Pemmican (/ˈpɛməkɪn/) (also pemican in older sources) is a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and sometimes dried berries. A calorie-rich food, it can be used as a key component in prepared meals such as stews or eaten raw. Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America and it is still prepared today.

The name comes from the Cree word ᐱᒦᐦᑳᓐ (pimîhkân), which is derived from the word ᐱᒥᕀ (pimî), 'fat, grease'. The Lakota (or Sioux) word is wasná, originally meaning 'grease derived from marrow bones', with the wa- creating a noun, and sná referring to small pieces that adhere to something. It was invented by the Indigenous peoples of North America.

Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Captain Robert Bartlett, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong, Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, and Roald Amundsen.

Pemmican has traditionally been made using whatever meat was available at the time: large game meat such as bison, deer, elk, or moose, but also fish such as salmon, and smaller game such as duck; while contemporary pemmican may also include beef. The meat is dried and chopped, before being mixed with rendered animal fat (tallow). Dried fruit may be added: cranberries, saskatoon berries (Cree misâskwatômina), and even blueberries, cherries, chokeberries, and currants—though in some regions these are used almost exclusively for ceremonial and wedding pemmican—and European fur traders have also noted the addition of sugar.

Among the Lakota and Dakota nations, there is also a corn wasná (or pemmican) that does not contain dried meat. This is made from toasted cornmeal, animal fat, fruit, and sugar.

Traditionally, the meat was cut in thin slices and dried, either over a slow fire or in the hot sun until it was hard and brittle. Approximately 5 pounds (2,300 g) of meat are required to make 1 pound (450 g) of dried meat suitable for pemmican. This thin brittle meat is known in Cree as pânsâwân and colloquially in North American English as dry meat. The pânsâwân was then spread across a tanned animal hide pinned to the ground, where it was beaten with flails or ground between two large stones until it turned into very small pieces, almost powder-like in its consistency. The pounded meat was then mixed with melted fat in an approximate 1:1 ratio by weight. Typically, the melted fat would be suet that has been rendered into tallow. In some cases, dried fruits, such as blueberries, chokecherries, cranberries, or saskatoon berries, were pounded into powder and then added to the meat-fat mixture. The resulting mixture was then packed into rawhide bags for storage where it would cool, and then harden into pemmican.

Today, some people store their pemmican in glass jars or tin boxes. The shelf life may vary depending on ingredients and storage conditions. At room temperature, pemmican can generally last anywhere from one to five years, but there are anecdotal stories of pemmican stored in cool cellars being safely consumed after a decade or more.

A bag of bison pemmican weighing approximately 90 lb (41 kg) was called a taureau (French for "bull") by the Métis of Red River. These bags of taureaux (lit. "bulls"), when mixed with fat from the udder, were known as taureaux fins, when mixed with bone marrow, as taureaux grand, and when mixed with berries, as taureaux à grains. It generally took the meat of one bison to fill a taureau.