Camas

A traditional staple food

For thousands of years, camas was one of the most important plant foods for indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Columbia Plateau (roughly modern Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and southwestern Canada). Annual camas harvests at known meadows were major social and economic events for tribes including the Nez Perce, Spokane, Yakama, and Coeur d’Alene.

Wild camas meadows were carefully managed by indigenous communities — burned in fall to maintain habitat, weeded of competing plants, and harvested with specialized digging tools.

Pit-roasting transforms the bulb

Raw camas bulbs are starchy, fibrous, and unpleasantly bland. Indigenous communities developed a sophisticated pit-roasting technique to transform them:

1. Dig a pit in the ground
2. Build a fire and heat stones at the bottom
3. Layer with vegetation, then a thick layer of camas bulbs
4. Cover with more vegetation, hides, and earth
5. Slow-roast for 24-48 hours (sometimes longer)

This long slow heating converts the inulin in the bulbs (a complex carbohydrate) into fructose — making the camas intensely sweet, caramelized, and concentrated. Properly cooked camas tastes like roasted sweet potato crossed with butterscotch.

Death camas warning

A serious foraging hazard: several species of “death camas” (Toxicoscordion species) look very similar to true camas in early spring before flowering. Death camas contains the alkaloid zygacine, which can be fatal even in small amounts.

The two are easy to distinguish in flower — true camas has blue-purple flowers, death camas has white-cream flowers. But the bulbs and pre-flowering plants look almost identical. Never harvest camas without confirming flower color first, and never harvest in spring before flowering.

Lewis and Clark’s stomach trouble

When the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the Columbia Plateau in 1805-1806, they were exhausted, starving, and welcomed by Nez Perce people who fed them camas. The unfamiliar food caused widespread digestive distress in the expedition members — diarrhea, gas, and sickness — because camas’s high inulin content is hard for unaccustomed European digestive systems.

The expedition still survived and benefited enormously from the camas, but the stomach trouble was so notable that several expedition members wrote about it in journals.

Modern indigenous food revival

Since the 1990s and especially in the 2010s, camas has experienced a revival as part of indigenous food sovereignty movements. Several Pacific Northwest tribes have restored traditional camas meadows, taught young people the traditional pit-roasting techniques, and reintroduced camas to indigenous-led restaurants and community kitchens.

The Sammamish-area camas restoration project (Washington), the Camas Festival in Oregon, and indigenous food educators across the Plateau region are all part of this renaissance.