Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 7–9

Preserving the Harvest: Salmon, Seal, Moose and Deer

History Class · Level band: Grades 7–9

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

Preserving the Harvest: Salmon, Seal, Moose and Deer

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = a published primary account, an official or tribal record, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = Indigenous oral history, a people's own published teaching, or an Indigenous knowledge holder's account as recorded, labelled as such. Debated / Claim = a disputed point or an inference, carried with its positions and never settled by assertion. This entry is a historical record of how foods were kept. It is not a set of instructions. Modern food-safety guidance governs any present-day practice.

2. Salmon — The River Harvest, Kept

• The two climates of drying. Documented fact: on the coast and the Plateau, salmon was preserved by drying with smoke or by sun and wind, and was sometimes pounded during drying to keep it from hardening completely; the parts dehydrated for keeping were the flesh, the backbone, the roe and the head. Smoked salmon was eaten with eulachon oil (Kuhnlein, n.d.).
• Wind-drying in the Fraser Canyon. Documented fact: just beyond Yale, where hot August winds funnel through the Fraser Canyon, Stó:lō and neighbouring fishers set drying racks high on rocky outcrops; salmon hung from the poles dried in a few days. The flat dried fish were stacked between layers of green alder boughs, which kept them in good condition and away from wasps until they were carried back to the village. The racks stand there still and are still used, though diminishing runs and regulation mean they are no longer filled as they once were (Stewart, Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast, 1977).
• The smokehouse on the wet coast. Documented fact: coast peoples who contended with rain and damp relied on drying and smoking. Their smokehouses — some quite large, built of cedar planks on post-and-beam frames, some with a second storey used for storage — held rows of long poles high in the smoke; a low bench-rack ran around the walls where dried salmon were stacked so air could circulate, and strips of roe and pairs of backbones hung from pegs. Fish could be half-smoked and left soft for eating right away, or fully smoked until hard and completely dehydrated for storage; some people pounded the fish frequently during smoking to keep it soft (Stewart, 1977). The contrast is recorded in tribal teaching materials in the same terms: upriver and interior peoples built open racks where warm dry canyon winds do the work, while the moist coast built enclosed cedar smokehouses (Suquamish Tribe curriculum record, n.d.).
• The Plateau: pounded salmon, stored underground. Documented fact: peoples of the Northwest Plateau dried and smoked salmon before pounding it and storing it underground, and made a salmon "pemmican" from the dried fish, which they traded (Kuhnlein, n.d.). Storage below ground — cool, dark, and sealed — carried the river harvest through the winter in the dry interior.
• Interior variations, kept distinct. Documented fact: Interior Salish peoples stored salmon in caches made of wood, to keep it safe from moisture; among the Ktunaxa (recorded in the source as Kutenai), women prepared the fish and it was sun-dried, not smoked (Kuhnlein, n.d.). One people's method is not flattened into another's: wind in the canyon, smoke on the coast, sun in the interior, the pit on the Plateau.
• The roe, aged. Documented fact: salmon roe was fermented into a cheese-like substance and then buried underground, or stored in the stomach of a deer (Kuhnlein, n.d.). Fermentation was not an Arctic-only instrument; it was practised in the salmon country too.
• Antiquity, at the level the record carries it. Claim: the northern-foods compilation states that cultures of the Northwest Coast began preserving salmon some 2,000 years ago, by drying or smoking (Kuhnlein, n.d.). The date is that compilation's statement, carried at that level; the methods themselves are documented in detail from the ethnographic record above.

3. Seal — The Sea Harvest, Kept

• Documented fact: seal stands beside the whale in Hunting Whales and Seals; this section follows what happened to the seal after the hunt. Seal meat was dried, and dried seal was eaten dipped in seal oil (Hensel, 1996, on a Yup'ik fishing-camp meal, as carried in Semiotic Review, n.d.; Kuhnlein, n.d.).
• The drying rack and the black meat. Documented fact — the Iñupiaq record: for mipkuq, the "black meat," the front and back straps of the bearded seal (ugruk) are hung on the iññisaq, the meat drying rack, for two to three days until a dry, dark outer layer forms; the blubber is cut into strips and rendered for its oil — in the old days, rendered within the intact sealskin itself, the seal "poke" (Iñupiaq traditional-foods record, n.d.).
• The poke — the seal kept the seal. Documented fact: seal bladder, stomach and skin were widely used to store oil; the Nunivak Yupik used the sealskin poke itself, the Tlingit used seal bladders to store grease or oil, and the skin, bladder and stomach served as oil containers for peoples from the Mi'kmaq to the Coast Salish (who stored eulachon oil so) (Kuhnlein, n.d., seals chapter). The container is part of the preservation: oil kept out air, and foods stored in oil kept under it. An Iñupiaq practitioner said it plainly in 2025: "The best seal oil I ever had was stored in seal pokes. Seal pokes have a long story behind it. It's seal hides made into a container" (Harris, Maniilaq Association, in KOTZ, 2025).
• Igunaq — the aged meat of the caches. Documented fact: igunaq is fermented — aged — walrus or seal meat, cached away for future use, the meat usually cached beneath stones or pebbles, and in the right gravel, where it ages in the ground. Igloolik and Hall Beach (Sanirajak) are known for the best igunaq on Baffin Island. The record is exact about the craft's conditions: the meat must be stored away at the right season, when it is not too hot or too cold — temperature plays a big role — and cached meat was saved for the winter, against the standing risk that a polar bear would find the cache first (Inuit igunaq record, Nunavut, n.d.).
• Kiviaq — birds in the sealskin. Documented fact: among the Inughuit of northwestern Greenland, little auks — small seabirds, hundreds of them, whole — were packed into the hollowed sealskin, which was sewn shut and coated with seal fat to make it airtight, then buried under rocks; over months the birds fermented inside the skin into a soft, high-fat preserved food (Fitzhugh & Kaplan, 1982). At the midwinter festival of Quviasukvik, which marks the sun's return, igunaq and kiviaq were shared communally — the preserved foods were not only stores but offerings that bound the community (Laugrand & Oosten, 2010).
• The permafrost cellar — siġļuaq. Documented fact: food cellars dug into permafrost — siġļuaq in Iñupiaq, siqlugaq in Yupik — are a natural refrigeration used "to preserve, age, and ferment foods harvested for subsistence, including marine mammals, birds, fish, and plants," and Indigenous peoples of the Arctic have built them for millennia. A cellar found in 2005 at Sivuqaq (Gambell, St. Lawrence Island) held whale blubber radiocarbon-dated to 1030–1070 ± 70 years BP, in a whalebone-supported style essentially the same as cellars used today (Yoshikawa et al., 2022, ARCTIC 75(2): 225–241). The same study records that warming permafrost now threatens the cellars and the traditions held in them.
• The caution in the record, stated as history. Documented fact: the aged foods carried a real edge, and the record does not hide it — the igunaq record warns that over-aged meat can be poisonous and that people have died from it (Inuit igunaq record, n.d.), and the Maniilaq service area of northwest Alaska has seen more than fifteen outbreaks of botulism tied to traditional Native foods since the 1950s (KOTZ, 2025). This is why the entry's standing line stands: the history is recorded here; modern food-safety guidance governs any present-day practice.

4. Moose and Deer — Dry Meat of the Forest and the Plains Edge

• Pânsâwân — the dry meat. Documented fact: pânsâwân, a Cree word loosely translated "thin-sliced meat," is the dried smoked meat of the Cree, Dene and Métis, made from bison, elk or moose: the meat is sliced parallel to the grain into thin sheets — sometimes one long "scroll" sliced from a single muscle — laid on a wooden frame, and dried and smoked together over a small controlled flame, sometimes inside a covered smoke shack. The finished dry meat is shelf-stable for long periods without modern preservatives; it is eaten as it is, like jerky, or pounded to make pemmican (Pânsâwân record, n.d.). North American jerky foods descend from this and kindred Indigenous methods.
• The Elders' cookbook record — moose. Documented fact — a First Nations Elders' published account: Rita Billette of Cold Lake First Nation records the drying of moose meat — the meat cleaned and cut into thin strips, hung on the rack of a smoke house, and lightly smoked for two to three days over a fire of green poplar or dry willow, the fire kept going at all times; Mary Rain of Paul First Nation records dried pieces of elk, deer or moose pounded for the pemmican mixture (Yellowhead Tribal Council, Traditional Methods of Canning and Preserving: Recipes and Tips from Alberta's First Nations People, n.d.).
• Yup'ik moose — a newer animal, kept the old way. Documented fact: moose were not usually seen in the lower Kuskokwim River drainages until the early 1940s — the moose chapter of Yup'ik preservation is a twentieth-century chapter. Moose meat was preserved by freezing and drying, rarely by smoking; hunters at spring camps in the mountains cut the meat into strips and hung it on racks or bushes to dry in the sun, making jerky that was eaten as it was or boiled. Virtually all of the moose was used: the bones were cracked and the marrow removed, the back and rump fat eaten, the head, heart, liver and kidneys kept (Yup'ik subsistence record, n.d.).
• The caches of the Tanana country. Documented fact: in the Alaska Dene (Tanana) record, summer meat was cut into long thin strips and hung on racks about eight feet from the ground to dry in direct sun over three to seven days, a smudge of punky wood kept burning beneath to ward off insects. The dried stores were kept in aerial caches — a miniature log cabin suspended some ten feet in the air on stilts — or in underground caches floored and sided with logs, covered with animal skin, earthed over, and weighted with heavy logs against scavengers; in winter, food was simply left outside on a raised platform, where it froze (Tanana ethnographic record, after McKennan, 1959).
• Venison in the longhouse. Documented fact: among the Haudenosaunee, most of the foods the people relied on could be dried or smoked for long-term storage — fish and venison among them — and the dried meats were generally kept inside the longhouse, while dried corn, beans and squash were kept in the longhouse and in the outdoor pits (New York State Museum, A Mohawk Iroquois Village, n.d.).
• Bone grease — nothing wasted, not even the bone. Documented fact: at the great Plains processing places, after the meat was stripped, the bones themselves were rendered: smashed up and boiled — by stone-boiling in pits and hide or paunch vessels — to free the fat from the cancellous bone tissue. The archaeological signature is unmistakable and dense: scatters of highly fragmented bone beside the boiling pits at late prehistoric and historic kill and processing sites (Binford, 1978; Brink & Dawe, 1989, synthesized in the communal bison-hunting literature). At Head-Smashed-In, the processing area below the jump — used across some 5,700 years — held the whole sequence in one place: meat roasted, bones boiled for grease rendering, strips of meat dried in the sun, and pemmican made (Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump record, n.d.).
• Tradition — a Gwich'in maker's account of the grease: Julia McDonald, a Vuntut Gwich'in resident of Old Crow Flats in the Yukon, described bone-grease making as it is still taught: after the meat is cut off, the bones rest one day only — left two or three days, the grease would taste too strong; they are smashed into pieces "as big as finger nails" with the back of an axe, then boiled in a kettle with a little cold water (McDonald, as recorded in the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery pemmican paper, 2022). The northern forest ran the same rendering as the Plains, on moose and caribou bone.
• Pemmican's place in this entry. Documented fact, in summary (the full record stands in Following the Herds): dried meat — bison above all, and moose, deer and elk in the forest country — was pounded to powder and mixed with hot rendered fat and marrow fat and, when available, dried berries, then packed into hide bags of about 90–100 pounds and sewn shut; a bag kept for months or years and concentrated several times its weight in fresh meat, and that keeping quality is what fuelled the northern fur trade (Colpitts, 2015, Pemmican Empire; Hargrave, 1871). Debated / inference: archaeological evidence of bone-grease making has been taken to suggest that pemmican was already being made on the Great Plains between five and six thousand years ago (Oxford Symposium pemmican paper, 2022). The grease rendering is documented; the full pemmican recipe at that depth is an inference, and is carried as one.
• Hide and bone close the circle. Documented fact: the animal that was eaten was also the animal that carried and covered the food — the rawhide parfleche, a folded envelope made by Plains and Plateau women, carried dried meat as saddle-borne luggage (see Hides), and the brain and marrow that dressed the hide came from the same carcass. Preservation and hide-work are one economy, and this entry's cross-reference to Hides is a join, not a courtesy.

Sources

Kuhnlein, ed., Traditional Animal Foods of Indigenous Peoples of Northern North America (McGill CINE, n.d.), salmon and seals chapters; Stewart (1977) Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast; Suquamish Tribe curriculum record (n.d.); Inuit igunaq record, Nunavut (n.d.); Fitzhugh & Kaplan (1982); Laugrand & Oosten (2010); Yoshikawa et al. (2022) ARCTIC 75(2); Iñupiaq traditional-foods record, mipkuq (n.d.); KOTZ / Maniilaq Association (2025); Hensel (1996); Pânsâwân record (n.d.); Yellowhead Tribal Council, Traditional Methods of Canning and Preserving (n.d.); Yup'ik subsistence record (n.d.); Tanana ethnographic record, after McKennan (1959); Binford (1978); Brink & Dawe (1989); Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump record (n.d.); McDonald (Vuntut Gwich'in), in Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (2022); Colpitts (2015) Pemmican Empire; Hargrave (1871); New York State Museum, A Mohawk Iroquois Village (n.d.). Full citations stand in the research entry, Preserving the Harvest: How the Peoples Kept Their Food.

Flagged claims and weakest-sourced points: (1) The 2,000-year antiquity for salmon preservation is one compilation's statement (Kuhnlein), carried as a claim, not independently dated here. (2) The 5,000–6,000-year pemmican antiquity is an inference from bone-grease evidence, labelled Debated in the reading. (3) The Tanana cache detail rests on a compiled ethnographic data summary drawn from McKennan (1959), not on the monograph read at first hand — carried at that level. (4) The pânsâwân method summary rests on a compiled reference record; the moose-specific practice is independently carried by the Yellowhead Tribal Council Elders' cookbook, the stronger witness. (5) The mipkuq record is a modern Iñupiaq traditional-foods document; its “in the old days” poke statement is the record's own framing. (6) Fitzhugh & Kaplan's kiviaq detail is carried through a secondary survey, not read at first hand.

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