Feed Us with Trees: Excerpt

The piece below is excerpted from the book Feed us with Trees, written by Elspeth Hay and published by New Society Books. The book will be released July 15, 2025.

A few months after my visit to Mark Shepard’s farm in Wisconsin, I was flying over the Klamath Mountains of northern California. As a Boeing 737 flies, I was about as far from my home on the tip of Cape Cod as I could get. Early that October morning, my husband and I had left the sand dunes, oaks, pitch pines, and salty bay of Provincetown in a tiny Cessna 402. By midday, we had flown over thousands of miles of lakes, forests, farms, and mountains, and below I could see yet another oak forest emerging through the windows of our third plane as we made our way toward the Pacific.

We had come west to visit Ron Reed — Karuk medicine man, cultural biologist, Indigenous activist, and now, to me, long-distance friend. I met Reed when, in my search for present-day acorn eaters, I picked up a book titled Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People.

To write it, author and Euro-American sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard compiled interviews with dozens of Karuk people, including Reed. When I started paging through it, I found not only a wealth of information about Karuk food production and acorn-tending practices, but also a rewriting of my understandings of American history and mythology. In Norgaard’s book, I read the first version of a story that I’d eventually come to see has played out across the Northern Hemisphere time and time again over the past thousand years — one that explains my own people’s disconnect from the abundance of nut trees, and one that stands at the heart of our current agricultural collapse.

The short version goes something like this: Once upon a time, a people tended nut trees to produce abundant food. But then their land was violently stolen, and the conquerors forced them to become grain farmers.

Norgaard’s book, which I tore through, was one of the densest, saddest texts I’d ever read.

When I finished it, I connected with her, and she introduced me to Reed. He and I started talking over Zoom during the long first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and spent hours talking about acorns. The Karuk — who often refer to themselves as “fix-the-world people”56 — are Indigenous to the area known today as northern California; and for millennia, they’ve managed the mountains and rivers of the Klamath River basin to produce an abundance of salmon and acorns, the two major traditional staples of the Karuk diet. The oak grasslands of California, while different in their climate and species composition from the oak savannas of the Midwest, are nonetheless open landscapes dotted with large, sprawling oak trees. And like the oak savannas of the Midwest, the hills of the Klamath River basin have historically been filled with a host of edible and delicious food species. I’d read that historically, acorn soup — also called acorn gruel or mush — was the chief daily staple of more than three-quarters of California’s Indigenous People, and when I started talking with Reed, I was curious to know what this acorn dish tastes like, and how in Karuk culture the nuts are gathered, processed, and cooked.57

During my conversations with Reed and through regular searches of the Karuk language dictionary, I learned all of that and more — in fact, a whole new acorn-related vocabulary. Karuk speakers have more than ninety words related to the English word “acorn”; words that refer to every intricacy of tending, gathering, processing, and cooking their staple nut. (There are a mere nine in English, most of which simply refer to things that look like or are shaped like the nuts of an oak tree.) I was not particularly surprised to learn that — just as there are specific scientific names for different species — in the Karuk language, there are specific words for the acorns of the tan oak tree, the scrub oak, the black oak, and the maul oak. But from there, the words delved into astonishing nuance. I learned that there’s a word for knocking on an oak tree to make acorns fall. There’s a word for picking up acorns from the ground, for gathering lots of acorns, and for standing up with a pack basket full of acorns on your back. There’s a word for cracking acorns, a word for having a work party to shell acorns, for soaking acorns and for straining them, for winnowing and for sifting acorn meal. There are yet more words for the finished products of acorn making: a word for coarse acorn meal, another for acorn flour, and words for every step of the process of making acorn soup and eating it. There is even a word for a person who is a good acorn soup maker: taxvaváyav.

As Reed and I talked about acorns, eventually I realized that what we were really discussing was something entirely different.

We were trading cultural stories about what it means to be human.

Endnotes

56. Karuk–UC Berkeley Collaborative, accessed Sept. 11, 2024, https://nature.berkeley.edu.

57. A. L. Kroeber, 1925 Handbook of the Indians of California, Government Documents and Publications 8 (2019), accessed Sept. 12, 2024, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu.