The Mohican Indians of Western Massachusetts shared with the other Algonquin tribes of the Northeast, and their Iroquois neighbors, a centuries‐old knowledge of the food resources of their environment. These included well over 200 recipes of wild fruits and berries, the latter including the familiar shadberries, cranberries, blueberries, ground cherries, checkerberries (wintergreen) and strawberries. These last were so important to Indians of the Northeast that their harvest was celebrated widely in “First Fruits,” ceremonies in which the Creator was thanked with music, dance, prayer and ritual offerings. The festival signaled the return of the bountiful time of year when other berries and fresh food could be expected soon to vary the dried and smoked diet of the long winter.

Other useful berries are less well known to us who now occupy the Mohican lands. Raw barberries were prized for their refreshing astringency. The berries were also dried to be stewed later for a citrus‐tasting drink or for flavoring other foods. The same was done with fresh or dried sumac berries. The Indians also chewed the bright yellow roots of the barberry and made a tea from the leaves for relief from rheumatism.

Most of us do not consider juniper berries to be edible, but they can be eaten fresh or picked all winter, after they have dried on the bush, and can then be moistened in the mouth until they yield a rain‐like flavor. The Indians added this spicy taste to fish, especially salmon, and they also enjoyed it with venison and bear meat. False Solomon’s Seal bears small clusters of fragrant red berries in the autumn. The Indians ate these raw and added them to other foods as seasoning, but they used them sparingly since they are somewhat cathartic. Other berries used by the Indians were nannyberries, bearberries, partridgeberries and even the bittersweet berries of nightshade. The toxic alkaloid solanine in the latter becomes less dangerous as the fruit ripens and is completely dissipated by the heat of cooking. The Woodlands tribes hulled the berries when they were ripe and used them for seasoning in their meat stews.

Our phrase “forced to live on roots and berries” suggests deprivation or downright starvation, but the Mohicans considered the woods to be their storehouse of staples, refreshment and delight. Wild foods, however, take much time in the gathering and processing, and time was something the Indians always seemed to have more of than their European neighbors.

• David P. McAllester (1916‐2006), a one‐sixty‐fourth Narragansett, was a Navaho scholar and professor of anthropology and music at Wesleyan University. Living in Monterey, Mass., he wrote Indian Notes for the monthly Monterey News from 1981 to 1994. This essay originally appeared in the newsletter December 1984.