WESTERN NEW MEXICAN FOOD

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GARY TIETJEN’S STORY: WESTERN NEW MEXICAN FOOD
An Alibi (weekly paper) reader shares his family’s story By Robin Babb

I read your recent article, “Who Owns New Mexican Food?” with interest. I would like to make a small contribution. I am 85 years old and have spent my whole life in New Mexico. My great-grandfather came to New Mexico in 1875 as a missionary from the Mormons to the Diné and Zuni peoples. I have written four books on local history centered in Cibola and McKinley Counties (the Grants-Gallup area), so my experience is somewhat regional, but I can tell you what people ate and you can compare that to other areas in the state.

We were always on the edge or within the Navajo Reservation. My father spoke Navajo, so he worked many years for the Indian Service (later the Bureau of Indian Affairs). Later we had a trading post at Mexican Hat, Utah, and I worked in a trading post at Bluewater. For a number of years, Dad was a foreman on Diné crews working for the Biological Survey and for commercial farms in the Bluewater area. My family were all cattle ranchers, but one year was spent raising sheep. For several years I was the cook for our ranch in the Datil area. Thus I am familiar with the Diné diet and the diet of ranchers. For one summer, a Diné friend and I killed one beef a day for the Diné crews at Bluewater. We hired sheepherders and I stayed at the sheep camp and ate with the Diné people there much of the time.

Historically, the Diné people lived on sheep and cattle they had stolen. When none were available, they loved prairie dogs and jackrabbits. When they could farm, they raised corn and squash, but that was seasonal. They did not use flour before 1864. In Jay Sharp’s “The Long Walk,” he says that “The army commissary gave wheat flour to the Indians, who tried to eat the strange new food raw or as gruel. They died of dysentery. [200 died].” They learned to use flour at Fort Sumner and made flour tortillas from it.

More at: https://alibi.com/food/55802/Gary-Tietjens-Story-Western-New-Mexican-Food.html