I tasted oolichan grease for the first time at the feast honouring the ceremony about the Witness Blanket.
I first learned about oolichan grease when I was auditing a course about Indigenous Legal Theory.
The texts we were studying were mostly stories of the Gitxsan people, but there were other Indigenous stories as well.
Oolichan grease was an important part of one of the stories. I had to go to google to find out more about it. Now I can seee that I didn’t describe all of the important food on the feast table. In an email, Lindsay Keegitah Borrows asked me if I had tried the oolichan grease that was at the feast
I had forgotten how thrilled I was when the spokesperson said that there was some oolichan grease to be used on the salmon if people wished. It had been poured into a small sacrament-sized cup and was available beside the salmon. And yes, I did try it. I must have been hungry for I just poured it all over the fish before I even knew if I liked it.
I am an adventurous eater. With a new taste, I am not so concerned as to whether I like it or not. Other thoughts are going through my head: many people think this is a delicacy, I have read about this but never tasted it before, I wonder who did the processing for this oil so that I could try it, etc. All of the time I am thinking these thoughts, I am also thinking about the taste and trying to get it into my memory so that if I were blind-folded and given a taste of this, I could identify it.
The literature tells us that we have to taste something about 17 times before we know if we like it or not. So I have 16 times to go. I hope I get invited to enough feasts to work this out.
Arta
I first learned about oolichan grease when I was auditing a course about Indigenous Legal Theory.
The texts we were studying were mostly stories of the Gitxsan people, but there were other Indigenous stories as well.
Oolichan grease was an important part of one of the stories. I had to go to google to find out more about it. Now I can seee that I didn’t describe all of the important food on the feast table. In an email, Lindsay Keegitah Borrows asked me if I had tried the oolichan grease that was at the feast
I had forgotten how thrilled I was when the spokesperson said that there was some oolichan grease to be used on the salmon if people wished. It had been poured into a small sacrament-sized cup and was available beside the salmon. And yes, I did try it. I must have been hungry for I just poured it all over the fish before I even knew if I liked it.
I am an adventurous eater. With a new taste, I am not so concerned as to whether I like it or not. Other thoughts are going through my head: many people think this is a delicacy, I have read about this but never tasted it before, I wonder who did the processing for this oil so that I could try it, etc. All of the time I am thinking these thoughts, I am also thinking about the taste and trying to get it into my memory so that if I were blind-folded and given a taste of this, I could identify it.
The literature tells us that we have to taste something about 17 times before we know if we like it or not. So I have 16 times to go. I hope I get invited to enough feasts to work this out.
Arta
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