IGNACIO – Kayla Armstrong took the morning off work Thursday to attend a jerky and drying workshop at the multiuse facility on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio. But she did not do it because she needed jerky, or even because she needed to learn how to make jerky.
“This is a part of our culture right here,” Armstrong said. “... I missed seeing this. It brings back memories. I just wanted to be around some of my elders, it’s been a while.”
The event was run by the multiuse facility’s manager, Elise Redd. The facility hosts a variety of workshops for community members – primarily retirees and elders – to socialize and practice various cultural traditions. Events include workshops for canning and jarring, beading and sewing. This was only the third of the drying and jerky workshops to take place in the last few years.
On Thursday, Redd stood behind the serving counter of the facility’s industrial kitchen shaving strips of beef from a roast with a cleaver. Five attendees, all women, sat scattered around the perimeter of a long plastic table; soy sauce, sesame seasoning, hot sauces and spices crowded the table space between them. Several plastic trays for electric dehydrators sat next to each woman. The dehydrators are a relatively recent addition to a much older tradition of drying meat within the Southern Ute Tribe.
The women mixed their preferred sauces and spices into bowls of beef strips as they bantered with one another, massaging the flavors into the fibers of the meat before splaying the strips across the dehydrator trays.
Armstrong said she learned to dry meat as a young child.
“Back then we used to just hang the meat over a string by our fireplace and every day we'd flip it before I went to school,” she recalled. “When we came back and we were hungry we used to pick at it.”
Jacqueline Frost and another attendee joined Armstrong, speaking in unison, describing how they would pick at the drying meat in their youths. Laughter erupted from the table as they recalled the childish practice.
“We dried ours in the garage – covered it, seasoned it with salt and pepper – and when it was hard, it would be a while, we’d go in there and pick a piece off and chew it,” Frost said. “My grandma would pound it and make powdered meat.”
While bison, deer and elk are the traditional meats consumed by the tribe, beef provides a more easily obtained alternative. The tribe began hunting bison after colonizing Spaniards brought horses to the area in the early 1800s and still maintains a small herd in the interest of cultural preservation.
Armstrong said she still relies on traditional foods throughout the year. Although she herself does not hunt, she is the recipient of deer or elk through a program run by the tribe’s Wildlife Resource Management Division to provide meat to elderly, handicapped and single female tribal members.
“I'll distribute that out with me and my kids and stuff and that's how I live through the winter,” she said.
Armstrong attended the workshop not only to be with her elders and learn how to use a dehydrator (a new skill for her), but because she saw it as an opportunity to preserve a cultural tradition of her people that is fading into history. She said she does her best to ensure its continuity within her own family.
“This is a dying skill if we don’t preserve it for the next generation,” she said. “... I try to teach my grandkids how to do a little bit of canning (with the) chokecherries that we pick in the fall. Even if it’s just a bucket, I try to just get enough for us to have jam.”
Some traditional practices are taught in the tribe’s Montessori academy. On Friday’s, students are taught native dances, beading, basketry and other cultural practices. The school also includes a language curriculum. Still, Armstrong and Frost emphasized that most of these traditions are passed down from generation to generation within a family.
Armstrong said the physical divide imposed upon the tribe’s members after the U.S. government forced them onto a reservation is partly to blame.
“I think that what keeps the tradition alive is that we all try to get together no matter what, no matter where we come from on the rez,” Armstrong said, speaking of the event’s attendees. “I think what keeps some of the elders away and some of the younger ones is the divide – the ‘don't go there, don't do this. ... (We) need to start trying to put that aside and think about what we're losing.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
