokeag (dried, parched cornmeal mixed with fat) and journey cakes. With a little imagination, you could be eating the same soup your grandmother ate when she was a girl.