My life is centered on food. Much of my time is spent thinking about when my next meal will be and what I will have, whether it’s a good day to make a trip to the cafeteria or to just scrounge for whatever is in my dorm. Maybe my finances will even allow me to eat out. Although the Native Indians and Puritan Settlers of North America didn’t always have a McDonalds down the street they still made food a large part of their life. This fact becomes apparent by the stories that have existed hundreds of years even after their cultures have died out. Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and the Native American Trickster Tales both use food as a central theme to emphasize the importance of food as a necessity for life. Both stories are constantly involving food and in many cases the main character is dramatically facing starvation if they fail to obtain provisions.

Mary Rowlandson, author of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, was born in England but moved to Massachusetts with her puritan family at a very young age. Mary married Joseph Rowlandson, the town minister, and they soon started their family in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Rowlandson begins her captivity narrative by describing in the preface to the reader how she used to almost wish for bad things to happen to her because her life seemed so boring because, despite the loss of one of her children, nothing ever seemed to go wrong. She got her wish on February 1st, 1675 when her town was attacked by three local Native American tribes, the Wampanoag, the Nipmuc, and the Narragansett. Mary and her family were attacked and she and her children were separated and taken captive by the Indians.

Throughout the twenty chapters of her narrative she describes the hardships she endured in removes, which signified every time the Natives she was with moved their camp. Rowlandson survived many trials in the three months she was captive, but the one that is by far most severely recognized is her endless hunger and need of food. In every chapter there is some mentioning of the food that she forced herself to eat in order to survive, such as horse feet, bear meat, and even intestine. Rowlandson also describes what a struggle it was for her to come by the meager bits of food that she did get. Many times she was reduced to begging through the camp for scraps and would often be beaten for doing so. She also accounts in a part of her narrative stealing a bit of horse foot from a child’s mouth because they couldn’t chew the tough meat properly. For nearly all of the three months that Rowlandson was kidnapped she on the verge of starvation, much like the winter months for the tricksters from old Native American tales.