Chinook Food

People in the Pacific Northwest like the Chinook did not farm or keep animals. They hunted and gathered their food. Mostly they ate wild roots like wapato (it's like a potato) and huckleberries (like small blueberries), and a lot of dried or roasted salmon that they caught in the rivers.

When they got home, they cooked their food in the longhouse. Each family had its own small fire in the longhouse. To roast the salmon, they put the salmon into a split cedar stick that held it tight like a clothespin, and stuck it in a sand pit around their fire. To boil their wapato, they put the roots in a wooden box or a basket that would hold water, and they put water in too, and then they heated rocks in the fire and dropped them into the water to heat up the water and cook the roots. You could boil water this way, though it would take a long time.

Here's a video showing a traditional Chinook way to cook salmon: