I ’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and most of the time they take place in restaurants in various towns across Humboldt (it’s a tough job, I know). When I met with Frybread Love owner Kayla Maulson and her mom, Lisa Sundberg, I was granted the rare treat of doing an interview in nature at one of California’s most breathtaking state parks – Sue-meg State Park – with descendants of the Yurok who first inhabited the area. So you, dear reader, get a twofer: a depiction of frybread delights and a peek into Humboldt’s evolving cultural history.
Sue-meg is a lush headland on the edge of the Pacific. The midday sunshine is often punctuated by the life-giving fog that rolls in at dusk and lingers ‘til dawn. It’s comprised of temperate rainforest with towering trees and seasonal fungi, with trails leading to panoramic vistas, down to Agate Beach, and to a reconstructed village of traditional Yurok plank-houses. Beneath the trees, somewhere between the community kitchen and the Yurok dance pit, we sat on redwood benches while the Frybread Love ladies told me about the significance of this space.
But first, the frybread. A neo-traditional foodborne of necessity in the face of colonialism, frybread has become a staple in native communities. After many of these communities historically (and unjustly) lost access to large segments of ancestral foraging and hunting lands, food commodities from the United States government – including refined flour – entered the diets of native people for the first time. The Indian taco, with its crispy-yet-soft pillow of a fried dough base, flourished as a fusion food in commodity-cooking. As it turns out, non-native folk are fans of the frybread phenomenon, too. So Maulson took the fusion concept and ran with it, perfecting it for the Arcata masses, and served it wrapped in comfort with a “crescendo of flavor,” as Sundberg states, to meet the community where they are.
Frybread Love is often found at the Arcata Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, and two things Arcatans love are eating seasonal and locally-grown foods… and biscuits and gravy. Along with the traditional Indian taco, they serve frybread topped with a creamy, meaty, sausage gravy; it’s soft and salty goodness, comfort food that lightens your mood and sits satisfyingly heavy in your belly. They serve seasonal favorites (like this fall’s pumpkin frybread), made with local ingredients from across Humboldt, like the honey-butter frybread made with local Reed’s Bees honey, or fruit-topped ones with Noble Berry Farms blueberries, and local apples, peaches, and strawberries, too.
But it’s the details that really seal the deal, details that only come from hours of dough-making, years of cooking for your community, a sheer volume of creation and experimentation that most of us could only dream of. From the little things like chopping up the bread so you don’t need a knife to eat it, to the big things like coating the dough in oil (not flour) to keep the frying oil’s flavor pristine, these ladies have reached a zenith of frybread mastery. After years of experimenting with the incorporation of traditionally foraged ingredients – like acorn flour in the dough, or elderberry syrup – they hope to bring more local fusion to their evolving menu so the community can experience different tastes of native Humboldt.
Back to Sue-meg Village. The kitchen we’re sitting next to, opposite the dance pit – Maulson and Sundberg have spent countless hours there cooking frybread to feed the community when they gather in this space. The interview started with frybread, but soon after it drifted into ceremony. I felt the privilege of the moment, sitting in a sacred space where local tribes gather with good intentions for the community, the land, the local abundance of life. When children or elders are sick, they gather here to heal. Neighboring tribes come together to dance, to eat, to gamble, to honor each other here in full regalia. In 2009, Maulson, herself, was the first Yurok woman in over 160 years to perform a coming-of-age flower dance, honored by elders with a song belonging to no one else – an emotional moment of tribal healing and cultural reclamation right on this site. At the risk of sounding trite, the energy was as strong as the fog rolling in, even with just us sitting there that day reveling in stories of ceremony.
While all this ceremony flows with dancing, and singing, and sweating through the day and night, someone is cooking to sustain all that good intention. Maulson and her mother are those someones, and they have developed a sort of ceremony of frybread-making, learning to work with nature’s fluctuation in temperature and humidity to achieve the same delicious result to feed their community with their frybread love. And now the rest of Humboldt gets to relish in this taste of this native cuisine, too. At the end of the day, as Sundberg says, “food brings us together […] we already cook for the masses here, so cooking for Humboldt feels natural.”
For me, folks, this was my most intimate taste of Humboldt yet.
