South Dakota Indian Taco

A vendor at the Sturgis Black Hills Powwow in early August has a propane burner, a deep iron skillet of beef tallow, and a folding table covered with bowls of fillings under cling film. A Lakota grandmother mixes flour, baking powder, salt, water, and a spoon of dry powdered milk in a steel bowl into a soft dough, lets it rest for ten minutes under a clean towel while she pats out the previous batch, then tears off a piece the size of a closed fist, presses it between her palms into a round about ten inches across, and drops it into the hot fat. The dough puffs at the edges, blisters along its face, and rolls in the skillet until both sides are deep gold. It comes out onto paper toweling for fifteen seconds, then onto a paper plate, and the rest of the sandwich is loaded on top while the bread is still hissing. That round is the South Dakota reading of Indian taco bread, with its own lineage and its own legislative status as the state's bread.

The South Dakota build is rooted in the Oceti Sakowin, the seven council fires of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples whose homeland covers the Northern Plains across the western half of South Dakota, southwestern Minnesota, eastern Wyoming, and into North Dakota and Nebraska. The fry-bread tradition on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Sisseton-Wahpeton, Yankton, and Flandreau reservations runs back to federal commodity rations issued through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Lakota and Dakota communities adapted the issued white flour and lard into a daily bread. The state legislature recognized the bread by name and made the South Dakota link civic record. South Dakota Senate Bill 41, signed into law in March 2005, designated fry bread as the official state bread of South Dakota, sponsored by Senator Theresa Two Bulls of Pine Ridge, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. The designation made the bread the only state bread with an explicit Native nation lineage in its naming.

The savory build sits on top of that round in a structured stack the bread is engineered to carry. A ladle of seasoned ground beef in its rendered juices goes down first, sometimes ground bison from a tribal herd in its place. A spoon of slow-cooked pinto beans, often from a USDA Food Distribution Program package issued through the Pine Ridge or Rosebud tribal office, lands next. The commodity bean is the daily one because the federal program supplies dried pinto by the case to enrolled household kitchens across the reservations, and the bean has become part of the build's grammar as much as a Hatch chile is part of a Southwestern build. Shredded cheddar goes on the beans while the heat from the meat is still pulling melt out of it. Shredded iceberg, diced tomato, sometimes a spoon of sour cream, and a ladle of red salsa or a chopped jalapeno close the stack. The plate goes out open-faced, eaten with the fingers from the outer rim inward or with a plastic fork from the center out, the round soaking up rendered juices as the eater works through it.

The cooking failure modes sit inside the dough and the fry. Too little baking powder and the round comes out of the fat dense and tough, a flat disc rather than a pillow. Too much baking powder and it puffs into a hollow shell that breaks apart under the load, leaving the customer holding cheese-and-meat over a bowl of fragments. Dough mixed too cold seizes in the skillet and stays raw at the center. Dough rested too long develops gluten past the right elastic give and goes chewy past the soft pull the sandwich wants. Tallow above the right temperature browns the surface fast and leaves the interior gummy; tallow below it soaks the bread before the crust can set, and the round arrives saturated and heavy. A round pulled fifteen seconds too early goes pale and the diner gets a doughy bite at the center; pulled too late, the round goes brittle and the load above will tear it apart at the first cut.

The smell at a powwow ground in Eagle Butte or at the Lakota Nation Invitational in Rapid City in mid-December is hot tallow and yeasted dough and slow-cooked beans, threaded with the steam from a pot of wojapi at the dessert station. The sound is the steady pop of the fat as a new round goes in and the soft tearing as a customer pulls a piece off their plate. The first bite of the savory build is the crisp outer rim of the bread, then the warm chewy interior, then the wet load above it, the cheese already gold and the meat juices running into the bread underneath. The second bite is fork work, lifting through the wet center of the round where the load has saturated through to the underside. The plate is eaten down to a soft soaked round that goes last.

The variations on the South Dakota reading separate it from its Southwestern cousins more than from its own local siblings. The sweet reading is wojapi over a hot round with honey or powdered sugar; wojapi is the traditional Lakota berry sauce made from buffaloberries or chokecherries simmered with sugar and water to a thick wine-dark spoon, served at family gatherings and powwows and ceremonial meals across the reservations, and the sweet fry-bread plate is the version diners from outside the reservations usually encounter first at the South Dakota State Fair midway in Huron in late August. A buffalo build swaps the ground beef for bison from the Cheyenne River buffalo herd or the InterTribal Buffalo Council network. A folded handheld build closes the disc over its load for eating away from the table, the way an empanada or a turnover seals around its filling. The wider Indian taco family runs the same form across Indian Country with a different bread and a different filling for each Native nation; the South Dakota reading anchors at the Lakota and Dakota homelands and at the state legislature's 2005 designation.

The two thousand five state bread designation

South Dakota Senate Bill 41 was signed into law in March 2005 and designated fry bread as the official state bread of South Dakota. Senator Theresa Two Bulls of Pine Ridge, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the future president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from 2008 to 2010, sponsored the bill, and the legislative record carries her floor remarks on the bread's Native lineage and its place in the state's nine federally recognized tribal communities. The bill passed the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee and moved through both chambers without significant opposition before reaching Governor Mike Rounds for signature. South Dakota became the only state in the union with an official state bread tied by enacted legislation to a specific Native nation's culinary lineage.

The fry bread the bill recognized has a Plains-specific history that runs through the same federal commodity program that produced the build's standard pinto bean. Treaties signed between the United States government and the Oceti Sakowin across the mid- to late eighteen hundreds, including the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie agreements, established reservation boundaries and federal ration obligations across the Northern Plains. The Bureau of Indian Affairs distributed white flour, salt, lard, and powdered milk to Lakota and Dakota communities on the reservations through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the bread emerged from those rations as a Plains adaptation that ran in parallel with the Diné adaptation in the Navajo homeland. The two fry-bread traditions developed in the same federal era from the same federal commodities through different community kitchens.

The Indian taco form built on the Plains fry bread is a mid-twentieth-century roadside and powwow food across South Dakota. Powwow grounds at the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation's Eagle Butte powwow in August, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's annual fair and powwow in late August, the Sturgis Black Hills Powwow each summer, and the Lakota Nation Invitational basketball tournament in Rapid City in December are the standard public venues. The South Dakota State Fair in Huron in late August carries the sweet wojapi reading on the midway. The state senate's 2005 designation of fry bread as the state bread sits at the formal anchor point of the South Dakota reading of the Indian taco.