Check out Sioux Chef in Minneapolis. That one is pretty good!
I’ve actually been to a native american restaurant. It was on a reserve. They served buffalo burgers. It was fucking delicious.
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.
Same shit for white people, British food vs English vs USA etc
Here’s a couple of NPR stories about indigenous people making restaurants that reflect their cultures:
The Sioux Chef is excellent and deserves all the praise.
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
Yeah as he said. 500 years, the us is bearly above 100 years old.
The US is almost 250 years old by now, but your point still holds true.
The US is almost 250 years old, but it’s bearly 100 years old. The bear shadow government took over in secret in 1925.
Ah, to be a teenager again
Also, a lot of their descendants were forced into re-education to replace their cultures with settler cultures. A practice even still ongoing.
imagine never having a fry dough experience…
FUCKING SAD
Indian frybread is good stuff, yeah.
we had a Navajo professor in college, he had a huge attitude problem stemming from all this.
By “all this”, do you mean 500 years of genocide and oppression? I don’t think I’d consider that an “attitude problem”.
I like this place https://www.iespokane.com/
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 just started to listen to A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/B0030H777E?source_code=ASSORAP0511160007
The first chapter talks about Columbus and the genocide he started. It’s eye opening.
Seeing as there’s so few restaurants within reach, anyone here know Native American or First Nations food?
What’s a good recipe to make at home from accessible ingredients that will male you want to have it again?
Most native food is composed primarily of buffalo meat, fish, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and berries. Basically just whatever they happened to be able to find and/or farm. Buffalo chili is phenomenal, (buffalo is red meat that is much leaner than beef, so it tastes a lot like beef chili without all of the grease) but maybe not something that you’d want to try as your first undertaking.
Fry bread is quick and easy, but a little bit messy if you’re not accustomed to frying things. Fry bread was often used by many tribes as a sort of base for many of their dishes, sort of like tortillas in Mexican cuisine. It’s dense and fluffy at the same time, because the dough bubbles unevenly as it fries.
And speaking of Mexican cuisine, there is a lot of overlap between native dishes and traditional Mexican dishes, because many native tribes (especially the ones in the southern US) were proto-Aztecan cultures. Remember how I mentioned tomatoes? Mexican salsa has roots in native cuisine. Hell, my own tribe’s language has the same roots as Aztec, the same way english and German are both derived from the same root language.
You left out squash, many of varieties of were a staple vegetable across North America (and possibly South as well? I’m less familiar.) Also, peppers. Extremely important.
Fair enough. Aside from pumpkin, I don’t really like most squash… Which is probably why it didn’t come to mind when I was writing the comment. And you’re also spot on about the peppers; Many of today’s most popular peppers originated in the americas. I alluded to that with the bit about salsa, but didn’t outright say it.
Out on the Pacific coast, it’s salmon, shellfish, berries, and camas root.
You might give fry bread a try. There are a lot of recipes available, and it can be topped with either sweet or savory ingedients. I suggest a recipie that uses shortening for frying, but thats what my grandma used to use so I am biased. Cheers!
Love frybread. Got turned onto it by of all things Reservation Dogs, one of the funniest and most insightful series I’ve seen.
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
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.
If I knew of one, I’d totally try it out, but the reservations in my area are a bit out of the way, and I don’t see any obvious native restaurants.
I know I saw some in coastal towns in Alaska. Didn’t have a chance to try them, though.
If you ever have the chance to visit Alaska, do it. It’s a highly underrated state. Jesse ultimately got the good ending in Breaking Bad.
This guy never ate a tortilla ?
Pretending Native American food is just Mexican food is Eastern Woodlands erasure.
