Native Hunting & Food Gathering

Their lives may have been physically demanding and their diets rough, but they were healthy (few digestive or stomach problems such as ulcers), physically fit, never obese, and, as history has proven, quite content to be living a lifestyle that seems harsh and is 

completely unfamiliar with ANY of us today.

Everything eaten was pure, 100% organic, wild plant and animal foods. 

So far this sounds quite healthy--and it was--but some of what they ate and how they fixed it might not sound as wholesome, too you. the North American native ate essentially everything edible they could get their hands on and they ate many things with little or no preparation. The term "foraging" probably describes most of the food procurement strategy more accurately than does "hunting and gathering

The latter may conjure up an image of an orderly division of labour with women and children gathering plant foods fairly close to camp and men sallying forth on hunting expeditions to bring home game.This is probably fairly accurate, but, in reality it was far more complex. Hunters and gatherers are opportunists first and foremost. Most of the time, they foraged off the land scape taking advantage of whatever food they found. Adult male hunters did target big game--deer; or if you prefer venison, (include moose and elk), were the top-ranked locally available prey--as judged by archaeological digs and the amount of meat represented by the bones found. When the hunters brought home a fat deer, life was good--bellies were filled with meat, fat was rendered, hides stretched and scrapped, and praise was sung to the mighty hunter. But, deer hunting success was likely limited: deer are wary, skittish and like bison, they are highly mobile.

While deer supplied an estimated 40-50% of the total meat; plants, birds, and relatively small animals that could be trapped, snared, netted, or knocked on the head with a stick were the dietary mainstay. Women and children would have harvested most of them, especially those requiring labour-intensive gathering and processing; but anyone able and hungry would have been on the lookout for anything easily acquired. Beaver, muskrats, porcupine, rabbits, and raccoons  were for example, were regularly consumed but plants or plant products always accounted for the bulk of the diet.

Hunter-gatherer life is highly mobile, especially in an environmentally challenging country such as Canada. People could not live in one spot for long without exhausting the local supplies of food and firewood and sanitation becoming a major problem. Instead they must have moved their camps quite regularly--even every few days or weeks--to take advantage of the resources changing with the seasons and during short-term climatic events. Because part of the mobility was tied to seasonal rounds--moving across the landscape to areas where different food resources could be found in abundance certain times of the year, they travelled more or less in a circle but the major movement was North and South, rather than East and West..

But the changing seasons only tell part of the mobile life story. Climatic events can be extremely localized and must have triggered movements of people, just as they do the movement of people and animals today. As farmers and ranchers  know only too well, warm-season hail, thunderstorms, or tornadoes often fall in small areas or hit only narrow swaths in this country. Where one spot gets more than it's share of rain, plants bloom, shrubs and trees leaf out, and grasses green up and grow thickly. Deer and other mobile animals from miles around can move quickly to take advantage of localized abundance, especially during droughts and otherwise tough conditions. Hunters and gatherers had to be equally opportunistic. For this reason, it was necessary to have many sheltered places throughout their area in which were stored  large stock piles of firewood (most important during the late winter and early spring when few other sources were available), heavy tools, and small caches of food.

The bison is a relative newcomer to North America, having originated in Eurasia they, (like Aboriginal North Americans); migrated over the Bering Strait; in their case about 10,000 years ago.

The North American Native belonged to a wholly stone-age culture, not possessing metals of any kind (ornamental gold being the only exception) and although the Inuit (a people believed to have immigrated much later) used dogs, the so called "Indians" did not. The usual draft animals were unknown and neither had discovered the wheel. Theirs was a very primitive culture, a thousand years or more behind most Asian, European, or even African civilizations; but the natives were certainly not stupid; they knew Canada's national game --Survival and played it very well..

Native bows, not very accurate and designed for close range (100 yard max); in bush or tall grass, were not powerful enough (30-50 lb. pull) to kill a bison --unless possibly-- if the arrow were first shot high into the air and let fall back to earth (a technique used by the English, in military conditions, with their long-bows). Records show; it often taking up to fifty native arrows to kill a tethered beef animal; which eventually bled to death.

Prior to the introduction Even after the introduction of the horse, it is a certainty that far more bison were killed with a lance than ever had been by an arrow. The process of collecting all the necessary materials and producing a single arrow would take up to six months; the natives could not afford to loose them. The common weapons of both hunting and warfare were clubs, lances, spears and knives made from stone or more often bone or tree bark. The making of a bow string, usually from plant fibre, sometimes from three strands of fine sinew, was a major undertaking.

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