Celebrating fry bread and Native American ancestry with the basic ingredients

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For most Americans, November is traditionally the month to celebrate Thanksgiving. But November is also Native American Heritage Month. For this month’s Hidden Kansas, we look at one of those important traditions: fry bread.
Tracy Smith knows all too well what it was like sitting in school when the gales and storms of November blew in.

And even though it’s been a few decades since she was in grade school, she remembers day-dreaming about her
grandmother’s fry bread.

“I’d be sitting there, looking out the window because, of course, I wasn’t listening to the teacher,” Smith said. “But I was looking out the window … especially be (on) rainy days, and I could swear I could smell my grandma’s bread and corn soup. And I’d … get home and she had corn and fry bread made.”

For many years now, Tracy and her daughter, Shawnee, make frybread for the region’s powwows, wedding and other celebrations. She is chairman of the Wichita All Nations Powwow Council and of Shawnee, Pawnee and Seminole ancestry.

She considers her fry bread a symbolic food. It comes with stories and memories. It serves as a reminder.

“Thanksgiving itself is not something that we would particularly celebrate … We celebrate our families and how we were able to overcome a lot of things,” she said. “Fry bread, of course is the main one. It goes with everything…What makes it that way is the recipe my grandmother gave me, which is secret, and I can never tell anybody…what makes it special is every time I make it, I think about myself in my grandma’s kitchen. She’s teaching me how to make it and talking to me through the whole thing.”

Smith’s grandparents were Rufus and Lena Squirrel, who were some of the people instrumental in helping start the Mid-America All-Indian Center and Hunter Health Clinic in Wichita decades ago.

In October, Tracy Smith and her daughter, Shawnee, traveled outside of Wichita to help teach attendees at the First People of Kansas event at the St. John Homecoming Hall and Museum in St. John the fine art of making frybread.

People lined up.

From now until the end of the year, the Smiths are booked, constantly making frybread for area events.

She starts with the basics – flour, warm water or milk, salt and maybe some baking powder or yeast. No measuring cups or spoons are used. The dough mixture is made by hand – her hands—and the ancestors before her. Her dough is the consistency of a thick pudding. Once the ingredients are combined, she lets the dough sit for 45 minutes to an hour, putting a kitchen towel over in it while the dough sets up.

Then, small golf ball size dough balls are flattened, stretched and shaped into four-inch discs with a hole in the middle like a donut.

Oil is heated to fry the bread.

“There’s no measuring with me,” Smith said. “There’s no time limit or timer. It’s just by the eye … since I make all mine by hand, none of them probably look the same shape – because that’s what let’s you know, they’re all made by hand.

“At home, I cook in a cast iron skillet … it was my grandma’s cast iron skillet .. and it was her mom’s cast iron skillet … We just keep using it.”

Fry bread can be a meal – add ground beef, beans and taco seasonings and it becomes an Indian taco. It is a desert when honey, brown sugar and sweets are added.

But always, it is a serious reminder of when Native American tribes were forced from their lands and placed on reservations.

By the mid-1870s, Kansans had taken away many of the Native American tribes hunting lands and way of life and moved them into Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.

“They were given very little rations,” Smith said. “One of them was flour … Out of necessity, this is how you feed your family. One of the other rations that were given out … is the lard. We just got a little fancier when we got older and got Crisco …

“My grandma said that it was always here. She used to always say 1492, (when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean Islands) we had our own food, and we had our own breads and our own meals that we made that sustained us.”

And so, fry bread is the journey and stories of a people.

https://www.kmuw.org/podcast/hidden-kan ... ngredients