Foregrounding this song in the Health Center’s battle against diabetes underscores the other side of frybread’s legacy, also emblazoned on a T-shirt that announces “Frybread: Creating Obesity Since 1860.” Cheyenne and Hudulgee Muscogee Indigenous rights activist Suzan Shown Harjo, who vowed to give up frybread as a New Year’s resolution, explains, “Frybread is emblematic of the long trails from home and freedom to confinement and rations. It’s the connecting dot between healthy children and obesity, hypertension, diabetes, dialysis, blindness, amputations and slow death.” Reflecting on stereotypes that dehumanized Indigenous people to justify colonization, such as the worn-out trope of Indians drinking “firewater,” Harjo asserts that frybread love is another way to portray them as “simple-minded people who salute the little grease bread and get misty-eyed about it.”
In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, scholar David Treuer introduces health educator Chelsey Luger, who is Ojibwe and Lakota. Chelsey talks to Indigenous communities about the perils of frybread as part of her efforts to steer their diets in new directions, even in the face of limited food options. “Sometimes people get defensive, but we are able to make the conversation positive. We say we grew up with it and like it and we say frybread is not power. We say frybread kills our people. It’s that serious. It causes diabetes and heart disease. We have to look at those colonial foods as a kind of enemy.”
Frybread arouses passionate feelings in its fans and detractors. Some people celebrate it as culinary artistry, some consume it as a comfort food, some curse it as a colonial byproduct, and some hold it up as a sign of ignorance or self-destruction. But everyone agrees that it is a far cry from the pre-colonial foods that nourished Indigenous people for centuries.
Corn is the centerpiece of Indigenous agriculture. Because corn does not grow wild, its cultivation requires extensive knowledge and care. Indigenous gardeners produced five different types of corn—sweet, dent, flour, flint (for hominy), and popcorn—and dozens of varieties within these types. Processing corn is extremely labor intensive, requiring impressive strength. One Indigenous woman reports beating corn until “our arms felt like they would break.” Activist and environmentalist Winona LaDuke, a member of the Mississippi band Anishinaabeg, recounts her father’s comment when she was a student at Harvard: “I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you cannot grow corn.”