Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience

Salmón, head of the American Indian Studies program at Cal State University East Bay, is descended from the Rarámuri, an indigenous people from Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico, and his lineage serves at the touchstone for this episodic volume, each chapter of which introduces the reader to a different mode of traditional land stewardship. Readers travel with Salmón to the Pueblos of New Mexico, where a former Native leader fears that his people’s youth are “not returning [from the cities] to farm the dry and barren fields” that are their birthright. They also meet a farmer who “coax[es] heirloom Hopi crops from the sandy soils of the Colorado Plateau, as well as Lois Ellen Frank, an American Indian chef who asks why her culture’s foods are “not considered a cuisine equal to that of French, Italian, and Asian.” As Salmón wryly notes, his project doesn’t focus on an “heirloom tomato that can be purchased for an outlandish price at a swanky farmer’s market,” but instead argues for “renewing whole traditions” that have their basis in indigenous concepts of man’s relationship to his landscape. Though the cause is worthwhile, and the author dedicated, he is not a skilled enough writer to turn workaday prose into compelling narrative. Photos. (May)