Episode Details

Pemmican, a 5,000-year-old Indigenous invention from the North American plains, packed dried, pounded meat and rendered fat into a dense, nearly imperishable fuel. The name itself comes from the Cree word for fat or grease, and this episode explains the chemistry behind its preparation and how it could stay edible for years, sometimes decades.

We follow pemmican from Métis bison hunts and 90-pound rawhide bags to the voyageurs of the fur trade, the 1814 Pemmican Proclamation and the Battle of Seven Oaks, polar expeditions from Peary to Shackleton, and a 1969 U.S. military Arctic rations study. The story ends with Indigenous communities and Indigenous-owned companies making pemmican today.

• How thin-sliced, sun- or smoke-dried meat was ground to powder and mixed one-to-one with rendered tallow
• Why canoe paddlers burning 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day depended on pemmican to move furs across the continent
• How the Pemmican Proclamation cut off the Métis trade and led to the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816
• The protein-heavy Bovril dog pemmican that Shackleton's stranded crew ended up eating themselves
• Rubaboo stew, berry pemmican, Lakota corn wasna, and the Boer War iron ration