Choctaw Labor Day Festival debuts new edition of book about traditional foodways, recipes

Written By: Sarah Liese (Twilla)

As the Choctaw Nation honors its traditions during its Labor Day Festival this weekend, the tribal nation is releasing the second edition of a book that intertwines historic knowledge and a Choctaw man’s experience utilizing traditional foods in his everyday diet.

(OKLAHOMA) Working in the Choctaw Nation’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office for 16 years, Ian Thompson immersed himself in the tribal nation’s history and culture. He accumulated recipes from when the Choctaw people would go out into their gardens, local forest or prairie to collect ingredients — prior to federal commodity rations.

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He and his wife, Amy, started incorporating these Choctaw foods into their diet after she was diagnosed with a form of diabetes a decade ago. He said doctors wanted to prescribe her different medications, but were not getting to the root cause of the disease.

“We both decided, ‘Hey, let's try to change our diet, particularly to an Indigenous Choctaw diet — the type of food that our ancestors ate 300 years ago and see what happens,” Thompson said.

The results were impossible to ignore.

“Within three months, we'd lost 70 pounds between us,” Thompson said. “And my wife was well outside the diabetic range [about] two years into that type of diet.”

Through further research, Thompson learned that his family’s experience was not isolated. Instead, other colonized communities around the globe, which had become accustomed to a Western diet and later switched to their traditional Indigenous diets, also saw similar health improvements.

His experience and work on his farm “Nan Awaya,” or “Place of Growth” — where they cultivate fresh traditional foods — are woven together with Choctaw history in his forthcoming book Choctaw Food: Remembering the Land, Rekindling Ancient Knowledge. 

“With this book, one of the really important things is to keep our experiences separate from the historical experiences that we talk about regularly,” Thompson said. “It's providing a lens of interpretation from the historical materials that is from a living perspective. So it's not just from a book, but it's like, ‘Oh yes, we've experimented with the same thing, and here are the things that we found out.’”

The second edition of Choctaw Food is scheduled to be released this weekend during the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival. It contains about 70,000 more words' worth of new information, Thompson said. That includes new partnerships that have enhanced the book’s content, as well as more experience from Thompson’s work on the Nan Awaya farm, where he said traditional controlled burns have brought back over 200 species of native plants.

“There's also an appendix that lays out the Choctaw names for more than 300 Latin species, and it's got cultural notes on most of those — like the importance of those plants,” Thompson said. “The first book did the same thing, but it came out in 2019. So, we've had lots of opportunities to learn new things since then.”

Choctaw traditional foods are at the heart of the culture as well as the language. That’s why, Thompson said, for the 90 Choctaw recipes in the book to have meaning, it is vital to understand the Choctaw community’s relationship with the land.

“If you're revitalizing traditional foods, you're also, of course, revitalizing connections with the land, but also language,” Thompson said. “For example, a lot of the most threatened parts of tribal languages overlap with traditional foodways and landscape management… So the book looks at how over more than 12,000 years, the Choctaw people interacted with the homeland to shape what is now recognized as the natural environments of that part of the world.”

One part of the book examines the months of the Choctaw calendar and the food-related activities conducted around the seasons. Another chapter explores the wisdom within the traditional Choctaw lifeway, which Thompson said “is relevant today, as it ever was, and not just living on this planet, but how to do so with a high quality of life.”

Anyone can learn from the book, which was written for the Choctaw community. However, Thompson noted that those engaging with it who are not Choctaw should not appropriate the knowledge; instead, he hopes they will use it as inspiration to discover their own Indigenous roots.

“Choctaw Nation, like a lot of tribal communities, is in the midst of a cultural renaissance,” Thompson said. “It's my hope that this book will present information that can be useful to community members in continuing that revitalization in that renaissance. It'll provide a source where they can learn things that are hard to come by elsewhere.”

During the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival, attendees have the opportunity to get their books signed by Thompson on Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Tvshkahoma Capitol Museum, where copies will be sold. The book will also be available for purchase at the Choctaw Store and Wheelock Academy Historic Site, and Choctaw tribal members receive a discount when presenting their membership card.