Lines from the lyrics of the Kris Allen song Live Like We're Dying go like this;

"Our hearts are hungry for a food that won't come.
We could make a feast from these crumbs"

Even though there are different meanings of this verse it reminds me how the Paiute Indian people used their survival skills to find food and make do with what they had. Mono Paiutes lived in some of the harshest of environments, from the Great Basin desert, to shores of the salty Mono Lake, yet Paiutes could find food in these environments and thrive even during the hardest of times. To do this Paiutes had to constantly move around their territory and collect, harvest and gather food items, like plants, roots, nuts, seeds, animals, and fowl, many of those were seasonal. For centuries Paiutes learned which areas would offer them the best sustenance and moved around according to the seasons. In harsher seasons the Paiutes would work their environment to stretch things and make do. Even after whites arrived in the area many Paiutes still continued to gather, hunt and fish in their old traditional manner.

During the history of the United States nothing effected the American people like the Great Depression. The Great Depression started with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, and affected every country in the world. The Depression lasted several years and during this time many people found themselves unemployed, including the people of California. Many people in the state and the country lost their homes and thousands of people went hungry.

Oddly during the height of the Great Depression Paiutes living in Yosemite were not affected because they resorted to their old traditional native lifestyles and natural foods as they had done for eons. The Paiutes living in Yosemite and Mono Lake went unfazed by the economical collapse that was going on around them because they just continued living in their Native American way as they always have.

An article appeared in the Mariposa Gazette newspaper, October 29th,1931, which you can see in the gallery, about the Paiutes of Yosemite and Mono Lake during the Great Depression;

NO BREAD LINES FOR YOSEMITE INDIANS

The Indian families wintering in Yosemite Valley are not worrying about bread lines, soup kitchens or doles, because they consider this a most prosperous year. The acorn crop is unusually bountiful and they have gathered large supplies of their staple food, which they grind into meal and make into nutritious “bread” and “mush”. Wrinkled, smiling, old Indian Maggie is a tireless gleaner, filling sack after sack with the nuts of the black oak. When questioned as to how she would manage to eat so many acorns, she replied: “I eat plenty. Some I take for my sons at Mono Lake. No oak trees at Mono Lake – no acorns at Mono Lake.”

The story was about Maggie "Taboose" Howard who worked as the main Yosemite Native American demonstrator in the Park. She worked in Yosemite National Park for decades and continued living in the traditional manner collecting and gathering Paiute food items like acorns, and you can see the photos of Maggie in the photo gallery making Acorn mush and cleaning acorns.

Even during hard economical times the Yosemite Mono Lake Paiutes reverted back to their indigenous methods to survive by resorting back to their traditional ways.