Native Foods and Healing Ways

Salmon promotes a healthy heart.

The late Dan Deschinny of Oak Springs, spokesman for the Dineh Spiritual and Cultural Society, said medicine men are actually singers. The singer leads the patient to heal himself by singing the songs, with chants the singer has spent lifetime learning.

Clarke said Navajos and Hopis have a practice of rolling in the snow early in the morning. Canadian Natives, too, often throw cold water on themselves in mornings.

Once again, modern science confirmed that providing the body with sudden cold actually causes an increase in the white blood cell count. Those white blood cells come to the rescue when the body's alarm signals a need for increased resistance due to infection.

Navajos, too, remember the foods that gave them health before the U.S. Calvary arrived with white flour and lard for fry bread, before trading posts sold red soda pops and potato chips and long before U.S. commodity foods brought fatty canned meats and depleted white starchy foods.

Rose Wauneka of Black Mountain remembered when there was plenty of goat's milk to drink with bread made from ground corn. Blue corn was grown in the fields for blue bread, dumplings and mush. Prairie dogs and rabbits were roasted, and deer was hunted with prayer.

Katherine Arviso, department director for Navajo Foods and Nutrition in the 1970s, proved the dense nutritional content of traditional Navajo foods using scientific analysis conducted by the University of Arizona.

Tumble mustard, Zuni Lake salt and corn silk were among 92 foods collected by Arviso's program. Among the amazing findings was the calcium content of the juniper wood ash added to blue corn meal mush; calcium was increased by 800 percent. The ash was made by burning juniper branches and passing the ashes through a sieve.

Calcium was also found in good supply in dleesh (white clay) eaten ground with wild potatoes or wolfberries. Calcium was abundant in wild greens, fresh beeweed and Navajo spinach. Fresh squash blossoms stuffed with blue corn meal was packed with nutrition, along with wild celery and onion soup and roasted mutton.