page_title: Pemmican
section_title: Ingredients
hierarchical_section_title: Pemmican / Ingredients
caption_attribution_description: Species: Aronia prunifolia Family: Rosaceae Image No. 1
context_page_description: Pemmican is a mixture of tallow, dried meat and dried berries used as a nutritious food. Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America, and is still prepared today. The word comes from the Cree word pimîhkân, which itself is derived from the word pimî, "fat, grease". The Lakota word is wasná, originally meaning "grease derived from marrow bones", with the wa- creating a noun, and sná referring to small pieces that adhere to something. It was invented by the Indigenous peoples of North America.
  Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Captain Robert Bartlett, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong and Roald Amundsen.
context_section_description: Traditionally, the specific ingredients used for pemmican were usually whatever was available. The dried meat is often in the form of large game meat such as bison, deer, elk, or moose, but the use of fish such as salmon, and smaller game such as duck, is not uncommon. The meats used in contemporary pemmican may also include beef. Dried fruit, such as cranberries and Saskatoon berries, are sometimes added. Blueberries, cherries, chokeberries, and currants are also used, but in some regions, these fruits are almost exclusively in ceremonial and wedding pemmican. The additional use of sugar was noted in the journals of European fur traders. These ingredients are mixed together with rendered animal fat (tallow). 
  Among the Lakota and Dakota nations, there is also a corn wasná (or pemmican) which does not contain dried meat. This is made from toasted cornmeal, animal fat, fruit, and sugar.
caption: Chokeberries (Aronia prunifolia), sometimes added to pemmican
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