What we know as frybread today didn't exist prior to the colonization of the Americas. The history of frybread, although comparatively short to the histories of traditional foods Indigenous to the Americas, is a history of oppression, suffering, and survival that has been adopted by many American Indians, including the Diné (Navajo) peoples in to what I've heard called, facetiously, as "neo-traditional." While it continues to be the default showpiece of an assumed mono-Indigenous culture within the United States, the impact of frybread from the height of colonization to now plagues Indian communities and, in a way, represents our struggles and tenacity to overcome the detriments we have faced.

But, moving on...

Poor health resulting from lifestyle choice is a serious problem for Americans. Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and alcoholism rage across tribal Nations and have struck both the young and old (Mihesuah, 2003, p. 807).

Native Americans have suffered from some of the highest rates of public health issues and, while some improvements have been made, still rank among the lowest across the charts. Of course, a number of factors play into this, including federal policy, local policy, Tribal actions, personal choices, resource availability, and so on. However, one thing is for sure: the conditions created by the United States government forced Indigenous communities into the situations they now find themselves and have fostered circumstances that make it difficult for even individual Indians to overcome detrimental habits such as those that lead to heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. This includes the circumstances that have produced frybread. Here is a brief explanation (emphasis mine):

Once Indigenous Peoples had been largely subdued and confined to reservations or reserves, so began the process of attacking Indigenous ways of life through the children. In federally mandated boarding or residential schools, the children were fed starchy and fatty diets. While the children did eat fresh produce often grown by their own hands, they were also fed a lot of dairy products and meats from the livestock they raised as child laborers at the schools. They were also introduced to sweets, which would have been a rare treaty in most Indigenous diets...

Treaty annunities and the government commodities program additionally severed to wreak havoc on Indigenous diet and health. Instead of eating hand-grown and harvested fruits, nuts, and vegetables, the lean meat of wild game, and fish loaded with essential fats, Indigenous Peoples instead consumed highly processed canned, salted, and sugared foods, canned fatty meats, and high quantities of refined sugar and bleached white flour. Once these foods entered Indigenous diets, they became firmly entrenched in spite of their ill effects on our bodies. For example, fry bread has become an Indigenous staple, but it only serves to worsen the health of our people. As Susan Harjo aptly describes, "Fry bread was a gift of Western civilization from the days when Native people were removed from buffalo, elk, deer, salmon, turkey, corn, beans, squash, acorns, fruit, wild rice and other real food." Many of us have acquired a taste for it, but when we give some serious though to the ingredients, we have to wonder why . . . While most Indigenous societies had some kind of bread prior to invasion and colonization . . . fried foods generally were not a part of the Indigenous diet" (Wilson & Bird, 2005, pp. 69-70).

Mihesuah (2003), cited earlier, also highlights this point, saying:

Although fry bread has been around for centuries, it is not truly"traditional," because wheat was brought from the Old World to the New in 1602 and was first grown off the coast of Massachusetts. Wheat is thought to have originated in southwestern Asia, and today, the production of wheat is behind only rice and corn in terms of worldwide production.

Not only is fry bread high in fat, it is also caloric. A person who regularly eats fry bread without exercising is probably carrying excess weight. If that person does not consume foods that contribute to his or her daily nutrition requirements, they will be unhealthy, overweight, and will be at risk for diabetes and all the problems associated with being overfat (p. 823).

Thus, for the Diné people and for many other American Indians, frybread would not have been an item they would have regularly consumed if they could make it prior to the colonization of the Americas. The ingredients for it didn't exist and we did not have an accustomed diet to said ingredients. This type of diet only developed after colonization and the product of frybread was often done out of necessity because reservations were commonly faced with malnutrition, starvation, and ration depletion, all of that which stemmed from neglect, abuse, and deadly intentions on behalf of the federal government who promised to provide such provisions in the treaties they made with Tribes. What little the Tribes did receive, the commodities are what produced frybread and also the unhealthy habits and statistics that are now felt today.

And while frybread is commonly associated with it being a Diné creation, there is disputed history as to the exact origin. Many Tribes faced similar conditions to the Diné once they were placed on reservations and similar commodities and rations would've been dispensed at these reservations.

Due to these adverse opinions about frybread, ethical debates have arisen: Should we continue to eat frybread? What does frybread symbolize? Have we adopted it or adapted to it? How would our future generations feel about it? Are we truly decolonizing by not stopping this habit? The commentary is wide, and here is just a sample opinion (emphasis mine):

Decolonization as a political project within Native studies and Native activism signifies diverse and often contradictory positions. Glen Coulthard notes that Native struggles articulate their claims under a rubric of decolonization when their actual campaigns focus on seeking recognition from the settler state rather than dismantling the state itself. In some contexts, decolonization can also be mobilized to support notions of cultural authenticity in abstraction from concrete political struggles; in other words, Native peoples must demonstrate their decolonization by rejecting Christianity, not eating fry bread, living on reservations, and so on. But by looking at decolonization in unexpected places, the point is not simply to challenge notions of cultural authenticity, but to remind us again that ultimately, as Waziyatawin argues, decolonization is a political project designed to dismantle white supremacy, settler colonial- ism, and capitalism. As such, it requires seeking alliances with all those who have an interest in decolonization. To build the political power necessary to effectively decolonize indigenous nations, and indeed the world, our political imperative is not to foreclose possible alliances with Native peoples who seem to be assimilationist or conservative, but to identify possible nodal points of connection that can lead to global transformation (Smith, 2010, p. 587).

While frybread, as noted, continues to be a staple for many Indigenous diets today, the effects are noticeable and have been for many years. For the non-Natives looking on from the outside, many see, as it appears to me, a fun food that is no different than the many fatty foods common in American diets and cuisine. But for the Indigenous peoples, for those who have suffered oppression and colonization, frybread has become much more than a food of enjoyment. It is a food of living, a food of commerce, a food of remembrance. But most of all, it is a food of survival.

References

Mihesuah, D. (2003). Decolonizing Our Diets by Recovering Our Ancestors' Gardens. American Indian Quarterly, 27(3/4), 807-839.

Smith, A. (2010). Decolonization in Unexpected Places: Native Evangelicalism and the Rearticulation of Mission. American Quarterly, 62(3), 569-590.

Wilson, A. C., & Bird, M. Y. (Eds.). (2005). For indigenous eyes only: A decolonization handbook. Santa Fe: School of American Research.