As you’re meandering around Skagway, Alaska, you’ll see all the Alaskan staples on offer. Beer, fish and chips, chowder, crab legs, fudge, and a plenty of dive bars. But you’ll also see a line spilling down the block outside Klondike Doughboy with people waiting for something you’ve probably never heard of: fry bread.
After ogling the massive plate size pieces of sugar-cinnamon laden fried dough going by, chances are you’ll want to hop in line too!
Fry bread might look like a simple treat. It’s just fried dough…. right? After some digging, it turns out that fry bread tells a tale of perseverance, hardship, colonization, and survival.
The history of fry bread begins with the Navajo (Diné).
Before colonization, the Navajo homeland swept across what is now Arizona and New Mexico. Like most indigenous people, they began as hunter gathers and slowly transitioned into agriculture. Agriculture leads to the development of permanent settlements. Permanent settlements lead to flourishing populations. Various tribes lived in the region, including the Apache, Comache, and Hopi. They lived a relatively peaceful existence with plenty of trades, raids, treaty-making, and treaty-breaking. But things took a major turn with the arrival of settlers in the 1840s.
The colonizers were tasked with setting up trading posts and military forts as people headed west in the name of Manifest Destiny. God is calling us to spread democracy and capitalism across the North American continent!! Never mind the Indigenous people we must “tame” along the way. It’s funny what people can convince themselves to do in the name of a higher power.
Treaties were made and broken as the US troops built up their presence. Things took a turn for the worse when Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson entered the scene. His mission was to round up Navajo people and send them to Bosque Redondo. And you better believe he didn’t ask nicely…
Kit Carson launched a “Scorch the Earth” campaign with the goal of making life so miserable for the Navajo that they had to surrender. Carson’s men destroyed Navajo homes, burned their fields, and captured their livestock.
People had no choice but to comply, and a forced march known as the “Long Walk” from New Mexico to Bosque Redondo began in January 1864. More than 8500 men, women, and children marched over 300 miles across 2 months. They weren’t given usual Navajo provisions like corn, beans, and squash. Rather, the government gave them flour, salt, sugar and lard.
They figured out how to make the rations into a dough that they could deep fried. The calorically dense creation helped stave off starvation, and it continued to be an important source of fuel through the challenging years many tribes spent at Bosque Redondo.
Fry bread was the first of many processed foods introduced into the American Indian diet. Because people were displaced from their land, they couldn’t forage or grow familiar crops and were forced to eat government rations instead. Said rations tended to be processed with minimal nutritional value. This sparked the beginnings of major health epidemics among the communities including type 2 diabetes and kidney disease.
The very food item that helped people survive morphed from a savior to an enemy.
Today, there are various health initiatives in American Indian communities aiming to undo all the decades of poor diet and nutrition while helping people return to their dietary roots. Literally!
The unsatisfying answer is that I don’t know. Google let me down, and I couldn’t find any reliable sources and reasonable answers.
But of course I have theories….
The concept of frying dough has independently formed across the world. From churros to Tibetan fried bread (a recent discovery of mine), good luck finding a pocket of the planet where some version of fried dough doesn’t exist. It’s not unreasonable to think that native tribes in Alaska came up with something similar on their own. It’s also not unreasonable to think that word of the Navajo creation spread north, and people adopted it accordingly.
Not only is Alaskan fry bread made with more sugar, but it’s also made with yeast. This allows the dough to rise, giving it a softer, breadier texture.
Traditionally, fry bread is a savory item that’s piled up with beans, meat, vegetables, and whatever else is on hand. Honey and jam are also common. Klondike Doughboy has put it’s own spin on it by smothering the fry bread in cinnamon sugar to create a crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside treat that’s simply delicious.
Not only is it delicious, but it’s also historically significant and a must-try item when visiting Skagway.
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