The Nez Perce food cycle is something that has been fine tuned and honed over thousands of generations. The amount of knowledge that is contained in that food round, that food cycle is enormous because the people and their experience of being from this areas and originating in this area always had to go out and look for food. Yet, they did not want to leave their homelands and be nomadic.

That is something that is a misconception about the Nez Perce is that they are often referred to as a nomadic people. Nomads follow the food no matter where it goes but the Nez Perce are transhumance which means they go in a cycle and end up back to where they originated.

In the springtime the food cycle would begin in the river bottoms and the lower valleys where there wasn’t much snow as in say the mountaintops. They would winter there because it was warmer; there was less food that was necessary to survive because the colder the elements are the more food you need to survive in that area. They would winter in the lower river bottoms and then in the springtime they would start by gathering the root foods and different foods in the lower river valleys along with the salmon, the spring runs of salmon.

Then it would progress slowly to higher elevations and eventually in the fall time they would end up near the headwaters of the streams and harvesting deer and elk from the forest. There are areas up in higher countries where camas was available. Then they would start harvesting those foods and then as it grew colder again they would slowly progress back down to the river bottoms. It was always according to what plant was available or what food was available in the forest. The old people were definitely not nomadic; they were transhumance. They followed a definite and distinct pattern of acquiring those foods.