Long before Louisiana cooks were arguing about roux color, tomatoes, or what belongs in gumbo, Native peoples of the region already knew sassafras.
The aromatic tree grows naturally across the eastern United States, including Louisiana. Native communities used different parts of the plant for food, flavoring, teas, and other purposes, and the knowledge of drying and grinding sassafras leaves became one of the Indigenous contributions that entered Louisiana’s developing food culture. Louisiana Folklife specifically identifies filé—powdered sassafras used in gumbo—as a Native American contribution.
Today that connection survives every time somebody reaches for a jar of gumbo filé.
Sassafras Was Here Before Louisiana Cuisine
Sassafras was not introduced to Louisiana by French, Spanish, African, or Acadian settlers.
It was already part of the landscape.
Choctaw people developed several uses for the tree. According to 64 Parishes, they gathered sassafras leaves and bark for flavorings and teas and used powdered sassafras in a variety of foods. The Choctaw term for the sassafras tree is recorded as iti kʋfi.
That history predates the culinary categories Louisiana uses today.
Sassafras was being used before there was a Cajun cuisine, a New Orleans Creole cuisine, or a dish recognized in its modern form as gumbo.
The Choctaw Connection to Filé
The Native history of filé is especially associated with the Choctaw.
Filé is produced by drying sassafras leaves and grinding or pounding them into a fine powder. Southern Foodways Alliance identifies that technique as a Choctaw contribution to gumbo, while Louisiana Folklife likewise credits Native Americans with introducing powdered sassafras into Louisiana foodways.
The powder serves two purposes.
It contributes a distinctive earthy, herbal flavor, and it can thicken soups and stews.
That made sassafras particularly useful long before anybody could buy a jar labeled “Gumbo Filé” at the grocery store.
Native Food Knowledge Moved Between Communities
Louisiana cuisine did not develop inside neatly separated cultural boxes.
Native peoples, Africans and their descendants, Europeans, free people of color, and later immigrant communities interacted through trade, work, settlement, family relationships, and shared foodways. Ingredients and techniques moved with them.
The Historic New Orleans Collection describes gumbo as a product of this broader process of creolization, combining influences that included Native American filé, African ingredients and traditions, and European cooking techniques.
Sassafras is one of the clearest examples.
Native knowledge of a local plant became part of dishes eventually cooked in Creole homes, Cajun kitchens, restaurants, hunting camps, and communities throughout Louisiana.
Choctaw Trade Connected Sassafras to New Orleans
Native influence on New Orleans food was not abstract.
Choctaw people traveled into the city and traded goods directly with Creole residents. Louisiana Folklife documents Choctaw interaction with communities around Mandeville, Bayou Lacombe, and New Orleans and notes that Native vendors sold basketry, herbs, and other goods in the city’s markets.
Filé was among the Native products incorporated into Creole cooking.
Nineteenth-century visual records even show Choctaw vendors associated with gumbo ingredients at the French Market. A circa-1870 drawing held by The Historic New Orleans Collection depicts Indigenous gumbo sellers in New Orleans.
The French Market was therefore more than a place where finished Louisiana cuisine was sold.
It was one of the places where Louisiana cuisine was being created through exchange.
Sassafras Appears in Early Louisiana Gumbo Records
The Native connection reaches deep into written gumbo history.
A French account from 1784 described a Louisiana gombo prepared with broth, pepper, sassafras, corn or rice, and various meats, poultry, or fish. Modern researcher John DePriest notes that the preparation strongly resembles traditional Choctaw-style stews and was distinguished from another gumbo specifically made with okra.
That is important because it places sassafras in Louisiana’s gumbo story during the colonial period.
It also shows that Louisiana already had multiple thickened stew traditions very early in the dish’s documented history.
Did the Word “Gumbo” Come from Choctaw?
This is where an old story needs some correction.
It has often been claimed that gumbo comes from a Choctaw word for powdered sassafras, sometimes written kombo. More recent linguistic research suggests that explanation is unlikely.
Choctaw linguist John DePriest found that early Choctaw dictionaries used forms related to kvfi for sassafras, while kombo does not appear in the written record as a term for powdered sassafras until much later. His research instead points toward Bantu languages of Central Africa as the likely source of the word gumbo.
That does not reduce the Native contribution to the dish.
The name and the ingredient can have different histories.
Native Influence Does Not Depend on the Name
This distinction is worth emphasizing because food history often gets compressed into catchy origin stories.
Evidence strongly supports Native use of sassafras and the incorporation of filé into Louisiana cooking. Evidence is much weaker for the claim that Native peoples gave gumbo its name.
Southern Foodways Alliance summarizes the multicultural history neatly: okra and the name gumbo have African connections, filé came through Choctaw and possibly other Native traditions, and roux reflects French culinary influence.
Gumbo does not need one inventor.
Its history is more interesting precisely because it does not have one.
Native Gumbo Traditions Were Not Limited to Filé as a Condiment
Today, many diners think of filé as something shaken over a finished bowl of gumbo.
Historically, powdered sassafras had broader uses.
64 Parishes notes that numerous Choctaw foods once incorporated powdered sassafras and that filé gumbo can be prepared without a flour roux, a practice also found among Houma people.
That suggests we should be careful about viewing filé only through the lens of a modern restaurant condiment shaker.
For Native communities, sassafras belonged to a much larger body of plant knowledge and cooking practices.
The Choctaw of Bayou Lacombe Preserved the Tradition
One important written record comes from anthropologist David Ives Bushnell Jr.
In 1909, the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology published Bushnell’s study, The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. His work documented the community and preserved information later used by researchers studying Choctaw language, material culture, and sassafras traditions.
Louisiana Folklife research has also documented the continued use of sassafras among Native-descended communities in the Florida Parishes, including memories of drying and grinding leaves into gumbo filé and sometimes selling the finished product.
The tradition therefore survived well beyond Louisiana’s colonial period.
Traditional Filé Making Preserved Older Techniques
The basic process for making filé remains remarkably straightforward.
Leaves are gathered from sassafras trees, dried, stripped from their tougher stems, and pounded or ground into powder.
Louisiana Folklife documented traditional filé maker John Oswald Colson gathering leaves, drying and destemming them by hand, then pounding them with a traditional wooden pilon, similar to a large mortar and pestle. His filé contained no added fillers or flavorings.
The simplicity of the ingredients can hide the amount of knowledge required.
Knowing which trees to use, when to harvest, how to dry the leaves, and how finely to grind them was traditionally learned from other people rather than from the back of a spice bottle.
Filé Knowledge Continued Through Louisiana Families
That knowledge did not disappear with commercial seasoning companies.
Southern Foodways Alliance documented Lionel Key, a Louisiana filé maker who learned the craft from his great-uncle Joseph William “Uncle Bill” Ricard. Key cured and pulverized sassafras leaves using family methods and tools connected to an earlier generation.
Some details remained family knowledge.
Key demonstrated the process publicly at museums and farmers markets but declined to reveal certain specifics, including his preferred harvesting period and curing time.
That tells us something important about traditional foods.
A recipe can be written down. A foodway involves knowledge, judgment, memory, and people.
Sassafras Joined African and European Traditions in Gumbo
Filé becomes particularly important when viewed beside gumbo’s other major thickeners.
Okra represents a major African contribution to Louisiana cooking. Filé reflects Native American plant knowledge. Roux developed from European flour-and-fat cooking techniques, although Louisiana cooks transformed roux far beyond many classical French versions.
These ingredients did not always appear together, and historic filé gumbo and okra gumbo could represent distinct styles.
But together they illustrate what makes gumbo such a useful window into Louisiana history.
One pot can contain evidence of several continents and peoples without belonging entirely to any one of them.
Filé Became Cajun and Creole Without Losing Its Native Roots
Over generations, filé entered both Cajun and Creole cooking.
Restaurants may place it beside hot sauce as a table condiment. Home cooks may stir it into gumbo after removing the pot from the heat. Some families barely use it, while others consider its flavor essential.
Louisiana Folklife identifies meat-and-sausage gumbo thickened with filé as a tradition found throughout South Louisiana, while seafood-and-okra gumbo is particularly common along the coast.
None of that changes where the sassafras knowledge began.
A food tradition can become shared without its earlier history becoming irrelevant.
Sassafras Is a Reminder of Louisiana’s Native Food History
Native American influence on Louisiana cuisine is sometimes overshadowed by the better-known Cajun, Creole, French, African, Spanish, and Caribbean stories.
Sassafras makes that omission difficult to defend.
Louisiana Folklife specifically points to filé as one of the cultural practices that European and African newcomers learned from the region’s Native peoples. Native communities also shared knowledge of hunting, fishing, local plants, and ways of using Louisiana’s natural resources.
Filé survived because that knowledge crossed cultural boundaries.
The Native History Is Still Alive
The Native American history of sassafras is not merely something that happened centuries ago.
Sassafras still grows in Louisiana. Traditional makers still harvest its leaves. Filé remains on restaurant tables and in home kitchens, and gumbo continues to change from one family and community to another.
What looks like a small container of green powder therefore carries an unusually long history.
Before the roux, before packaged seasoning, and before anyone wrote down a Louisiana gumbo recipe, Native people knew what sassafras could do.
Louisiana kept cooking with that knowledge.
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