Check out Sioux Chef in Minneapolis. That one is pretty good!
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.
I’m from Sinaloa (Northwest of Mexico, south of Arizona) and the food is really really different from Mexico City’s cuisine.
I’ve found that New Mexican food (from New Mexico) is really similar and uses the same ingredients. Also the vocabulary spoken in that region combines several Native American words with Spanish (words like adjectives, children or child, animals and foods names, etc) and if you go to our cousin state of Sonora that sits between Arizona and us, you’ll see plenty of Yaqui and Mayo cultural references. They even have a baseball team called The Yaquis.
Exactly my point! And those are nice examples; indigenous culture is alive. Thank you for sharing.
Same shit for white people, British food vs English vs USA etc
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.
Massachusetts has a little bit of that as well, though in my experience, it only really means that the tribe members have more relaxed rules around regulated hunting/fishing seasons. Being able to fish out of season and harvest in closed shellfish beds, that sort of thing.
The snails I’ve had (only twice) were delicious. Is geoduck like that? They look like a big snail.
I farmed them for a number of years and they are surprisingly versatile. For the most part they taste like your standard manila, its just got a lot of mass compared to most shellfish. Preparation is everything and overcooking gets you a rubbery mass which isn’t so great.
I enjoyed slicing the siphon and deep frying them, but at that point it was less flavor than texture what with the beer batter and all, etc.
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.
It’s only like $10-$15 to get in too. A couple of hours worth of fun. The salmon is more, but worth it.
We’ve got one in Minneapolis too that’s good. They do exist support em.
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?” “
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.
"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
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/
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.
So I almost stopped reading at “native ecology”. You do have a good point about deliberate destruction of what was there, but the American continent wasn’t in some kind of pristine natural state before Columbus arrived. The native peoples altered their environment to suit them. What we call corn today came from maize, but maize isn’t natural, either. Its closest genetic relation to a natural plant is one with tiny, inedible cobs. It’s not clear how they manged to go from that to maize.
Humans alter the environment around them to better suit humans. That doesn’t mean we have to be relentlessly destructive, but we always do it in some way. Narratives that native peoples were in some kind of perfect state of nature feeds into noble savage myths, and take away from their humanity.
But focusing on cultural eradication is a very good point.
Hey, yeah, you’re completely right. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that they lived in some unspoiled wilderness or that they didn’t believe in touching the wilderness like a lot of the colonial narratives suggest. I’ve been reading Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson, and it does a lot of work dispelling those myths. What I mean is that they had relationships with the ecology here; California native tribes knew where edible corms grew and how to cultivate them to ensure a good bounty, they knew when to expect and hunt migratory birds, how to sustainably harvest roots and leaves for basketry, how to harvest and use acorns from the various oak species here, and how to get food and shelter from incense cedar and sugar pine without killing the trees. They also knew how to tend these local ecologies to ensure that these plants and animals continued to exist as long-term and renewable resources. In fact, another book I’m reading, Braiding Sweetgrass makes the case that the plants that native people used fare worse without human intervention. While the tribes, at least as early European settlers knew them, were semi-nomadic (they would move between the valleys and the mountains depending on the season) rather than agrarian, they still cultivated and shaped the lands they lived on. They helped to shape and were also shaped by the ecology.
European and American settlers blew almost all of that away without even realizing it in many cases. In California, all it took was introducing grazing animals and declaring land private property.
Some humans suck so much. Like this whole thread is a painful read, even as a random European.
All of Latin America: Y’alls cuisines aren’t heavily influenced by native peoples’s? Damn bro that sucks
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.
tocabe in Denver has absolutely killer fry bread
Worst museum in dc, but I haven’t tried the cafeteria. Sounds interesting.
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.
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.
Dude what. Get out of here with your foie gras and make some ratatouille. Not just anyone can be a great cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere.
Did you miss the following sentence or?
No. Being rich doesn’t make you develop a palate. According to rich people food is good when it’s expensive and, for lack of better metaphor, dressed up like a hooker. According to gazillions of home cooks, food is good when it puts smiles on people’s faces, keeps them fit and healthy. The best dish in the world? Probably the secret recipe of someone in Asia working their tiny noodle stand perfecting their bowl for 40 years. Dirt cheap, dockworkers swear by it. Michelin star chefs swear by it. Rich people scoff at it, not enough expensive ingredients.
Tribes were removed from their lands and forced onto reservations that didn’t resemble their lands. The buffalo was driven to near extinction to deny the tribes that relied on it their main food source. Until 1967 the US had a policy of eradicating indigenous languages and cultures. A lot was done to erase their culture. It was a systemic approach, not random or accidental.
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.
imagine never having a fry dough experience…
FUCKING SAD
Canadian Native here, if anyone ever has the chance to try moose meat, do it! It’s easily my favorite meat, I’d take moose over a t-bone or prime rib every single time. If I had to eat it every single day for the rest of my life I’d die with a smile on my face. You can make steaks out of it, make ground moose burger, cut it into small slices and stew it, or one of my favorite treats, turn it into smoky jerky etc. Lot’s of different ways to cook it.
The taste is hard to describe, it’s a bit gamey but not overly so (at least to me, I grew up on the stuff) and it’s very tender and flavorful. Tastes a bit like beef I guess but IMO much better.
I had like five slices of Elk salami once while in Norway and I can still taste them.
I’d love to try it. How does it compare to deer? I like deer but I don’t like black bear. That’s my line for gaminess.
Honestly I haven’t tried deer so I’m not sure! My grandparents didn’t like it so they didn’t hunt it. Sorry!
Where I live I estimate at least half of white men hunt deer. Some people look at me funny if I tell them I’ve never been hunting. It’s absolutely necessary for population control, because we’re never going to get these people to go for reintroduction of wolves.
I’ve had a deer steak so good it ranks up with the best beef steaks I’ve had. I’ve had deer so gamey it’s gross. Hunters tell me the biggest influence on taste is how quickly the deer dies. It could be bullshit but I believe it. They aim for the heart, and if their aim is true the deer will die instantly.
I’m a big fan of jerky made in the old style (very thin and chewy) with no sugar added. Deer jerky is my second favorite after biltong. You should try it if you get a chance! I know I’ll keep an eye out for moose now.
Stress hormones taste like ass but that’s not game taste as such.
Interesting, I’ll definitely keep my eye out for some deer when I have the chance, thanks for the recommendation! Jerky made out of pretty much any meat is good tbh, my grandparents also made it out of salmon and it was absolutely amazing. Cut into cubes but left on the skin and then hung in a smoke rack until dry. So good.
I fully accept I’m being a bit dense here, but what’s this guys point? There’s a good reason why there aren’t many Native American restaurants, and probably most of the world knows why…
This guy never ate a tortilla ?
