Rachel Virginia Briggs

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Anthropology

As long as the Indian can eat and drink osafki, he will not go dead. Made from boiled maize kernels exposed to an alkaline solution, hominy has been regarded as one of a number of maize dishes within the culinary repertoire of the Native cook. However, this article proposes that hominy was not a singular dish but rather the life-sustaining staple f...

Although the Mississippian standard jar, a specific vessel form found in many parts of the Mississippian cultural world, has long been recognized as a utilitarian cooking pot, the important connection between this ceramic form and maize has largely been overlooked. By focusing on the Mississippian site of Moundville located in the Black Warrior val...

Native women in Indigenous‐Western colonial entanglements are often portrayed as passive agents with little transformative social power in an otherwise dynamic landscape. However, Native women throughout the European colonial world many times controlled the most important resource required by European colonists: the knowledge and materials necessar...

This chapter is a continuation of my research into the hominy foodway, exploring three major historical trajectories of the foodway after European contact: the white or Euro-American hominy foodway, the African and African-American hominy foodway, and the Native hominy foodway. I argue that what differentiates these different foodways is the culina...