Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining from Around the World

13: Eating with the Blackfeet: Who’s Been Eating Whose Food?

223 Biographical sketch. Susan Johnston is a professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania. She was awarded her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1999 from the University of Pennsylvania. Johnston’s areas of specialty within human biology are medical and nutritional anthropology, with her research thus far focused on native North American populations. Prior to returning to graduate school, Johnston was a physician assistant working in academic and various clinical settings; her undergraduate degree was in human ecology (an interdisciplinary major in anthropology, biology, and psychology). I felt a bit nervous as I knocked on the door of Bell’s1 house in the main reservation town of Browning. Although I had spent some time driving around the reservation with her as she visited elderly and shut-in people in her role as a community health worker, her abrupt and somewhat gruff demeanor still had me a bit on edge. Added to that was the fact that I had never eaten with a Blackfeet family before, and I did not know what to expect. After we sat down, what I saw from my place of honor at the table was heaping piles of meat and C h a p t e r T h i r t e e n Susan L. Johnston Who’s Been Eating Whose Food? Eating with the Blackfeet Susan L. Johnston 224 potatoes and a salad consisting largely of iceberg lettuce. What I heard was “we don’t have salad all the time—I made it because you were coming.” I was surprised and a bit disconcerted (although I kept this to myself). I was on the reservation that summer of 1992 to determine if there was a chronic diseaserelated issue that I might be able to examine for my dissertation research, and I knew that this would likely involve research on nutrition and foodways. Yet how was I to study Blackfeet food habits if they were going to change them because I was present? As I munched on substantial portions of boiled rib meat, boiled potatoes, and salad, I also heard lots of questions from Bell and her grown kids about how I usually ate. I felt eyes on me, watching to see if I helped myself to seconds and what I chose to eat more of. My initial nervousness persisted, although for somewhat different reasons. Honestly, I am not a paranoid person. What I experienced, without understanding it at the time, was the discomfiture of the observer being observed. These are experiences I have had the opportunity to repeat again and again during my many years of working in this community, studying health and food habits, and of eating in this particular household and others. The Blackfeet, or at least some of them, have been studying my food habits, and studying me studying their food habits, for years. In 1995–1996 I lived on the reservation for a year while I conducted my dissertation research, which was informed by the preliminary data gathering I did during that initial visit in 1992. I returned every year through 2007 for periods from a few days to a couple of months to do follow-up or additional projects. I discuss this work in more detail in the following sections. In the field, we often eat with those whose foodways or nutritional intakes we are attempting to understand—and often in household settings. Yet there are dynamics in this very interaction, and in the expectations surrounding it, that may well alter the eating patterns and food choices of either or both parties and have impacts on the kind of data we gather. In this chapter, I tease apart some of the dynamics of this experience and explore ramifications of this bidirectional observation experienced by anthropologists of food and nutrition in the context of eating. But first I will outline where the Blackfeet live today and how that came to be. Background and History The Blackfeet Reservation, home of the people who refer to themselves officially as the Blackfeet Indian Nation or Blackfeet Tribe, includes approximately 1.5 million acres (6,070 km2 ) in northern Montana where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountain front (Figure 13.1). It is tucked up against Glacier National Park on the west and the international border with Canada on the Eating with the Blackfeet 225 north. The climate is characterized by...