I’m Kathleen Holt, Coordinator of the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. The following Radio Readers BookByte is a repeat of one originally aired in 2017 and is offered in memory of its author Thomas F. Pecore (Pay-corE) Weso who died July 14, 2023, in Healdsburg, California.
Born and raised on the Menominee Indian reservation in Wisconsin, Tom attended and received degrees from Haskell Indian Nations University and the University of Kansas. He loved food and history as well as his Menominee culture. He wrote the food memoir Good Seeds (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), and a second memoir Survival Food, which is forthcoming. His children’s book Native American Stories for Kids won a Kansas Notable Book Award. In honor of Tom --
RADIO READERS BOOKBYTE
My name is Tom Weso. It is an Indian name, Weso meaning One Who Stands Firm. I had a complicated childhood that was exacerbated by certain economic realities. We were poor. We had to move around a lot looking for work. We had a large family, including in-laws, children, and shirttail cousins. My grandparents had 15 to 20 people to feed at dinnertime. Obtaining food was a full-time occupation.
I was born on the Menominee reservation in Northern Wisconsin and spent several years living there, most notably living in the Indian service jail building with my grandparents, which they had converted into a home. I also spent many years moving among major urban areas, like Green Bay, Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and finally Kansas. I have lived in Kansas for 25 years, and I consider it my home.
My book Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir, published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press, is a collection of recipes and stories about wild indigenous foods from my childhood, the 1950s and 1960s. I spent most of this time on the Menominee reservation. Although certain ceremonial and political aspects of rez life are well documented from the late 1800s, little is written about home life. My book addresses those family moments. I dedicated this book to my grandparents who were traditional, and both had grudgingly accepted some assimilation. Good Seeds is unique because recipes all relate to people I knew, and people are stories. We can’t help ourselves. We want to share stories and food with friends.
Like many people in Kansas, my grandparents “put up” fruit and vegetables for the winter. We encountered wildlife, and the following excerpt from the book is my true bear story.
“Bears and apples would not appear to go together, but they do. We went apple picking at the orchards where the Wolf River washed around the bends and eroded small caves. In the autumn season, bears liked to den in these caves, because they also liked to harvest the nearby apples. When we went apple picking, it didn’t matter that bears were around, because they did not go after the same kind of apple we wanted. The bears selected fermented apples, too rotten for us. The alcohol-laden food must have appealed to them, because they ate to excess. Drunken bears are not hard to identify. They stagger. They roll on the ground with blissful smiles. They slur their growls. Some of that the people from the Department of Natural Resources used to say that the bears only ate rotten apples only because of the grubs and other protein in them, but that was not true. They ate fermented apples like we would drink apple beer, and they seemed to enjoy themselves until they passed out. We never bothered them.”
Family stories about bears and apples, and about wild edibles like milkweed, plums, and blackberries will live on. Children will learn how to do things. How to survive. This is universal to all people. They will enter the Menominee heaven—food, drink, and friends with whom to share stories and some laughs.
Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir by Thomas Pecore Weso, Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 978-0-87020-771-6 Hardcover: www.wisconsinhistory.org
Thomas Pecore Weso
