Fuels and Fires: Storage Containers

With so much of the year’s food preserved for lean times, it was essential to use large storage containers, among them large pottery jars, wooden bowls, baskets, and gourds. The Pomo used large coiled baskets for storing dried blueberries, and the Cree kept cranberries in pitch-sealed birch bark. The Menominee kept wild rice in containers made from the outer layers of birch or woven from the inner bark of cedar. Eastern Algonquians made grass sacks for corn. Hunting societies used animal products for their containers. The Apache stored dried, pounded acorn and meat mixtures in skins; the Paiute used buckskin bags to hang dried elderberries; and the Menominee also stored wild rice in muskrat skins, fawn skins, and raccoon sacks. In some cases animal bladders were inflated and hung over a fire to harden into bottle-shaped containers.