What it means
Fry bread is a round of plain dough, stretched by hand and dropped into hot lard or oil, where it puffs, blisters and turns gold in about a minute. Eaten plain it is chewy and faintly sweet; dusted with powdered sugar or drizzled with honey it is dessert; topped with beans, seasoned beef, lettuce, tomato and cheese it becomes a Navajo taco, the dish most Arizona visitors meet first.
Fry bread came out of the government rations fed to the Navajo after the 1864 Long Walk, spread to nearly every Native nation through the same ration system, and became the shared food of Indian Country. It is comfort food and a reminder, sometimes in the same bite, and Native people themselves disagree about what it stands for.
Scottsdale sits beside the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and the easiest places to eat fry bread made by Native cooks are the Community’s own gatherings; see the links below.
Where you’ll meet it
At the Red Mountain Eagle Powwow on the Community’s ballfields each November, where the south-side stands sell fry bread until it runs out; at the Arizona Indian Festival at the Civic Center each February; at Fry Bread House on Seventh Avenue in Phoenix; and at the Arizona State Fair, where the Navajo taco is a standing institution.
Where the word came from
Fry bread has a date, which is unusual for a food. In 1864 the U.S. Army forced the Navajo people from their homeland on the Long Walk, up to 450 miles on foot, to internment at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. The land could not support their crops or herds, and the government issued rations instead: white flour, sugar, salt and lard. Out of those four ingredients, Navajo cooks made a bread they could fry in a pan over an open fire. When the Navajo returned home in 1868, the bread went with them.
The same rationing then became the norm on reservations across the country, and fry bread spread with it, from the Southwest to the Plains and beyond, acquiring local names and shapes along the way. By the twentieth century it was powwow food and fundraiser food, sold at every gathering, which is how it came to be called “Indian” bread rather than Navajo bread. The Navajo taco came later; several Arizona and New Mexico diners claim to have put taco toppings on fry bread first, and no claim is documented, so we leave it at that.
Phoenix gave the bread its national moment. Cecelia Miller, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, opened Fry Bread House in 1992, stretching the dough by hand the way she had learned as a child and topping it with red chile stew or chorizo and cheese. In 2012 the James Beard Foundation gave it one of five America’s Classics awards, the first ever to a Native American restaurant. Miller died in 2020 at 81; her children run it now, at 4140 North Seventh Avenue.
What it is not
Fry bread is not a sopaipilla, the New Mexican pillow of fried dough that is leavened and hollow, and it is not a tortilla. A Navajo taco is not a taco in any Mexican sense; it is a plate. And “fry bread” is not one recipe: O’odham cooks, Navajo cooks and Plains cooks make it to different thicknesses and with different fats, and each will tell you theirs is correct.
The fine print
The argument over fry bread is a Native argument, and visitors should understand it rather than take a side. In 2005 South Dakota made fry bread its official state bread. The same year the Cheyenne and Muscogee writer Suzan Shown Harjo published an essay in Indian Country Today calling the bread “emblematic of the long trails from home and freedom to confinement and rations,” and linking it to the diabetes and obesity that burden many Native communities. Others answered that she overstated the case, that a food which kept people alive through removal is a symbol of survival, and that blaming a bread for the effects of poverty gets the causation backwards. Both positions are alive, often at the same table.
A few practical notes. Fry bread is best within minutes of the fryer, which is why powwow lines move slowly and nobody minds. The savory toppings at Native-run stands are usually red chile stew or pinto beans and seasoned ground beef; the sweet version is honey or powdered sugar, and the honey one is the better test of the bread itself. At the Red Mountain Eagle Powwow the stands have sold out of specialties before the evening grand entry, so eat early. Bring cash.
When you buy it at a Native-run event you are also paying the cooks directly, which is the point. The Community’s Huhugam Ki Museum explains the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash history that frames all of this, and our guide to buying Native American art covers the same principle at the vendor rows.