Notes: This is my experience of eating Native food. I respect the people and their love for the foods they grew up with and that have sustained them for generations. I use the word ‘Eskimo’ because that is how the people I knew identified themselves and how they wanted to e identified. This was to make a distinction between themselves and Native Alaskan people who were not Eskimos. Also, I have changed the name of the village in question, calling it simply ‘Village.’
Where Did You Learn to Eat This Food? Part Two
Now it was Thanksgiving week, and our Eskimo friends had invited us to a church potluck. The food on the table looked pretty familiar. Then we saw it—the bowl of muktuk. This is the quintessential Eskimo food. It is blubber and outer skin (about an inch of each) from the gray whale. Not all Eskimo groups have this food as a tradition, but it has become a kind of pan-Eskimo food and the one they are most known for. So there it was. Bill and I each dutifully took a chunk and sat down to eat. Our friends were in charge of the music, so they were off doing other things. We didn’t know anyone else, so we sat off to the side and ate, saving our muktuk for last. The truth is, I didn’t know what the heck to do with it! It was a huge chunk and it seemed to be impossible to cut, at least with a plastic knife. I watched a Native woman eating hers and she was having trouble too. Finally, I popped the whole thing in my mouth and started chewing. I chewed and I chewed and I chewed. Nothing happened. I couldn’t possibly swallow it, so after several minutes of chewing on this stuff, I brought my napkin up to my mouth and discreetly spit my muktuk into it. Bill placed his napkin over his. We threw away our paper plates and had more soda.
A few days later, we had a potluck in the Inupiaq Eskimo language class. There was more muktuk there, but it was cut in matchstick pieces. Everyone was watching the white people to see how they would do with the food. There was a young woman from France in our class who proclaimed that she was not going to eat “that crap,” but would wait until she got home for Christmas and eat “real food.” I was horrified at her insulting manner, but envious that she had enough self-confidence to say, “No, I don’t want any.” I desperately wanted to say the same thing (though in a far more polite way!).
Again, I took some of everything, sat down and hoped I would respond properly so as not to offend this room full of Native people. I plastered my fake smile on my face and began to eat. It was difficult. The first thing I put in my mouth was moose, though we learned only later that it was moose tongue. Bill had eaten his first and tried to quietly warn me, but it was already headed into my mouth. Later, when we would eat niqipiaq, moose stew was always something of a relief, but the tongue was strong. I struggled mightily to keep the smile on my face as I chewed and swallowed. Then came the matchstick pieces of muktuk. Those were not so bad, because I could pop them in my mouth and, being mostly blubber, they pretty much slid down my throat. I had saved my salad for last, figuring that would help clear the taste of the other food out of my mouth. That turned out to be a mistake. The salad contained black meat, which is raw seal meat that has been dried. It turns black as it dries, thus the name. It was like big chunks of seal jerky there in the salad. As I bit into this, a horrible taste filled my mouth—one that I would not be able to get rid of for hours. I tried tea, soda, strong mints—nothing worked. Everyone was asking how I liked it. “It’s good,” I lied.
