History & folklore

Indigenous Peoples and Salt in the Americas

By The Salt AlmanacPublished November 8, 2026

Long before Europeans arrived, peoples across the Americas boiled, mined, traded and honoured salt. Some of their sacred salt places are still protected and visited on pilgrimage today.

At a glance: where to see this history

Salt gods and sacred lakes

Huixtocihuatl, the Aztec salt goddess. According to the 16th-century Florentine Codex, Huixtocihuatl mocked her brothers, the rain gods, who banished her to the salt beds, where she discovered how salt was made. In Tecuilhuitontli, the seventh month of the Aztec calendar (June), salt-makers and their daughters danced in her honour for ten days. The festival ended with the sacrifice of a woman chosen to embody the goddess.

Salt Mother of Zuni Salt Lake. In New Mexico, a shallow lake in a volcanic crater is the home of the Zuni deity Salt Mother, Ma'l Okyattsik'i, and its salt is described as her flesh. For centuries the Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Hopi and Taos pueblos have made pilgrimages to gather it. The Apache leader Geronimo remembered the lake as a place of peace, where no one could hunt or attack an enemy. Read more about Zuni Salt Lake.

The Hopi salt journey. In an old initiation tradition, young Hopi men travelled down into the gorge of the Little Colorado River and the Grand Canyon to gather salt and carry it home to their female relatives. A Hopi archaeologist calls it a “spiritually and physically dangerous journey.” The deposits lie near the Sipapuni, the Hopi place of emergence into this world. Out of respect, we give no location.

How salt was made

• Boiling brine in pots. The most common method across the Americas. Maya salt workers at Ek Way Nal in Belize boiled brine in pots in pole-and-thatch “salt kitchens” and salted fish for inland markets, about AD 300–900. Their workshops survive under the sea floor at Paynes Creek.
• Salt springs. Mississippian and earlier peoples boiled brine at the Illinois Salines, and Native Americans boiled the springs of Avery Island, Louisiana, trading the salt as far as central Texas, Arkansas and Ohio.
• Mines and brine in the Andes. The Muisca of Colombia, called “the Salt People,” worked salt at Zipaquirá, Nemocón and Tausa. Muisca women drew salt from brine in large pots, and salt dried and preserved fish and meat.
• Mountain sun pans. At Maras near Cusco, about 4,500 terraced pools, used since well before the Inca, are filled from a salty spring and left to evaporate in the sun.
• Lake-bed crusts. The Aztecs gathered tequesquite, a natural crust of salt and soda from dried lake beds, still used as a seasoning in Mexico. For the Mexica, salt was a luxury the poor could not easily afford.
• Salt from plants. Where there was no salt to mine or boil, the Witoto (Murui) people of the Amazon made “ash salts”: they burned palm shoots and other plants, washed the ash with water and boiled the liquid down to grey grains, used in a ceremonial tobacco paste called ambil.

Salt, trade and power

Salt moved along trade routes across both continents. The Osage controlled the Great Salt Plains of Oklahoma by 1760, using the salt to bleach deer hides and as a valuable trade good. Pottery from the Muisca salt towns turns up across the Bogotá savanna. Salt from Zuni Salt Lake was still traded widely when the Spanish arrived in 1598.

First Nations, Métis and salt in Canada

The written record for Canada is thinner. Most of what survives comes from fur traders' journals and oral history, and historians note that little is known about Indigenous uses of salt beyond trade. Two regions stand out.

The northern salt plains. Dene people gathered salt from the riverbanks and salt plains along the Salt and Slave rivers, in what is now Wood Buffalo National Park. Dene traders told the Hudson's Bay Company about it, and it appears on a company map of 1760. Alexander Mackenzie wrote that “when the Indians pass that way they bring a small quantity to the fort,” and in 1791 Philip Turnor saw salt brought to Lake Athabasca in large quantities. Dene oral history describes carrying salt about 600 km north to Contwoyto Lake to trade with the Inuit. In the 1840s the HBC handed the deposits to the Métis leader François Beaulieu.

A tradition that continues. Indigenous people still gather salt on the plains. In 2022 Parks Canada warned Melissa Daniels, an Athabasca Chipewyan woman from Fort Smith, against selling salt she harvested there. Parks Canada says personal harvesting by Indigenous people is allowed but commercial harvesting is not, and it referred the question to the park's co-operative management committee of 11 Indigenous governments.

Manitoba's salt springs. On Lake Winnipegosis, salt springs drew game for seasonal hunts recorded in 1799. Ojibway and Métis families at Duck Bay boiled brine in iron kettles, and from 1818 the Métis Monkman family made salt that travelled by York boat and Red River cart to the Red River Settlement. The railway's cheap salt ended the trade in the 1880s.

Salt places today

Some of these places are tourist sites; others are sacred and protected. The United States returned Zuni Salt Lake and 5,000 surrounding acres to Zuni control in 1985. From 1981, a utility planned a coal strip mine about ten miles away that would have pumped the groundwater the lake depends on. After a 20-year campaign led by the Zuni, the mine was cancelled in August 2003. At Maras, about 400 local families own the salt pools, and a company owned by local residents has run the salt business since 1980.

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