Indian potatoes.

[Theresa Kishkan]

I think we had a discussion about wapato in the past. These are Sagitarria latifolia, sometimes called "arrow leaf" and often called Indian swamp potato. According to Nancy Turner in her Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples, these were a major food source of the Katzie and traded as far away as the Nlaka'pamux of the upper Fraser Canyon and the Vancouver Island Salish. Also eaten by the Chinook of the lower Columbia River -- I'm paraphrasing from the book here...

But that's swamp potato and it seems that at least three other kinds of plants were called potato. Claytonia lanceolata or Spring Beauty (these grow in mountainy areas, in damp ground). Annie York talks about plant gathering trips to Botanie Mountain (near Lytton) which would concentrate on the little corms of these. And I gather that the corms can get quite large. They are starchy and contain inulin. I wonder if Spring Beauty is the Indian potato in Sage Birchwater's Chiwid, the chapter called "Potato Mountain"? This is the most wonderful collection of stories set in the Chilcotin and the chapter involves a number of people remembering trips to the Potato Mountains (between Chilko Lake and Tatloyoko Lake) in summer to dig the mountain potatoes, have horse races, hunt, live outside...it sounds like paradise. 

Staflower -- Trientalis latifolia -- has tiny tubers which I've heard called potatoes. They don't look unlike Spring Beauty corms so I wonder if the two might have been thought of as the same?

And to confuse things a little further,  I think that Erythronium grandiflorum, the yellow avalanche lily, was also considered a wild potato.

And just to keep this on the CJ topic, if informally, I had the pleasure of having dinner the other evening with Frank White (some of you know him) and he turns 90 this spring. His dad was a butcher in the Fraser Valley, coming from the Ottawa area in 1890. He spoke the Jargon fluently and Frank knows quite a bit too. He was looking at the lexicon in A Voice Great Within Us and kept finding words he remembered, saying that many of them were accompanied by hand gestures. Tenas, for instance, went with a small pinchy gesture. Klimmin was accompanied by a soft smooth gesture of the fingers. 

Theresa Kishkan
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