Seattle has one and it's delicious. We also have/had another food truck. There are pow wows in the area that serve the best salmon. They exist.
The Pacific Northwest is the rare exception where some of the remaining tribes are still on or adjacent to their ancestral homes.
Best seviche I ever had was made out of geoduck and from a tailgate after doing a beach cleanup.
Off the Rez for the win. I hear Spokane has a good place, too.
I wish I had a chance to try ʔálʔal Cafe before it closed last year.
Off the Rez was exactly it. I wish I lived closer to it so I could go there more.
Was going to bring up pow wows. Great way to find Native foods, learn about culture and history, and for many, most of the proceeds go back into the tribes hosting the event.
There's Owamni in Minnesota. The food uses pre-colonial ingredients. So no dairy, eggs, wheat, etc. They also source the ingredients from indigenous farms
Edit: No chicken eggs
No eggs? Are you telling me no one ate one if the more nutrient dense foods or are you saying it just doesn’t make it into cuisine because eggs wouldn't be common to people who didn't farm birds?
The latter.
Owamni has fantastic food; the James Beard award was well deserved.
Why don't we see any restaurants that make a big deal about cooking buffalo?
Oh... Right.
I've always heard about this buffalo skull pile, but I didn't actually look at a picture of it.
And damn, that is striking to see so many dead buffalo in one place under the heel of colonialist scumbags. Thousands upon thousands...
"Most of them" is the understatement of the day. Our country killed nearly all of them.
It is truly staggering the extent of the destruction we caused on the natives to this land.
Wiki says 96% of them were killed. That's something like 3.6 million humans were slaughtered.
And most all of their land taken.
It's an injustice in this country that we don't learn about it more and try to atone as best we can.
Of that 96% starvation and disease killed many/most. The USA absolutely waged genocidal campaigns against the various tribes but that 3.6 million includes other deaths as well.
Active or not, the Europeans and then the Americans caused the collapse of their civilization.
Imo all deaths are related.
I remember when this came up a few years ago on Twitter. There are First Nations restaurants, most (white) people just don't go to them and where they are. Yes there are not a lot, it would be much better if there was more. The reason there isn't is because of colonization and genocide.
But we also have to be careful because presenting a minority group as already extinct exists to help continue the perpetuation of the genocide. As Judith Butler describes.
An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all'
There is a surviving first nations food culture that doesn't care whether Patrick Blumenthal has eaten it or not.
Also First Nations food has been heavily assimilated to into many cultures food. Mexican Food, Peruvian Food, etc When people eat these foods they don't think of it's relationship to First Nations, but there's a connection.
Finally stuff like corn, tomatoes, potatoes all of this food that is widespread everywhere is from North and South America and only hits Europe and Asia in the early modern period. What is and isn't a certain cultures food is not static but subject to forces of history.
There's a native restaurant near me that is kinda like the equivalent of Chipotle for American Indian cuisine, and it's fantastic. The owners are members of the Osage Nation and have had a few restaurants since the 90s. Really happy for them that they recently expanded to also have a food truck and catering business, as well as a little satellite location at a nearby ski mountain.
I can't do much to help undo the genocide and cultural erasure, but I damn well take everybody I know to that restaurant.
"But we also have to be careful because presenting a minority group as already extinct exists to help continue the perpetuation of the genocide. As Judith Butler describes.
An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all'
Thank you so much for this reminder; because of this, I have realised that this is a trap that my thoughts sometimes slip into. Hopefully I will be able to be mindful of it and check myself in future
There was a comedian who had a routine that went something like “my sister’s husband is German. Whenever he visits the US, he says that you just can’t get good bagels in Germany. I said, “and whose fault is that?” “
This got me in a rabbit hole and I got curious about what indigenous/Native American cuisine would be like because I genuinely didn't know and came across a good list of indigenous owned restaurants as well as a bunch of new recipes to try, in case anyone else is curious.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/native-american-restaurants-in-the-us
https://www.tastingtable.com/1297689/native-american-foods-should-try-once/
Things we would call "Mexican" food are indigenous food. Mole, empanadas, certain types of salsa. We just call it something else. I mean, they had corn and tomatoes all the way up most of the U.S.
There would be a ton of local variety since a large number of different tribes and societies had varying access to local fauna and game, plus trade. Think of the variety we have from Canada to Argentina and that is likely a comparable range to the wildly different native populations. Food near the great lakes would be completely different from food in the tropics and completely different from the foods in the mountains of the southern continent with a ton of variety in between.
Kind of like the massive variety in the continent of Africa.
More than that, we completely transformed the native ecology of places such that they're nearly unrecognizable from what they once were. Native plants only occupy a tiny, tiny slice of the ecology that they used to, thanks to invasive introductions that came either accidentally or deliberately with livestock and agricultural imports. I know that in California, many of the plants the native people depended on are difficult to find anymore, and are almost never deliberately cultivated. We also took deliberate, calculated steps over decades to eradicate their cultures, and since very little was ever written down, it was largely successful.
In spite of all that, AFAIK there IS at least a Dine restaurant that they're using to try and teach their own people and others about their traditional culinary and food-ecology practices.
All of Latin America: Y'alls cuisines aren't heavily influenced by native peoples's? Damn bro that sucks
Odd take because plenty of communities have lower populations and still have restaurants of their cuisine. But also because there are a bunch of native cuisine restaurants.
It doesn't help that a relatively equal society without extreme division of labor is probably not producing cuisine on the same level as cultures with extreme inequality. A class of jealous and idle nobles with personal chefs trying to outdo each other does a lot to push culinary experimentation.
We also, specifically, forced them into cultural re-education camps to force them to be christian, not speak a native language, or engage with anything from their native roots.
Four Corners area. Navajo fry bread, I still dream about it. Also the Smithsonian has a Native American museum with a great cafeteria, all things considered. It was under renovation last time I went. I hope it still good, if not better.
I feel like this post doesn’t give enough credit to Europeans who also killed millions of native Americans before the US was even founded.
Distinguishing between European settlers and (US) Americans feels a bit silly
Here's a couple of NPR stories about indigenous people running restaurants that reflect their cultures:
The Sioux Chef is excellent and deserves all the praise.
Tocabe in Denver is excellent too. It has some pretty unique flavor combinations going on.
To be more accurate, smallpox killed somewhere between like 65-95% of the native american population after contact with Europeans. And, of course, many of their remaining descendants ended up concentrated into reservations.
So, I imagine if you were going to find native american cuisine restaurants, they'd be rare but typically in and around reservations.
The initial Spanish expeditions had herds of pigs with them, which transmitted a ton of diseases to the natives. A hundred years later when other Europeans came the cities were almost completely depopulated.
Many reservations are far from the original habitat of the people living in them, (see Trail of Tears) so the food materials for their original cuisine can't be found or grown
Guns, Germs, and Steel covers that in a brief but eye-opening way. When Hernando de Soto's crew first explored the Mississippi river in 1541 they wrote about all the people they found, but did not mention bison. A century later another set of Spanish explorers revisited the Mississippi and didn't record much at all about people, but commented on how prolific the bison were.
Because you arent looking?
We have a few here in my city... Maybe you just gotta actually go look around a bit more...?
I've seen plenty of food trucks but it was in the South West. So your mileage may vary.
Natv in Broken Arrow is pretty good.
imagine never having a fry dough experience....
FUCKING SAD
If y'all get a chance, try Navajo Tacos.
I adore Navajo Tacos! Ironically, they are a post colonial invention that was the result of the US forcing the Navajo into concentration camps and issuing them rations of flour, sugar, and lard. The Navajo people invented fry bread with their limited ingredients, which became the base for many other foods later on.
To divide indigenous people with our current borders is anachronistic and not useful.
For example, Aztecs migrated from the current United States (or close, as there's no consensus) into Mexico. I bet they carried on culinary traditions. If so, dishes from Mexico City are an example of native (native to their first and their second land) cuisine.
Yaqui, Pima/Pima Bajo, Kickapoo and other groups lived and live both in the U.S. and Mexico. So, again, northern Mexican dishes might be "Native American" dishes.
But that notion alone is problematic as it implies the indigenous peoples' food was and is more similar than it actually is. We can have Quechua cuisine, Mayan cuisine, Cherokee cuisine, but grouping them up for a restaurant would be as easy as trying to open an "East Asian restaurant" or a "European restaurant". What to put on the menu? Lol.
I hope I'm not pedantic. I just don't agree with the divide of the indigenous people by our current nations, and I'm debating the air over here.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
