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Recent research bears this out as well. In one study, native Hawaiians were allowed to eat anything they wanted, provided it came from their traditional island diet. White rice, macaroni salad and Spam—all popular with Hawaiians, all introduced within the last 100–200 years—were off-limits.
“What the researcher found,” says Dori Khakpour, nutrition and education coordinator for the UW’s Diabetes Care Center, “was that when he put hypertensive, high blood-pressure, high blood-fat, overweight, diabetic Hawaiians on their original diet, those problems all went away, no matter how much they ate.” Using traditional foods to fight diabetes, she says, “totally makes sense.”
A longstanding complaint of Native Americans is that archaeological research rarely benefits them—archaeologists dig up historic sites, destroying them in the process, for their own obscure purposes. In 2002, Gobin approached Lape about the possibility of bringing his archaeologist’s tools to bear on a present-day problem. “He basically challenged me,” Lape recalls. “He said, ‘Does archaeological data have anything useful to offer Native Americans with diabetes?’ And I kind of immediately thought, ‘Well, yeah. We should have something. We study what people ate in the past—surely we should be able to say something about it.’ ”
 The team of Tulalip Indians leading the fight against diabetes within the tribes includes, from far left, Marsha Gray Airis and Verna Hill of the Tulalip Health Clinic, and Hank Gobin, Inez Bill and Joy Lacy of the Tulalip Cultural Resources Department. Photo by Mary Levin.
It was painstaking work, says Robert Kopperl, ’98, ’03, an archaeologist with Northwest Archaeological Associates, who as a graduate student was one of the project’s main researchers. “They’d have the basic information—what kinds of tools and everything—but you really had to dig deep into what’s called the ‘gray literature’ to find out about food. And oftentimes somebody actually did go through the trouble of identifying the bones—300 salmon bones, 24 flounder bones. But that really useful information was usually buried really deep. We were kind of doing the archaeology of the archaeology.”
Ultimately, these site reports yielded a rich record of traditional fare—particularly for coastal populations. (Shell fragments in the soil act as a preservative against its natural acidity.) The researchers found evidence of many fish and invertebrates not mentioned in the existing ethnographies—although the ethnographies, by contrast, provided valuable information about plants, roots, seeds and other food sources that don’t tend to survive in the archaeological record.
The overall picture that emerged, which Lape and Kopperl presented at the 2006 conference of the Society for American Archaeology, was of a diet breath-taking in its diversity.
 Peter Lape, curator of archaeology for the Burke Museum and assistant professor of anthropology at the UW. Photo by Kathy Sauber.
Asked if that was because they were subsistence eaters who cooked up whatever was available, he says it’s not that simple.
“The evidence suggests that this was a very rich place to live, the resources were abundant, and people were making choices about what to eat—not because they were starving but for other reasons that we may not know about. My pipe dream is someday to really learn more about the cuisine. What did the food taste like? How was it prepared and cooked? What were the traditions? What was the high cuisine of this area? Unfortunately, a lot of that has been lost because of the reservation system. It was really difficult to sustain those traditions in the 20th century because people didn’t have access to the ingredients.”
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