Welcome to the Acorn Eating Renaissance!

By Dale Englehorn

Editor’s note: this article was submitted by a reader and published with permission

It's late autumn and the hills surrounding Santa Rosa, California are hot and parched. Relief from the heat, a patch of refuge, can be found in swaths of dark  green shade cast by the Valley Oak trees’ massive branches. Some of the Oaks in this  hillside grove are hundreds of years old, and their spreading curvy branches are  dropping vast quantities of acorns. Here in these oak woodlands, it is the season  that indigenous peoples once gathered to harvest acorns. 

Kashaya-Pomo Native American teacher Elsie Little Deer Valencio invited me to  join her in this spot to help her harvest acorns. And to share with me some of her people’s traditional ways of collecting and processing acorns into a nourishing staple food. 

I previously met Elsie in a Sonoma State University Native American ethnobotany class. She’s an engaging generous teacher - eager to share and explore intersections around the science of botany and her tribe's traditional knowledge.  My favorite class session Elsie taught was; ’How Cornerstone Species Oaks  Feed Entire Ecosystems’. 

It's fun to collect acorns together; handling their cool to the touch polished smooth shapes as we scoop them up with our hands and drop them into big buckets.    Acorns lay in thick carpets all around us on the soft ground.   

After collecting our first batch, we break and sit cross legged in the shade; laughing as we talk back to the western grey squirrels who have been chattering away at us for a while; “don't you worry!”  we holler high up into the canopy, “we are leaving plenty for and your family to squirrel away for the winter!”    

Elsie says; “I can rattle off LOADS of facts to you: like how fifty percent of my peoples’ diet was acorns, and that just one large oak tree, like this Valley Oak we’re gathering from, can  produce up to one thousand pounds of acorns a season!  But the most important thing  I want you to understand is that the Kashaya-Pomo people have always held a very close relationship to the oak trees: from our indigenous perspective, there is this fully reciprocal circle between us and the wild being oak tree groves, growing of their own free will, in their own natural habitat. This circle holds trust in the peoples’ care and gratitude to the trees being returned back to us. In the form of bountiful food, materials for shelter, tools. But most especially – in spiritual connectivity. “ 

We pause for a moment to watch late afternoon light spread long amber rays across the hillside. Elsie continues;” from an indigenous view, when you eat an acorn; you partake in all of what oaks are hitched to; they take sunshine, mingle it with rain and the earth and create acorn food. 

Why the whole web of life runs through this food- deer, squirrels, bears, insects and lots more below in the ground! Over a hundred kinds of birds depend on oak woodland for food and shelter. And bears – they just LOVE acorns! In stories from the old times they say that grizzly bears so frequented the grand Centurian oaks that their trails made a wheel of deep spokes around each trunk, where they would return each fall to feast on the fallen nuts. “ 

Elsie sighs, she’s saddened that a lot of indigenous folks are surprised to hear that acorns are edible and have been carefully harvested and processed into foods by California natives for millennia. I tell her that some new anthropological research  points to that long before the advent of agriculture and cultivation of wheat and rice – many of our ancient ancestors across the globe relied on oak tree acorns as a staple food. 

I share that when I visited Ireland to learn about my mother's family heritage, a high point was walking in ancient oak groves, learning how the oak was considered sacred by the Celts. In fact- Druids –my ancient ancestors’ shamans, healers, seers - acted as the priests and sacred story tellers to their people, and the term ‘druid’ is thought to come from the word dru (oak) and wid (to see or to know). 

 Elsie lightens up, her giggles are contagious, as we get on a corny acorny word play roll: Acorns: the original California cuisine that literally grows on trees!  Why not reintroduce eating acorns? We could be the first to sell ‘one hundred percent pure and natural Acorn Cupcakes’ to Whole Foods Marketplace!  Hey, a LOT nuttier ideas have taken root in California! 

We passionately agree: from both the science of ecology and native wisdom- you can't overstate how important oaks are as a keystone species. Keystone species are a plant or animal or organism that's vitally important to their environment. Like a key stone in an architectural arch, it holds the complex web of relationships together in the system. A keystone is so crucial that if it is removed, the whole habitat suffers and may not be able to adapt to environmental changes. Oaks are a keystone species supporting more life forms than any other tree genus in the world. California has twenty-one oak tree species – all of which need stewardship and protection. 

Elsie and her tribe are part of a growing movement dedicated to seeking ways to reclaim their earth-based heritage knowledge through restoring links to Indigenous access to and use of native foods.  

“Our elders teach us that acorns have been the lifeblood of our health and community for thousands of years. And that knowledge of acorns and their stories,  songs and ceremonies for harvesting and processing into food... that this is all crucial to healing our communities. Eating acorns can help us remember to back when the people and the trees and the rocks and the animals  understood each other's language.’’ 

The arrival of Europeans to California brutally changed acorn eating – pushing people off their carefully stewarded traditional lands. Within two decades of the Gold Rush, most  California Native peoples were murdered, starved, displaced or legislated off their traditional lands; which meant they were barred from access to traditional food sources and cultural traditions.  Now, generations later, despite such catastrophic demographic  collapse, California Native peoples are renewing the importance of acorns as an ancestral food.   

There’s a real sense of urgency here, as the epidemic of obesity and diabetes from eating nutrient poor sugary western diets runs especially rampant in Native American communities. And acorns’ natural sugars possess uniquely low -glycemic indexes that digest slowly in the body, making them an excellent staple food for regulating blood sugar. Top this off with acorns being a nutrient packed food that’s loaded with protein, healthy fats and minerals. 

Now Elsie and I kneel as we sort through mounds of plump auburn acorns, twisting off their little hat-like tops, discarding ones that are teeny, or ones with oak weevil bore holes. 

Elsie starts to sing and chant autumn oak gathering songs she and her sisters learned as children. ‘’ Hear my acorn songs mighty oaks! These songs are gifts of thanks to you!” 

‘All you people, go out and gather the acorns, thank the trees, so the spirit will know we are happy for this food! Gather all you can, tell the animals there’s plenty for all, don't talk about starvation, eat the acorns, thank the trees, there’s nothing to it! ‘
‘Now rivers rinse, rinse the acorns, now people pound, pound, cook, cook the acorns, make bread, make soup, so we can all eat, it makes the people strong. The plants  will teach you the way, just eat the food. When you see the acorn trees it is important to  say thank you! thank you! Thanks for these gifts, the tree spirits hear us, they know our songs are our gifts!’ 

Elsie has brought a big hunk of acorn bread to share. It's delicious -chewy and dense with a sweet nutty toasted taste. She muses; taste is mnemonic, it allows a person to recollect situations, feelings, places ... to reconnect to the deep past. Elsie says that when she eats acorn bread or acorn soup, she gets a kind of sense – feeling of some of the old ways.  We wholeheartedly agree: there's a whole heap of important  information that people just can't get off YouTube Videos! 

Elsie and I both lament: how can such an abundant food source, all these amazing acorns through the seasons, lie unnoticed all over the ground – for so many?  

We lug our filled to the brim acorn harvest buckets down the hill and load them into her pickup. I happily agree to meet up again the following week so she can teach me steps in how to process tannins out of the acorns and turn them into edible food.   

She smiles broadly as we hug goodbye and says; “The Oak trees and I want to enthusiastically welcome you to ‘The Acorn Eating Renaissance’ “!!!