If you stop at a roadside restaurant anywhere between North Dakota and Oklahoma, you might not immediately get a sense of culinary diversity. Many menus in rural and small-town middle America consist…
I’m native from Central America. Many of our foods haven’t changed in a millennia. You can go grab tacos, beans, tamales and pozole and you’re basically eating like an Aztec or native. My grandma was full Mayan/Pipil, I still miss her cooking
There are a few fry bread restaurants in Washington State. Obviously, native American cuisine goes much farther than just fry bread. But at the same time it is rather difficult to find any kind of authentic home cooked native American food that has not been incredibly bastardized over the last several hundred years.
(I am Lakota, I know a little bit of what I’m talking about)
There has been a concerted effort by the US Govt to remove as much Indian culture as possible. Moving tribes from their homelands to reservations where the plants used in dishes are different, forbidding native languages, taking kids and schooling them to be white while they’re a thousand miles away from home to prevent cultural passing down, all adds up to a loss in recipes and traditions.
Indian tacos, while delicious, aren’t exactly traditional because they’re made with flour and other ingredients supplied by the US govt.
However, there are other things that have lasted - wojapi (berry sauce), kanuchi (nut soup), and some others. Mainly things that could translate between regions and be orally retold until they could be written down. Now it just takes a Google search to find them.
But overall, it’s hard to build a menu on pre-contact food. There’s a few restaurants, but it’s not easy.
The main problem (in my opinion) is that industrialization of food happened after Native American and Anglo-American food systems combined. (And that combination was enforced by the displacement and confinement of Native Americans).
There aren’t many restaurants providing Native American food as it was eaten 200 years ago. Similarly, there aren’t many restaurants providing English-American food as it existed 200 years ago. Most foods we eat could not have existed back then due to things like selective breeding, long distance shipping, and refrigeration.
These advancements changed food all around the world, and many foods were invented that couldn’t have existed before. Later waves of immigration brought new foods to America that were already part of industrialized food.
Many foods that Native Americans ate long ago are part of what is just considered “American food”. Just look at the list of vegetables that came from the americas during the Columbian exchange.
With the rise in “farm to table”, I think there has been a bit of resurgence in Native American food, it might just not be labeled as such. You do have people like Sean Sherman who are really advocating for food that is explicitly Native.
I think part of it is the forced displacement of the Trail of Tears moved them across several different biomes over several waves, cutting their access to their original ingredients.
I’ve never thought about it, but why aren’t there Native American restaurants the same way there are Mexican/Italian/Chinese/etc?
I’m native from Central America. Many of our foods haven’t changed in a millennia. You can go grab tacos, beans, tamales and pozole and you’re basically eating like an Aztec or native. My grandma was full Mayan/Pipil, I still miss her cooking
That is a good point about Central American cuisine. Its both current and ancient.
There are a few fry bread restaurants in Washington State. Obviously, native American cuisine goes much farther than just fry bread. But at the same time it is rather difficult to find any kind of authentic home cooked native American food that has not been incredibly bastardized over the last several hundred years.
(I am Lakota, I know a little bit of what I’m talking about)
There has been a concerted effort by the US Govt to remove as much Indian culture as possible. Moving tribes from their homelands to reservations where the plants used in dishes are different, forbidding native languages, taking kids and schooling them to be white while they’re a thousand miles away from home to prevent cultural passing down, all adds up to a loss in recipes and traditions.
Indian tacos, while delicious, aren’t exactly traditional because they’re made with flour and other ingredients supplied by the US govt.
However, there are other things that have lasted - wojapi (berry sauce), kanuchi (nut soup), and some others. Mainly things that could translate between regions and be orally retold until they could be written down. Now it just takes a Google search to find them.
But overall, it’s hard to build a menu on pre-contact food. There’s a few restaurants, but it’s not easy.
This article goes into that. ;)
The main problem (in my opinion) is that industrialization of food happened after Native American and Anglo-American food systems combined. (And that combination was enforced by the displacement and confinement of Native Americans).
There aren’t many restaurants providing Native American food as it was eaten 200 years ago. Similarly, there aren’t many restaurants providing English-American food as it existed 200 years ago. Most foods we eat could not have existed back then due to things like selective breeding, long distance shipping, and refrigeration.
These advancements changed food all around the world, and many foods were invented that couldn’t have existed before. Later waves of immigration brought new foods to America that were already part of industrialized food.
Many foods that Native Americans ate long ago are part of what is just considered “American food”. Just look at the list of vegetables that came from the americas during the Columbian exchange.
With the rise in “farm to table”, I think there has been a bit of resurgence in Native American food, it might just not be labeled as such. You do have people like Sean Sherman who are really advocating for food that is explicitly Native.
I think part of it is the forced displacement of the Trail of Tears moved them across several different biomes over several waves, cutting their access to their original ingredients.