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Tlingit cuisine

List of edible plants and mushrooms of southeast Alaska

Foodways



Many varieties of berries are gathered by the Tlingit. Among them are salmonberry, strawberry, thimbleberry, red huckleberry, watermelon berry, gray currant, highbush cranberry, and bunchberry. Several varieties of blueberry are also collected. Nagoon, also called Arctic raspberry, is considered a special treat.

The Tlingit feed their babies highly nutritious salmon eggs as their first solid food, at about nine months of age.

The 300 Tlingit residents of Yakutat, Alaska continue their traditional subsistence hunting of seals, taking 345 seals in 2015, down from 640 seals in 1996. They have modified their diet in response to the decline in seal populations.

Fireweed

Nangoon

The Tlingit have been cultivating a local variety of potatoes for hundreds of years. This is a primitive cultivar called "Maria's Tlingit potato", planted in south facing plots. Potatoes are not native to southeast Alaska, but have been cultivated there for centuries. Theories about how they arrived include through Russian traders and Tlingit accounts of canoe voyages as far south as South America that may have brought potatoes back.

A Tlingit elder was quoted as saying "Gathering eggs in Glacier Bay was something especially the family looked forward to. It was like Easter. Family and cousins gathered up there and we collected eggs, and it was a joyous occasion." The time of gathering eggs from mid-May to mid-June each year symbolized the transition from reliance on stored and preserved foods to the time of active fishing, hunting and gathering in the warmer months. The month of egg gathering was called the "Going to Get Eggs Moon" in the traditional Tlingit calendar

A mollusc commonly called the gumboot is considered a delicacy.

Research by archeologists has shown that Tligit peoples have been hunting harbor seals with harpoons for almost 600 years or longer.

Other subsistence foods include an oily fish called hooligan, black-tailed deer, herring which were often smoked, and a mollusc commonly called the gumboot. Various species of clams, crabs and mussels were also gathered for food.