John Pozniak, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 Fry Bread’s Fans and FoesĪ frybread taco. This familiarity allowed them to create the recipe for fry bread when necessity called. Bitsoie, who served as executive chef at the National Museum of the American Indian until the novel coronavirus hit, says the Navajo and other tribes may have seen these ingredients being used previously. Native Americans received unfamiliar foods in the relocation camps, and low-income communities continue to receive federal disbursements today. The story was a familiar one among Native American communities who experienced similar relocations and internments across the United States. The government issued them rations of flour, salt, and lard, and they cobbled together the recipe for fry bread, which helped them survive internment until an 1868 treaty allowed them to return home. Hundreds of miles away from familiar lands where they could forage, hunt, and grow familiar crops, the Navajo starved. Hundreds of people died each day, and even more succumbed during their encampment.

One such camp emerged from what would become known as the “ Long Walk.” In 1864, the federal government of the United States rounded up Navajo people and forced them to march 300 miles south from their northern Arizona and Four Corners–area homelands to eastern New Mexico at Bosque Redondo. Instead, most trace its origin story to the internment camps that arose from the forced displacement of tribes in the mid-1800s. Now considered a Pan-Indian food that’s nearly ubiquitous across the 574 federally recognized tribes, fry bread is not indigenous to Native American cuisine. “It’s so simple,” Bitsoie says, “but it is the most controversial Native American dish.” Rations and Survival They fried the flat dough outside, placing the round in a rustic, black fry pan over an open fire until it bubbled and crisped, becoming thick yet pliable.įry bread contains only four ingredients-flour, baking powder, salt, and water-but behind this extraordinarily simple recipe is a complex, and tragic, history. Bitsoie was still in elementary school when he and his family first made it to mark a ceremonial event.

Chef Freddie Bitsoie’s earliest memory of making fry bread comes from his childhood on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.

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