We talk a lot about okra as an essential gumbo ingredient, but do you know the story of filé, finely ground sassafras leaves? Dusty Fuqua is among the people working to keep the filé tradition alive in Louisiana against forces of commercialization, cultural amnesia, and environmental degradation.
Story by Jonathan Olivier | Photographs by Rory Doyle
Dusty Fuqua maneuvers his burgundy pickup off the blacktop onto a red dirt road flanked on both sides by soaring longleaf pines. He pulls turns with confidence while dodging potholes from what seems to be memory. The landscape offers the only markers: dirt paths like overlapping veins, prairie strewn with black-eyed Susans, undulating hills.
“I came recently to scout, and I realized that whole right side of the road was burned,” Fuqua says, gesturing with his hand toward the charred landscape. A controlled fire like this recent one, a common way to manage habitat, could interrupt today’s forage, but to our left the woods have been untouched by flames.
We’re in the sandstone hills of Kisatchie National Forest, northwest of Alexandria, Louisiana. Fuqua has been coming here for the last 10 years to pick leaves from the sassafras tree with his 83-year-old mentor, John Oswald Colson, who is from the nearby Cane River community and grew up exploring these woods on horseback. This year, although Colson is homebound due to health reasons, Fuqua has planned to forage for sassafras alone and has allowed me to trail behind.
Dusty Fuqua first started venturing to Kisatchie National Forest with his mentor John Oswald Colson 10 years ago to learn the tradition of harvesting sassafras to make filé. He has come back every year since in order to preserve and advance the tradition.
Fuqua, a 39-year-old anthropologist and chief of resource management at Cane River Creole National Historical Park, explains that most of Kisatchie was at one time home to Native American tribes like the Caddo and Attakapas, then eventually the Choctaw arrived in the 18th century. This fertile forest was later clear-cut by American loggers until the federal government bought the land in the 1930s and began a longleaf restoration program, returning much of the area to its natural state. The revived forest serves as a bastion of rare flora like the carnivorous pitcher plant, as well as medicinal ones like the red bay. The sandy, upland soil of Kisatchie is also a perfect habitat for the sassafras tree.
Fuqua slowly edges his truck to the side of the road, halting near an overgrown ATV trail. He steps out into the cool air of mid-May and ties a burlap sack to his belt loop before almost disappearing into a dense cluster of trees, where his hands begin methodically stripping leaves. “I don’t harvest every leaf on the plant,” he says. “We don’t want to stress the tree, and by keeping leaves on it, it’ll remain healthy.”
He hands me a leaf the size of my hand with three rounded lobes. This is the first time I’ve gotten a detailed look at the sassafras — its leaves range from light green to emerald as they mature, coming in trilobate, oval, or mitten shapes. It grows in most of Louisiana, as well as across a large swath of the eastern United States and parts of southern Canada.
Native Americans have used parts of the sassafras tree for hundreds, even thousands, of years. The Choctaw would grind the leaves into a powder, called filé by the French, and add it to soups as a thickener and flavoring. Sassafras root bark, its aroma sharp and sweet, was boiled to ease stomach pain or fevers, while a poultice helped cleanse wounds. Europeans quickly learned of the tree’s value, and as early as 1578 it was being shipped across the Atlantic. Sassafras grew immensely popular and was heralded as a cure-all thought to alleviate ailments like syphilis and to even delay old age. The root bark became a popular way to scent soaps and perfume, as well as to flavor root beer. At one point in the 17th century, sassafras was one of the biggest exports from North America.
The popularity of sassafras declined after it was revealed that safrole, found in high concentration in the roots, caused cancer in lab mice and rats over a long period of time (widely consumed foods like nutmeg also contain safrole). Safrole is banned by the Food and Drug Administration, and the European Commission labels the substance as carcinogenic. The leaves, deemed safe by the FDA, contain negligible levels of safrole and are still used today as a spice.
For hundreds of years, Louisiana Creoles have perpetuated Choctaw tradition by adding filé to their gumbos — a hefty pinch tossed in after the dish has cooked produces a thick broth and an aromatic finish. It’s still readily found in Louisiana gumbos, but hardly anyone harvests sassafras and makes their own filé. This cultural loss is what beckons Fuqua to Kisatchie each spring: to advance an Indigenous ritual, once venerated and now teetering, found at the very origins of the dish we know today as gumbo.
Sassafras grows in much of the eastern United States and has long been used by Native Americans for culinary and medicinal purposes. Today, Louisiana Creoles still add powdered sassafras, called filé, to their gumbo as a thickener and flavoring.
A modern gumbo starts with a roux, a paste made from oil and flour darkened brown, and onions, bell peppers, and celery. In this soup, one might find an assortment of sausages, fowl, seafood, and okra or filé, along with various spices like cayenne, salt, and black pepper, served atop steaming rice. These ingredients are derived from a collection of people who blended over time, including West and Central Africans, Native Americans like the Choctaw, Spaniards, Germans, and the French.
Yet early gumbo likely didn’t look anything like the dish we know today. Some of the common staples we now cherish simply weren’t available to 18th-century Creoles. In New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories, Cynthia LeJeune Nobles notes that at one time ham was common in gumbo, not sausage. Bear fat, not vegetable oil, was mixed with flour for the roux, if flour was available at all. Historian Shane K. Bernard uncovered early gumbo variations in a 1788 work by French botanist François Rozier called Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts within a section titled “Observations sur le sassafras, arbre de l’Amérique,” by P. de la Coudrenière.
The Creoles of Louisiana love it so passionately, that they cannot eat any other soup than this one made with broth, pepper, sassafras, & corn or rice cooked in water. Admittedly, this soup is much healthier & better tasting than our soups of bread. They make gombo with all kinds of meat, poultry & fish. They also make it with shrimp & crawfish. That of cabbage is less esteemed; it is eaten, as is that of shrimp, in the evening, and is often served instead of dinner.” [Bernard’s translation from French to English]
Les Créoles de la Louisiane l'aiment si passionnément, qu'ils ne peuvent manger d'autre potage que celui qu'ils font avec du bouillon, du piment, du sassafras, & du maïs ou du riz cuit à l'eau. Il faut avouer que ce potage est bien plus sain & bien meilleur au goût que toutes nos soupes de pain. On fait du gombo avec toutes sortes de viandes, de volailles & de poisson. On en fait aussi avec des chevrettes & des écrevisses. Celui de choux est le moins estimé; il se mange, ainsi que celui de chevrette, le soir, & tient souvent lieu de souper.
While a common thread states that gumbo’s beginnings can be found in the French bouillabaisse, little evidence exists to back up that claim. In “The Origin Myth of New Orleans Cuisine,” journalist Lolis Eric Elie concludes that “gumbo does, however, have much in common with the okra soups and stews that are commonly found in Western Africa and throughout the African diaspora, where the ancestors of most Afro-Creoles came from.”
West Africans, forcibly uprooted from their homes and enslaved in Louisiana starting in 1719, brought with them okra seeds, a plant native to their region. This tropical plant quickly took off in Louisiana’s warm climate, and Black Creoles continued traditions of making okra soup, often paired with rice. The idea is that by adding other ingredients available to enslaved cooks, such as seafood, wild game, and new spices, the soup eventually evolved into gumbo. And in the winter, when okra wasn’t in season, people could thicken gumbo with filé.
Today's gumbo is the result of hundreds of years of culinary evolution stemming from several ethnic groups that mingled over time in southern Louisiana. As long as gumbo has been around, filé has been a main ingredient.
And yet there is a third origin story, one that lies with the Choctaw. Indiginous people were cooking soups that contained filé long before the arrival of Europeans. These soups would likely have consisted of abundant plant material, such as poke leaves. Wild game or shellfish would also have appeared, along with corn, perhaps resembling the pre-contact Tanchi Labonna dish. The Spanish made contact with the Choctaw in the 1540s, and when the French started exploring the region throughout the next century, they likely encountered these soups made with filé.
Nobles argues that Choctaw origins are unlikely, however, writing that gumbo’s “historic pairing with rice is one of two convincing reasons why neither Native Americans’ stews nor French bouillabaisse morphed into today’s soupy gumbo. Native American stews were centered around corn, an ingredient rarely found in gumbo.”
While corn isn’t a staple in gumbo today, neither is cabbage or fish; yet according to Coudrenière’s 18th-century account, these ingredients appeared in early gumbos. The dish, which seemed to evolve regularly in its infancy, simply changed as commercial rice agriculture made that ingredient widely available in the 19th century. While Acadian refugees were at one time known to use cornmeal in their gumbo, Choctaw Indians had been using corn in soups for thousands of years. Corn and filé in early gumbo points directly to Native Americans, just as rice and okra point to African influence. While these two versions are often amalgamated as simple variations of the same dish, their key ingredients demanded distinct monikers, as showcased by Coudrenière’s 1788 account.
These leaves used in sauces … give them a pleasant taste. … The gummy principal is so sticky that a pinch of this powder is enough to make a viscous broth. This dish is known as American gombo. But we must distinguish this American stew from the one called gombo févi. [Bernard’s translation from French to English.]
Ces feuilles employées dans les sauces … leur donnent un goût agréable. … Le principe gommeux qu'elles contiennent est tel, qu'une pincée de cette poudre suffit pour rendre un bouillon visqueux. C'est ce mets que l'on nomme en Amérique gombo. Cependant il faut distinguer ce ragoût américain, de celui qu'on nomme gombo févi.
Tradition in Louisiana dictates that gumbo thickened with okra is called “gumbo févi,” while the one thickened with ground sassafras is called “gumbo filé.” Nobles calls this “gumbo’s golden rule — never add okra and filé in the same pot.”
Fuqua has been picking for less than an hour, yet his burlap sack is close to full. Young leaves have an undesirable pale green and red hue, so he is looking for more mature, darker ones. Depending on the size of the sassafras tree, he might only pop off a few leaves, while larger specimens allow for stripping foliage more heavily.
Fuqua is careful not to damage the tree during the process. The continuity of the specimens in this area is important at a time when environmental factors are disrupting sassafras all over the country. He points out a large sassafras with its top cut off. “That’s the work of poachers. They’ll come in the woods and just start cutting entire trees.”
He has a permit from the Forest Service to pick sassafras, and he strictly abides by the rules, but not everyone does. Overharvesting has been a real problem in this region for a while; where Fuqua works in Cane River, this led to a large reduction in the number of trees throughout the valley.
Although the sassafras is vibrant in spring, Fuqua says Creoles would historically pick the leaves later, such as on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption in Catholic tradition. If he tried to harvest leaves that time of year now, he says, there would hardly be a leaf left due to insect damage. One of the culprits is the yellow poplar weevil, which feeds on sassafras leaves after overwintering in leaf litter on the forest floor and emerging with spring. With warming temperatures due to climate change, the weevils are feasting earlier than ever.
Some sassafras trees in Kisatchie National Forest have recently become infected with laurel wilt pathogen, a disease that can kill the trees in a matter of weeks. The likely spread in coming decades could reduce the number of sassafras trees in the region.
According to the School of Renewable Natural Resources at Louisiana State University, the trees are also highly susceptible to a fungus known as the laurel wilt pathogen, which was first detected in the United States around 2002. Kisatchie biologists discovered local cases in 2016. The fungus is toted from tree to tree by the ambrosia beetle, an invasive species from Asia. After infection, sassafras can die in a matter of weeks, and there is currently no effective way to halt the devastation throughout the Southeast.
While environmental factors alone would create a sense of urgency to continue the tradition, loss of knowledge has been the biggest factor contributing to the decline of local filé production. Younger generations, Fuqua says, haven’t continued this custom as old-timers are passing on. This sentiment has recently hit close to home. Colson missed most of last season due to precautions to avoid the coronavirus; this year, subsequent health issues have kept him sidelined again.
In a typical season, Fuqua played a background role. He’d help pick the leaves, but the processing, bottling, and distribution was all left up to Colson, who is a household name at folk and heritage festivals due to the superb quality of his filé — enough so that he was named a Louisiana Tradition Bearer in 2018 by the lieutenant governor. At these gatherings, Colson sold filé and educated the public about the tradition he’s been perpetuating for more than 60 years.
“When you love somebody, you don’t expect them to not be able to do it anymore,” Fuqua says. “It’s getting to that point where he’s getting older and it’s hard. So I never expected it to happen, but I kind of grabbed the mantle.”
John Oswald Colson, whose ancestry includes Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans, learned how to make filé from the elders in his family. It's a tradition he has continued for 60 years, introducing the craft to scores of people in Louisiana.
Fuqua has joined Colson among the ranks of only a few traditional filé craftspeople left in Louisiana. Another, just a half-hour south, is Danny Petrella, a member of the Mamou Choctaw tribe. He still uses the Choctaw method of pulverizing sassafras with a wooden mortar and pestle, a tradition he learned from his grandfather. “It’s a dying tradition, like a lot of things,” Petrella says, so he has retained as many vestiges from his people as he can.
According to oral history from his ancestors, Petrella says Choctaw gumbo, a stew that contained filé, and gumbo made with okra, are two separate dishes with distinct origins. He says that different ethnic groups began adding previously unavailable ingredients like cayenne, sausage, and rice to the Choctaw gumbo.
“The okra gumbo came by the African people,” he says. “That dish kind of intermingled with the Choctaw gumbo and formed a cultural gumbo.”
The debate over gumbo’s roots often centers on the etymology of the word gumbo itself. In the Central Bantu dialect in West Africa, the word for okra is “ki ngombo.” It’s also said that gumbo is a corruption of “quillobo,” which means okra to people in the Congo and Angola areas of Africa and what the Portuguese called “quingombo.”
However, others point to the ground sassafras leaf as evidence of an alternate linguistic origin of gumbo. The French called ground sassafras “filé,” which means “thread” and is a nod to the leaves’ ability to thicken soups so much that they can become stringy. Yet to the Choctaw, the powder was actually named “kombo ashish.”
For the people of the former Kingdom of Dahomey in the present-day Western African country of Benin who spoke a language called Fon, okra is “fevi.” According to the Dictionary of Louisiana French: As spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian communities, “févi” also means okra in Louisiana French, clearly an adopted word.
Although known around the country simply as gumbo, in Louisiana, where the dish originated, locals typically break it down into two categories: gumbo févi and gumbo filé. These monikers date to the 18th century, when the dish first appeared in the historical record.
Looking back further at the historical record, there is more evidence of distinctions between types of gumbo. The first recorded mention of gumbo is from a 1764 court document involving escaped enslaved Africans, found by historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century.
“Comba and Louison, both Mandingo women in their 50s, were vendors selling cakes and other goods along the streets of New Orleans. They maintained an active social life, organized feasts where they ate and drank very well, cooked gumbo filé and rice, roasted turkeys and chickens, barbecued pigs and fish, smoked tobacco and drank rum.”
The entire term “gumbo filé” is mentioned, a deliberate effort to highlight a soup thickened with powdered sassafras, not okra. Rice is also singled out, perhaps a sign that it had not yet become synonymous with the dish. Even in this earliest recorded instance of gumbo’s existence, the presence of filé shows the clear Choctaw influence.
While Bernard asserts it’s likely that gumbo owes its name to African origins, he admits that “it’s possible it draws on both Choctaw and West African sources.”
Pointing to Mamou Choctaw oral history, Petrella claims that gumbo filé and gumbo févi began as distinct dishes with separate origins but then were lumped together due to physical and linguistic resemblances. Distinctions were historically retained through subtle markers — févi and filé — and this tradition continues today: Gumbo contains filé or okra, but typically not both.
The reality is that colonialism and slavery brought together the ingredients needed to make modern-day gumbo, and since the 18th century, the stew has evolved again and again thanks to experimentation. Today, it’s still changing. New Orleans chefs like Arvinder Vilkhu sell a “curried gumbo” that includes ginger, cilantro, and turmeric, while others like Michael Gulotta infuse gumbo with elements like black cardamom, lime leaf, and fermented black beans, showing a range of Southeast Asian culinary influences in the region.
Despite the debate, the dish is, for certain, unequivocally Creole. Gumbo’s origins are rooted in African and Native American cuisine, smattered with European influences, and this represents the diversity of south Louisiana culture. These elements are definitional of a region where each ethnic group has shaped traditions, languages, and food. Gumbo is no different.
Back at his home, Fuqua gathers a few bags of dried sassafras leaves from a piece of cardboard so large it almost fills a spare room next to his kitchen, and then he replaces them with the day’s haul. He lets the leaves air dry here for a few weeks, turning them periodically with a stick so as not to transfer any oil from his hands.
He starts processing the older, brittle leaves, removing the petiole and midrib with one hand, tossing them into a pile, and then crumpling the blade with another. Those crushed pieces are then ground and sifted to remove any veins. The result is a vivid green powder with a floral aroma. While commercial filé is readily available for cooks who don’t want to tromp through the forest, the difference between those products and Fuqua’s filé couldn’t be starker.
“Commercial filé looks like sawdust,” Fuqua says. “It’s this brown or gray powder. It’s likely because whoever is processing it isn’t removing stems, but grinding it all up together.”
I contacted McCormick, The Spice Hunter, and Elite Spice, Inc. — three major filé suppliers — and none divulged where their sassafras was sourced or how it was processed. Other companies mis-market filé traditions, basing claims in myth rather than fact. To describe its filé, Frontier Co-op states that, “just like the traditional filé introduced by Choctaw Indians in Louisiana, this blend contains sassafras leaf and thyme,” despite the fact that thyme is not native to North America and never historically appeared in Choctaw filé. Fuqua says that commercial options like these come across the senses as flat, with hardly any taste or smell.
Agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry wrote in “The Pleasures of Eating” that when there is an ignorance of the history of food and it’s no longer associated with the land, “eaters are suffering from a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.” In this case, commercialization of filé leads to a sense of emptiness: industrial filé, a mass-marketed product far removed from tradition, encourages a one-dimensional and misleading participation with the food — and, by extension, culture.
Fuqua has grabbed the mantle from Colson and carried on the filé tradition by himself this year. He hopes that the groundwork laid by Colson, and now his own efforts, will serve to transmit the filé tradition to a new generation.
Throughout the 20th century, this movement toward commercialization and, at the same time, Americanization, has slowly yet continually eroded traditional Louisiana Creole culture. While filé and bay leaves are still used in gumbo, both ingredients are readily available at most supermarkets. Homemade roux is often replaced by a jar from the store. Gumbo’s sausage comes wrapped in packaging covered in advertising. Losing these parts of foodway tradition coincides with the erosion of the region’s heritage languages, French and Louisiana Creole, in favor of English.
Cultural amnesia runs deep. Hands that delicately and intentionally select a sassafras leaf are replaced by a process that lacks finesse. In this way, commercial filé both cheapens that process and the product while removing the capacity for human care rooted in tradition. Traditional filé can bind individuals to heritage in a world that often seeks to eradicate or cheapen that link for the sake of a profit — the tree transforms from revered ingredient to inventory. Once a chain is broken, a custom is in danger of losing its meaning.
Commercial options have all but replaced homemade filé, which used to be a staple in Creole kitchens. Due to this cultural loss, Fuqua feels a sense of urgency to carry on filé traditions before they're gone for good.
Fuqua is pushing back against this cultural amnesia because he sees the value in tradition and feels that, by reaching the right people, they’ll see its importance, too. “It adds to the integrity of our cultures. You have all of our Louisiana cultures, all of our traditions, that are one big piece. But we started losing one little piece of it. And it’s less and less integral. This is just part of it. We keep that, and it keeps us having integrity.”
To keep the tradition going, Fuqua created the Sassafras Society, a group that includes Colson and a few friends who are invested in the continuity of local culture. Each year, he brings a group on a sassafras pick — this June he brought along seven people interested in the craft. He’s working on turning the informal group into a nonprofit, growing the member base, and spreading awareness about Choctaw and Creole customs.
At his kitchen table, Fuqua begins pouring finished filé into Colson’s signature jars — a clear 1-ounce container with a red cap. He estimates he’ll sell a few hundred this year and give away dozens more to friends and family.
He hands me a jar. “For when you make a gumbo,” he says with a smile.
Jonathan Olivier is a journalist from Louisiana who has covered the environment and culture in English and French for publications like Outside and L’Actualité. For The Bitter Southerner, he’s written about how locals are using education, food, and music to keep Louisiana French and Kouri Vini alive. He's working on a book that examines contemporary south Louisiana culture, exploring what it means to continue distinct linguistic and regional traditions after decades of Americanization.
Rory Doyle is a working photographer based in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the rural Mississippi Delta. Born and raised in Maine, Doyle studied journalism at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. In 2009, he moved to Mississippi to pursue a master’s degree at Delta State University. Doyle has remained committed to photographing Mississippi and the South, with a particular focus on sharing stories from the Delta.
