Filled with historic and contemporary photographs, baskets and other artifacts, food specimens, memoirs and recipes, Seaweed, Salmon, and Manzanita Cider: A California Indian Feast is a new statewide traveling exhibition from the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, organized by Exhibit Envoy.
The exhibition features foods important in the lives of Native Californians including fish, shellfish, seaweed, meat, vegetables, berries, fruits, flowers, nuts, seeds and salt. This delicious look at native foods is based on the 2008 Heyday Books publication Seaweed, Salmon, and Manzanita Cider: A California Indian Feast by Margaret Dubin and Sara-Larus Tolley, a delightful and sometimes startling compendium of Native American cuisine—the most authentic local food around.
Sherrie Smith-Ferri, Director of the Grace Hudson Museum, curated this exhibition in consultation with her aunt, Kathleen Rose Smith, a California Indian artist and a member of the Coast Miwok and Dry Creek Pomo tribes.
“It brought back lots of good memories of getting together with the family to spend time at the coast harvesting abalone, mussels and seaweed, or going to pick berries,” Smith-Ferri said. “And of course, it brings back recollections of some great meals eaten together. I found I would get really hungry if I worked too long a stretch of time on the exhibit.”
“Our foods were (and still are) as varied as the landscape, as are our methods of preparing them,” Kathleen Rose Smith added. “We ate them raw. We roasted, boiled, baked, leached, steeped, dried, and stored them, and, after contact, we fried and canned them.”
The book and the exhibit contain harvesting instructions and recipes for many delicious foods, including Huckleberry Bread, Pine Nut Soup, Rose Hip or Elderberry Syrup, Peppernut Balls and Ingeniously Roasted Barnacles.
The traveling exhibition includes historic and contemporary California Indian baskets and other artifacts used to hunt, gather and process California Indian native foods; historic and contemporary framed photographs of California Indian peoples gathering, preparing and enjoying traditional food; large format framed contemporary photographs of California Indian food resources; and informative text panels.
The exhibition also contains preserved or processed examples of types of California Indian foods (jars of kippered salmon, dried manzanita berries, dried seaweed, different types of acorns). And there are tear off recipes for visitors to try these native foods at home.
