There’s a secret to making wonderful Native American dishes, and Barbara Stumblingbear knows it.

“I’m going to tell you, but you’re not going to believe me,” confides Stumblingbear, director of food services at Haskell Indian Nations University.

Ida Meacham butters the tops of Pueblo Bread, a round bread prepared for centuries by the Pueblo tribe. Meacham said she prefers cooking from scratch, which she demonstrated at Haskell Indian Nations University. Traditional Native American foods, including Meacham's Pueblo Bread, will be served at the Lawrence Sister Cities Scholarship Dinner & Auction.

“The first thing you have to do is talk to the Creator. You have to ask him to give you good feelings, so that I can do a good job. I want my food to be nourishing, and I want the people who eat it to feel good about it.”

In Native American cuisine, Stumblingbear believes, attitude and intention are everything.

“If you take a cook that is upset and angry and mad, can you imagine what the food’s going to look and taste like? So the first thing you have to do is get yourself right.”

She sees this mysterious process play out every day in Haskell’s cafeteria, located in Curtis Hall.

“I can have a cook who is happy and having a good day, and when the kids eat the food, (that positive attitude) goes on through to them,” she says. “It’s really strange how that works, but it’s true.”

These days, Stumblingbear and her food service staff are busy getting into the right, nurturing frame of mind to produce a feast of traditional, Native American delicacies.

They will cook and serve a meal of arduously prepared, authentic dishes to about 120 guests Saturday at the Lawrence Sister Cities Scholarship Dinner & Auction in Stidham Union on the Haskell campus.

The event is being held to raise scholarship money to help pay the travel expenses of area junior and senior high school students who want to study abroad at one of Lawrence’s two sister cities: Eutin, Germany, and Hiratsuka, Japan.

Karen Swisher, Haskell’s president, serves on the advisory board of Lawrence Sister Cities. She offered to have the school be host to a Native American dinner in Stidham Union as a fund-raiser.

Stumblingbear has high hopes for the special meal that will be served to guests at Haskell.

Stumblingbear

“I want them to experience the true foods of long ago, like the kanutchee (a thick soup made of pulverized black walnuts and wild mushrooms) and the Chippewa wild rice. It won’t be really elaborate. It’s very basic and kind of plain looking, but the flavors are fantastic,” she says.

Crawdads and wild onions

Stumblingbear, who has been Haskell’s food service director for 22 years, is in charge of overseeing the preparation of the dinner.

The menu for the meal will feature Kiowa corn soup; baked salmon; roasted buffalo; Chippewa wild rice; baked acorn squash; saut wild onions in a scrambled-egg dish; kanutchee; and pinon nuts from cedar trees, which are eaten like sunflower seeds.

To create a meal like this, you can’t just run to the grocery store for ingredients. It takes time, planning and plenty of advance work.

“When people want a Native American meal, I never know what my menu’s going to be, because you can’t always have wild onions and kanutchee. They’re seasonal,” says Stumblingbear, a Kiowa from southern Oklahoma.

“The day before the dinner, two of our chefs are going down to Tahlequah, Okla., to pick up the crawdads, the kanutchee and the wild onions from the Indians in the area. We’ve already put the word out what we’re looking for, and they’re gathering as we speak.”

Stumblingbear and her staff are working hard to locate just the right ingredients for the dishes they’ll serve.

One such delicacy are the wild onions.

“You have to go into the woods and pick them. A wild onion, compared to a green onion you’d buy in a store, is very tiny. You have to pick a whole lot of them for just one dish,” she says.

Buffalo meat likely will come from a local vendor. It will be rubbed with seasonings and slow roasted until tender.

The recipe and cooking technique for the baked salmon comes courtesy of a Haskell student who is from a native tribe in Alaska.

“We’ve got one young man who is absolutely fantastic when it comes to making salmon. We’re going to ask him to cook ours for us. He’s taught us a lot,” Stumblingbear says.

Sense of connection

When traditional, Native American dishes appear on the regular menu in Haskell’s cafeteria, the inspiration often comes from the students themselves.

Roughly 115 tribes from across the country are currently represented at Haskell.

“That’s where we get a lot of our recipes from the kids. They share them,” Stumblingbear says.

Not all of the native offerings are a hit, though.

“We try to do a traditional Indian dish about once a week. The Alaskan people, their common dish is seal-grease-and-salmon soup. When you put that on the menu, these kids are not going to eat that. It doesn’t sound good, but it’s wonderful,” she says.

In Native American tradition, it’s important that the cook preparing the meal has an intimate knowledge of the ingredients being used.

Better still if the cook has personally gathered the ingredients from the forests, fields and streams.

It’s equally important for the diner to establish a sense of connection with the dish before him or her, to approach the meal with an attitude of awareness and gratitude.

“My husband prays this a lot: Everything we eat and put in our mouths was alive at one time. They gave their lives so that you could have another day on this earth,” Stumblingbear says.

“Young people don’t know. They think that Cheerios came out of the sky and milk is from the refrigerator. It’s important to ask, ‘Where does that food really come from?'”