In our final episode, we explore our original food – the culinary traditions of Turtle Island, which is how many Indigenous cultures refer to North America.
With many celebrations planned for the 250th anniversary of the United States, we thought it would be a particularly poignant time to look back to Native food.
“Food is a gift from the land in our way of thinking,” says Jill Falcon Ramaker, at Montana State University. “If we’re able to receive those gifts and work with the land, tending wild plots, taking care of buffalo, then we’re expressing our food sovereignty.”
Ramaker is one of many experts who told us about an awakening that’s happening when it comes to Indigenous food, which was plentiful and important for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. In Oakland, California, Crystal Wahpepah is serving dishes like hand-harvested wild rice fritters and “three sisters” veggie bowls at her restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen. And in Minneapolis, a restaurant called Owamni, co-founded by Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson, specializes in “pre-contact” indigenous foods (no wheat flour, dairy, refined sugar, or factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken).
While these restaurants are winning accolades, it’s safe to say that many Americans are profoundly unfamiliar with Native food. By some estimates, there are less than 20 Indigenous restaurants in the U.S.
“If something isn’t practiced, it disappears,” says Lois Ellen Frank, co-owner of Red Mesa Cuisine in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a small catering company specializing in Indigenous food and cultural education. She’s also the author of “Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations,” the first Native American cuisine cookbook to win a James Beard award, back in 2003. “The only way to keep these foods alive, the only way to perpetuate them, is if people make it.”
While much of Indigenous cuisine has been ignored, forgotten, and nearly wiped out, we found early documented examples – including the “The Indian Cook Book,” published in 1933 by the Indian Women’s Club of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In this episode, we talk to Frank about her mentor, Juanita Tiger Kavena, author of the 1980 cookbook “Hopi Cookery.” And we also speak to Robert Caldwell at the University at Buffalo about modern-day Indigenous cuisine.
More From This Series
Seasoned, Episode 1 – MFK Fisher
Our 6-episode podcast kicks off with the California writer who invented the food memoir. Long before Anthony Bourdain, there was a woman who taught us how to enjoy food, drink and life.
Seasoned, Episode 2 – Cecilia Chiang
In San Francisco, an immigrant restaurateur brings authentic Chinese cuisine to the U.S. via The Mandarin. It’s a love letter to her childhood in China, pre-Communist Revolution.
Seasoned, Episode 3 – Lena Richard
Down in the Big Easy, a Creole chef experiments with bold flavors and becomes a forebearer of today’s multihyphenate food personality, even as her life is cut short.
Seasoned: Episode 4 – Edna Lewis
This celebrated Virginia chef introduced the farm-to-table movement and showed the rest of the country the fresh flavors of Southern cuisine.
Seasoned: Episode 5 – Elena Zelayeta
She elevated Mexican cuisine in America, and later enjoyed success as a cookbook author and TV host despite a disability that once plunged her into despair.
Check out the entire Seasoned project.