What did the Nez Perce people eat before contact with Anglo-Saxons?
The Nez Perce people didn’t just concentrate all their time on food gathering, hunting or food preparation. The question was “what kind of food did the Nez Perce people eat”, and it so happens we travel with the seasons. I will describe the food gathering, hunting and preparing by going through each season and what a Nez Perce family (or band) would have gathered at that time. Within the deep canyons of the traditional Nimi’ipuu land, the people relied on the rivers, mountains and prairies for sustenance. They practiced a seasonal subsistence cycle, living with the seasons, not by the month. In early spring, the women traveled to the lower valleys to dig root crops. The men traveled to the Snake and Columbia rivers to intercept the early salmon runs. The men still hunted, but much less during the salmon runs. In mid-summer all the people of the village moved to higher mountainous areas setting up temporary camps to gather later root crops, fish the streams, and do more hunting of the b
