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Bannock-making recalls Native history, draws big business
the Georgia Straight, February 28, 2002
Watts had to leave the culture of her Git’ksan village at the age of ten when she was sent to residential school in Port Alberni. After she finished school, she got married and stayed in the area until 1984, when she moved to Vancouver to study anthropology at UBC. Just after she graduated, she decided to help raise money for native students in grade eight and nine to visit aboriginal museums around the province. She bought an electric frying pan and set up a stand outside the Museum of Anthropology to sell her fresh baked bannock and was astonished when she raised fifteen hundred dollars in five days.
“Then the director [of the Museum of Anthropology] asked if I was interested in making bannock outside the museum regularly, so we set a table out there the next day,” she says. “I made the dough by hand and I hired two ladies to make the bannock, to fry it on the spot, and they couldn’t hardly keep up, so I knew there was going to be a business there.”
After a year in front of the museum, she started her own catering business, Just Like Grandma’s Bannock, which also sold soup and salmon. In 1995 she expanded into her own restaurant, the Liliget Feast House, which specializes in West Coast fish and wild game.
Native people didn’t make bannock or any other breads before the arrival of the Europeans; the Iroquois made food out of ground up corn, but barley and wheat were never cultivated. In the mid 18th century, the Hudson’s Bay Company imported large numbers of labourers from Northern Scotland and The Orkney Islands and many ended up marrying aboriginal women. The Scots brought with them their tradition of making bannock, which was quickly adopted by their native wives. Scottish descendents living in Canada today may not be familiar with bannock, but might recognize its close cousin, the oat cake.
“Originally native people were eating traditional foods from the land,” says Arthur Ray, a UBC professor who studies early colonial history, “but one of the side effects of the fur trade was depletion, particularly of large game, because it was used to feed the posts and the brigades. As game was depleted, native people turned to alternative foods and one of those was flour, which is one of the key ingredients in bannock.”
Ray says in some parts of Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company sold flour at below cost in order to discourage natives from hunting. Bannock became a staple food and was made by frying it in a pan or sticking the dough on the end of a stick and turning it over the fire.
“Sometimes you’ll see historical photographs of bannock making,” explains Ray. “There will be a central fire with the frying pans tipped on end around the edges of it, so the bannock in the pan faces the fire and then you turn it over.”
Bannock is a traditional family food for Henry Hall, a member of the Eastern Fraser Valley Metis Society who traces his ancestry to the Manitoba Red River Metis.
“The trappers and the Voyageurs would use whatever they could live on for a long period of time,” he says, “so that means when they were out for two or three weeks at a time, they could take flour and salt and actually make bannock while they were on the trail.” The bannock lasted four or five days and was eaten along with pemmican-a mixture of dried meat, fat and berries.
“I actually really enjoy making bannock,” he says. “Every time I make a bannock I think of my mother who’s passed away now. It’s something that she’s handed down to me and it’s something that I’ve handed down to my children too.”
For Watts, bannock has made her put her dream of becoming a writer on hold-at least temporarily. She’s much too busy with her business, which she says has churned out over a million dollars in wages to her staff-and over a million pieces of bannock so far.