My head jerked back and forth under Grandma’s palm, her rough brushstrokes pulling my hair into a neat braid. She had a knack for finding all the tender spots of my scalp while swearing she’d hardly touched me in her tough, but loving way. From behind me, she spoke slowly, an Oklahoma drawl slipping through the words, while I did my best to keep a straight face through the discomfort. “Repeat after me,” she said.
One… hvmken (hum-ken). Two… hŏkkôlen (ho-koh-len). And on, and on we’d count.
I am one-eighth Seminole, and Grandma taught me about our family and the words of our language, known as Muskogee Creek, like this. Spread across summer mornings and yearly family reunions where we came together to eat fry bread and Indian tacos so heavy the juice of fresh meat and beans soaked through our paper plates. Standing behind the stove, Grandma and her sister would messy the counters with flour and cook enough food for nearly 50 people as they laughed easy and talked among each other. Calling out through the kitchen, Grandma repeated the same phrase each year:
“Hompvks ce.” (hom-box-chee)
“Let’s eat” or “the food is ready,” the meaning was never directly translated to me. Instead, it became a feeling or a promise of something delicious. My childhood fell into this rhythm of visits to Grandma, my father’s mother, from my home in Houston where there were nearly eight-hour drives between us. At Grandma’s, I soaked up all the words that I only heard with her, and the days in the kitchen where I learned to make fry bread like she did.
But by the time I turned 17, I hadn’t tasted fry bread in two years.
Chasing after my fading memories for the fry bread recipe, it struck me that I never even knew how to spell the Seminole words sitting on the tip of my tongue. My stomach sank as I plugged the most abstract phrases into Google to find anything recognizable to no avail.
Over the next year, as I started college at the University of Texas at Austin, I found a Seminole language dictionary but questions the internet couldn’t answer followed me. Could I be Native American when my experiences, like language or recipes, were trapped inside of my mind in ways I couldn’t see, taste, or even spell? The demographic boxes saying “Native American and Alaska Native” taunted me. Fry bread became the mountain that loomed over me, blocking me from finding comfort. I needed to find a way to make it.
Sunlight filters past half-drawn shades onto my kitchen countertops as the October morning slips into afternoon. I tinker with the switches on the wall for the perfect combination of lighting. I need enough to see but seek the ambiance of a childhood memory and a dash of quiet grace for my unskilled hands. For all the fry bread that I’d eaten in my life, it wasn’t until now, at 20, that I first set out to make it myself.
My phone pings with messages from Grandma. The purple Facebook Messenger text bubbles carry lines of well-intentioned, yet slightly vague, instructions. Her words provide the kind of loose descriptions that could only come from a cook who knows her favorite food by feeling alone. Grandma communicates in her usual way: slightly morbid, and just sentimental enough to make you brush it aside.
“I can die happy knowing my fry bread recipe lives on,” she writes.
Growing up with frequent trips to my dad’s house in Sulphur, Oklahoma, fry bread was the focal point of every dinner with dad’s Native American family. It was at the local fundraisers, powwows, and the events held at the Chickasaw cultural center next to Dad’s house. For some, fry bread is an integral part of being raised in or around Native American communities.
Ruth Hooker, owner of Hookers Grill in Fort Worth and member of the Choctaw nation, opened her restaurant with her mother Katherine in 2017. They sought to bring a taste of Hooker’s Oklahoma heritage with fry bread and Indian tacos. Hooker recounts the time the restaurant once hosted guests from five different tribes in a day. “It’s pretty interesting when that happens, we’re always joking it’s like the Gathering of Nations [the largest powwow in the United States],” Hooker says.
Crafted from a mixture of baking staples like lard and sugar, fry bread was created by the Navajo in the early 1860s after they were forcibly relocated from modern-day Arizona by the government to New Mexico on “the Long Walk.” When tossed into sizzling oil, the simple ingredients—which can include flour, milk, salt, or water—make a fluffy dough with a crisp outside.
What began with the Navajo on the Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner in New Mexico made its way to other tribes where many developed their own takes on the recipe. The taste and make-up of fry bread can differ depending on the region and tribe you come from. With fry bread, it’s all about the details, and even heavy-handedness can affect the dough’s density. Of all the fry bread I’ve tried since moving to Austin, I have yet to find any like Grandma’s.
Fry bread isn’t as ubiquitous in Texas as it is in Oklahoma, where the Indigenous population is much larger. Texans will most likely only come across it in state at powwows or fundraisers hosted by community groups.
Though they’re no longer together, years with my father exposed my mom to a lot of fry bread. She’s not as picky as me, but she understands it’s special. “I didn’t have it at home, it’s not something that my parents cooked,” Mom says. “It always seemed like a treat.”
Fry bread is often made by the women in the family. Its invention was a result of abysmal government rations provided to reservations, including other basics like beans. Over time, it came to symbolize ingenuity and many credit it as a survival tool. Fry bread spread to U.S. boarding schools, where thousands of Indigenous youths were taken from their homes and made to assimilate to white society.
Despite its valued place at many gatherings, some critics says fry bread perpetuates a mythologized story that causes more harm than good. University of Kansas humanities professor Devon Mihesuah, a member of the Choctaw nation, says fry bread’s prevalence in Indigenous communities causes complications. Fry bread came from places of deep pain for many generations of Natives and holding onto it can appear to hinder decolonization—the act of reframing Indigenous narratives and practices to center traditional values and lifestyles.
Mihesuah attributes fry bread as a contributor to health problems. For many communities living on tribal lands, Natives face barriers in accessing nutritious foods and experience a gap in healthcare equity gap compared to other demographics. Since 2019, data from the CDC shows rates of obesity in Native Americans remaining at nearly 10% higher than white respondents.
Mihesuah runs a Facebook page called Indigenous Eating that advocates for a return to making food with homegrown ingredients. She believes consuming from your own garden is the answer to healthier lifestyle choices. It’s also a way for Natives to achieve food sovereignty—a system in which people can produce, distribute, and consume food in culturally appropriate and ecologically efficient ways. “Fry bread is not at all traditional if you define that word literally,” Mihesuah says.
Fry bread, like many things, can be fine in moderation. Hooker, who is surrounded by the dish all day at her restaurant, says she probably only eats it every few months. Hooker views fry bread as a tool to acknowledge even the difficult parts. This sentiment resounds especially as Hooker points out the 100th anniversary of Native American citizenship in the United States this past June.
“Fry bread gives you a chance to tell the story about its origins, and how it came out of a terrible situation,” Hooker says. “Once colonization took place, and they were given what they were given, they had to make do to survive because they can no longer hunt or forage. The fry bread became a lifesaver, literally, and now, here we are.”
Growing up, I only knew fry bread as something special that tied me to my family. Learning about the discourse surrounding it in recent years has only deepened my relationship with it. I can appreciate the nuance of something beloved coming from a painful past.
When my great-grandfather was in the second grade, with his limited reading skills and an affinity for math, he ran away from the Mekasukey Mission School in Seminole, Oklahoma. Although Grandma only mentioned him a few times, his story stuck with me. In a gentle, reverent way, she always refers to him as “daddy” even as she gets older. During his time at the boarding school, students had their hair cut by school officials and received hits for speaking their native language.
“Today we really only know how to say the swear words,” my dad once joked.
So much was almost lost due to the boarding schools and other government policies, but I feel a responsibility to piece it all together and learn— swear words and all.
To celebrate being Seminole fills me with a profound sense of awareness for where I come from. I often think of the steps our ancestors made from Florida to Oklahoma, and I think of the stories that we hold closely through tradition. My dad carries it with him across his back, with the tattooed letters of his second Indian name Emecv-hiye (E-meech-uh-hey-ee) etched in deep black ink. Aunts and cousins make beautiful beadwork and sew traditional skirts with patchwork designs that tell their own stories through color. And cooking fry bread echoes the call that we are still here, still together, and still honoring our history.
I can’t remember the last time I ran barefoot through the house with my cousins to line up for a plate of fry bread. Before my sophomore year of college, I hadn’t spoken to Grandma in four years. Fueled by my dad and stepmom’s divorce, the pressure of picking sides led to a biting exchange with Grandma that left our relationship radio silent. To her, my desire to stay in contact with the woman who helped raise me signified a betrayal toward my dad. I was just 15, and the choice to go no-contact left a bitter taste in my mouth and my heart felt pitted.
After that, I spent the latter half of my teenage years feeling untethered to myself and my family. By extension, I missed feeling connected to being Seminole, and without Grandma, I wasn’t sure if I knew how to be. Upon starting college, and armed with the distance of time, I began messaging her on Facebook where most conversations revolved around the easy stuff: pictures of cousins, or work, or school updates. But something changed when I asked her about her recipe.
“Grandma, could you tell me how to make fry bread?” I wrote. We’ve talked almost every day since.
My grandma’s recipe lives inside my phone’s notes app, where it’s collected metaphorical dust for the last five months.
Missing the context of measurements, attempting to cook with these simple ingredients felt unbelievably daunting, like a test. The bullet points could be mistaken for a long-forgotten grocery list.
Milk, all-purpose flour, baking powder, oil.
In my head, I felt an inexplicable pressure to simply know how to make the fry bread. It was like the act of cooking needed to be as instinctive as breathing, or as easy to call to memory as riding a bike. I imagined an omniscient presence overhead, looming just beyond the kitchen lights with the power to validate every aspect of my identity. Somehow, my claim to being Native American hinged on my ability to perfectly flatten the dough and fry each dense disk to the golden hue of my earliest memories.
Fluorescent red heat stretched across the surface of the stove as the first burner clicked to life. Before making the fry bread, I cook the meat that is traditionally ladled on top to make Indian tacos. Referring to Grandma’s notes, I pour a packet of taco seasoning over the meat before leaving it to simmer.
Now comes the part that simultaneously scares and excites me: actually making the fry bread. Standing on my tallest tiptoes, I reach into the cabinet to find my biggest mixing bowl and start pouring in two cups of flour with a dash of baking powder. Eyeing the measurements, I do my best to moisten the pile with milk. Once the contents of the bowl become sticky and too thick to handle with anything but my hands, I pull the forming dough into pieces and place them onto a flat surface. The dough stretches in dense strings, reminiscent of a toy slime, and minuscule bits hang off my nails.
Pressing my hands into a cutting board, I ask my roommate Ella to shake the bag of flour onto my skin in an effort to lessen the dough’s clinginess. The flour falls out in waves of fine powder rain, coating my skin before slipping between the cracks of my fingers. We laugh at the mess we’re making as clouds puff into the air in an instant and disappear the next.
For a moment, I feel like a younger version of myself. As the dough crusts against my hands, my initial hesitation falls away to the familiar feelings of cooking with Grandma.
There’s a photo of me as a child, similarly covered up to my elbows in flour. The bridge of my nose glittered dully with a spatter of it as I tucked my tongue between my teeth, rolling a ball of dough between my hands. Generations of us learned to make fry bread after receiving a dusting of flour to the face, per family tradition. Copy-cat pictures exist of my younger siblings Kaysen and Kawliga as they cooked next to Grandma.
“It was my dad’s way of welcoming you to the kitchen,” Grandma writes.
Even now, I can picture the gaudy green floral pattern of the couch that peeked from my grandma’s living room and the googly-eyed magnets on the kitchen fridge. From my usual place next to her on my red step stool, Grandma stood so much taller. Her long black hair always hung down her back in a thick braid, framing her freckled cheeks and dark eyes that were constantly penciled with lines of drugstore eyeliner. On her otherwise makeup-less face, a large mole sat on the bridge of her nose. Even when we weren’t speaking, she remained so beautiful in my mind’s eye.
Five years have passed since I last saw Grandma in person, but sometimes I catch a whiff of her signature perfume in random places that overwhelms me with nostalgia. Bath and Body Works released “Moonlight Path” in 2007, boasting notes of jasmine and lavender, all compressed into a purple bottle that ultimately smells of baby powder. Grandma used to go on tirades about store staff insulting her with the assumption that she needed assistance in finding her nth replacement of the scent.
Grandma’s loyalty manifested in many places, from her fragrances to her fierce protectiveness over her first son. I’ve come to understand that our fight all those years ago was a result of her need to defend him from the world, even if it was from me. This led to our estrangement for many years, but in that time, I clung to the memories of her face and pored over our shared moments in the kitchen over fry bread.
But over time, I lost the details of the recipe. What came to replace them were feelings of insecurity, as I could only summon my grandma’s words about my identity. “You are denying your heritage,” Grandma said throughout my youth. She poked at my lack of formal tribal citizenship until the idea became impressed into my mind that only certain certifications could “make” me Seminole, such as carrying my CBID (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood), and somehow, knowing how to make fry bread.
This tension came from my mom’s choice to let me enroll on my own time, seeing as she didn’t feel it was her place being my non-Native parent. Ultimately, I’m thankful for this even in the times I have spent grappling with my own self-doubt. It brought me to my first Indigenous studies course in college, where I started to understand more about the percentages that I obsessed over in my insecurities. The connections I longed for in the absence of my family, I started to find in my journalistic work. Little by little, I’ve found wholeness in the uncertainties of the last few years.
My mind stills as I absently squish the dough beneath my palms.
I ask Ella to pour an inch of oil into a new pan on the stove while I finish getting the dough ready. But, waiting for it to heat provides a new obstacle.
“You can listen to the oil, and you’ll know when it’s ready,” Grandma writes.
From every step of the process, fry bread seemingly requires an innate understanding of how it’s made. Fry bread asks for nothing, and so much all at once. The idea of hearing the oil almost seems laughable to me.
Grandma learned to make fry bread through observation, as she watched her dad make it for her and her three siblings. She felt a responsibility to carry the recipe on after her parents passed and the family dinners ended.
“I felt it brought us back together as a family. I was the only one who learned fry bread from dad, and it kept his memory alive,” Grandma said. “Making fry bread is like honoring our ancestors.”
The oil doesn’t make a peep for me though, even as I lay my head close to the stove and hold my breath. I opt to drop a test piece into the deep yellow liquid.
Bubbles form around the dough and swallow it until it bobs back to the surface and turns golden.
With a pair of tongs, I pinch the edge of a larger piece of dough and set it into the rolling oil. The bigger fry bread would be for the Indian tacos that I intend to share with Ella, while the smaller ones would be for dessert. It’s customary to use honey—Grandma’s preference—or powdered sugar on the remaining fry bread.
I watch the dough finish frying, and Ella holds out a napkin-covered plate for me to lay the pieces onto. We make quick work of piling up our fry bread with fresh lettuce and glimmering diced onions. Before heading to the table, I stop Ella with a childish request. It’s one that I know Grandma would agree with.
“Want to try dessert first?” I ask.
Grabbing a leftover piece of the fry bread, I dig for the honey I knew we packed into the kitchen somewhere and squeeze the cartoonish bear-shaped bottle over my plate. I watch it drip out slowly. The honey pools onto the flaky outside of the fry bread, and I take a moment to snap a photo for Grandma.
“Looks good, I’m impressed,” Grandma writes back instantly.
I laugh and flip my phone over. For the first time in so long, I feel a rightness within myself. I even entertain the corny thought that somewhere deep inside I had carried the knowledge to make fry bread all along.
Lifting the honey-soaked piece to my mouth, I sigh into the quiet of the room and let the sweetness wash over me.
