Since that question is a bit vague what I’m asking is what methods would be used by northern native Americans to preserve food, excluding the obvious of pemmican and smoking were there any others? I would love anything particular to natives in modern day Kentucky however anything would be nice. Added details such as what they would preserve as well would be nice, for instance were they preserving plants such as what are now known as Indian cucumber, groundnuts, and other such plants? Were any of these methods other than smoking adopted by settlers? I know this is loaded so feel free to take off one of these questions and go further with it.
Dehydration was hugely important for food preservation among many western nations. Pinion nuts, acorns, grass seeds, manzanita and other berries, cammas bulbs and other root crops, and seaweed were important staples. They were usually sun dried and stored in houses in large baskets. Pinion nuts were shelled and stored. Acorns were stored in their shells.
Meat, fish and shellfish were dried or smoked (or both). Both meat and fish were stored hanging from racks inside houses along the Pacific coast. At some of the large fisheries (like The Dalles, Oregon), dried salmon meat was packed with mauls into long, fish-skin lined cylindrical baskets and then transported into the intermountain west and on to the Great Plains.