When Will Native American Food Finally Get Its Due?

By Tove Danovich

[DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images]

How Native American food is the “original farm-to-table.”

The American palate is expanding. Over the last few decades, formerly exotic foods like raw fish have gone from “gross” to grocery store staple: According to market research by IBISWorld, the sushi industry, for example, has grown 2.5 percent every year since 2009. Yet there’s one key cuisine that has somehow gotten lost along the way — and we don’t even need to go far to find it. The cuisine? Native American — perhaps the most truly local style of cooking around.

Though there are restaurants that focus on certain styles of Native American food — from frybread houses to fine dining — they’re few and far between. Even New York City, one of the culinary capitals of the United States, has boasted only one such restaurant, the now-defunct Silverbird, which opened in the mid-‘80s. It says something that one of the few Native restaurants on the East Coast is housed in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.

The supposed Native American food resurgence has been brewing for the last decade — reflected in growing media coverage, the opening of new restaurants, and acclaimed non-Native chefs exploring the cuisine (Chicago’s Michelin-starred Elizabeth is launching a series of Native American tribute dinners later this summer). But if there was ever a time for this cuisine to rise into the spotlight, it’s now. Many of the best restaurants in the world feature foraged and/or local, seasonal foods on their menus. In the United States, these restaurants often fall under the “New American” culinary genre — but their cooking has more in common with the French approach than anything on this continent. But with diners more acutely aware of the ideas of farm-to-table, locavore dining, it might be the moment for a few plucky restaurants around the country to change that. As Loretta Barrett Oden, member of the Potawotami tribe, chef, and Emmy-award winning host of PBS’ Seasoned with Spirit says, “We’re the original farm-to-table.”

Washington DC’s Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe [Photo: Chris Maddaloni/CQ-Roll Call]

What is Native American food?

An important issue to address in talking about Native cuisines is that there isn’t just one. Given the size of the United States, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. (China, a country only slightly smaller than the U.S., carries at least eight distinct styles of food under the “Chinese” umbrella.)

Today, there are 566 federally recognized Indian Nations — though, of course, there used to be many more — and there are regional (if not tribal) differences between food preparations and ingredients. Yet it’s actually easier to define Native cooking than many other cuisines. According to many Native chefs, there seem to be two main rules: use only foods indigenous to your area, and use simple cooking techniques like smoking, drying, stewing, or putting food in direct contact with fire.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean the general public has any idea of what Native cuisine actually is. Barrett Oden, who still regularly encounters stereotypes about Native culture, believes Americans are “undereducated about Native America as a whole.” “They think we wear feathers and eat frybread and possum,” she says. In the early 1990s, when she opened her first restaurant, Corn Dance Café, in Santa Fe, New Mexico citizens had little concept of either Native or local foods. “People thought it was going to be really weird and off the beaten path — like Andrew Zimmern eating bugs and that kind of thing,” Barrett Oden remarks. “But it’s not. It’s just great, wonderful food that happens to be indigenous to some place in the Americas.”

Today, many Native chefs focus on what’s known as a pre-colonization menu — the foods that were eaten before European settlers came to the Americas. That means no factory-produced white flours, processed sugars, and dairy, and no farmed meats like beef, pork, and chicken. This is the approach taken by Sean Sherman, member of the Oglala Lakota (also known as Oglala Sioux) nation and owner of Minneapolis catering company Sioux Chef as well as an upcoming food truck focused on Native cuisine. “I try to remove as much European influence and ingredients as possible,” he says. “It’s been a real minimalistic style of cooking.”

Though he grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, Sherman did a lot of outside research to discover the full scale of ingredients and cooking techniques available to him in pre-colonial, Native cuisine. He knew that Native Americans in particular had a “vast knowledge of plant identification and usage” and began talking to elders and picking up any cookbook he could find to replicate some of that know-how. “It’s a lifetime of education to figure everything out,” Sherman says, noting he finds new plants and techniques every year.

According to Barrett Oden, the fact that Vegetarian Times and similar magazines were among the first to promote Corn Dance Café’s menu shows how plant-based and healthy many Native dishes are. Corn, squash, and beans — often referred to as “the three sisters” because they thrive when grown together — appeared together in many menu items. Then there are the game meats like buffalo and rack of rabbit.

Yet many foods at Native restaurants seem quite familiar, and not just because they’re being interpreted for a modern palate. In some areas (namely the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest) what people think of as regional food owes strong debts to Native cuisine. Fernando Divina, co-author of Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes and Traditions, sees examples of Native foods everywhere. Popcorn, planked salmon cooked over alder wood, the chili dishes of the Southwest, and even the Northeast’s maple sugar pie are all “offspring of indigenous dishes,” he says.

Bettina Sandoval, the Cultural Arts and Education Coordinator for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, sees Southwestern food as a hodgepodge of influences. “It’s actually Mexican, Spanish, American, and Native cuisines combined.” Any time you see blue corn, a dish like grits, dried foods, jerky, or stews on a menu, there’s been a Native influence. The Cultural Center where Sandoval works has a unique partnership with the Pueblo Harvest Café it houses. Both are owned by a partnership of 19 local pueblos, or southwest Native nations. To bring the two together, the Center offers culinary tours. They consist of a visit to a community garden (which features the three sisters and other Native gardening techniques) and the restaurant where Native food and culture actually comes to life. As Barrett Oden says of her own experience introducing outsiders to Native cuisine, “It’s a wonderful, gentle way of heightening people’s awareness of who we are as people and what the culture is about.”

Frybread [Photo: Issac Wedin/Flickr]

What about frybread?

Yet while a pre-colonial perspective has been popular in Native American fine dining, much like other Americans, many Native people have gotten away from traditional (and often time-consuming) methods of cooking. One of the most contentious foods associated with Native Americans is something known as “frybread,” essentially dough fried in a thick bath of lard or other shortening. It may be the most well-known Native “dish,” even though its origins hark back to one of the most painful periods of Native American and U.S. relations. “The Long Walk” was an Indian removal project that lasted from 1864-1866 and forced the Arizona Navajo people to walk 300 miles to “relocate” in New Mexico. Their food and animals were either left behind or destroyed. To keep them from starving completely, the government offered ration boxes of cheap commodity foods like lard and flour. From this comes frybread.

Unlike the fine-dining approach taken by Barrett Oden, Sherman, Divina, and others, frybread doesn’t require specialized culinary training. This is likely one of the reasons for its popularity. It also makes running a frybread house a business model that’s accessible to a historically low-income population. (According to U.S. Census data from 2013, the median household income for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives was only $36,641, compared to $52,250 for the United States as a whole.)

While some chefs like Barrett Oden refuse to serve frybread (“I am the biggest opponent of frybread you’ll find,” she says), many Natives embrace it. Today most tribes have some version of frybread, and if you stumble across a Native American restaurant, it’s more likely to be one that specializes in this dish than not. A Denver restaurant called Tocabe offers choices of stuffed frybread, frybread nuggets, and a sugared dessert frybread on its small menu. The Pueblo Harvest Café serves so-called “Indian Tacos” using frybread. Phoenix’s Fry Bread House even won a 2012 James Beard America’s Classics Award for its food.

Black Sheep Café, a casual restaurant in Provo, Utah serves frybread with its soup. Like all native people, Black Sheep’s chef Mark Daniel Mason is well aware of both the poor health effects associated with frybread (Native Americans have above-average rates of diet-related disease like Type 2 Diabetes, much of which is attributed to poor post-removal diets), as well as the conflicting emotions it brings up. Personally, he thinks that despite the history, what the Native people have done with frybread deserves celebration. “It can be absolutely tender and represents culinary evolution,” he says. The frybread people eat today has been passed down “through the hands of a lot of Native American mothers and grandmothers.”

Provo, Utah’s Black Sheep Cafe [Photo: Facebook]

Why aren’t there more restaurants?

Though some Native restaurants have come and gone, it’s hard to tell how many closures resulted from a lack of consumer enthusiasm. In a business notorious for the high failure rate, restaurants featuring Native American cuisine have the benefit of still being novel — and popular. Barrett Oden’s restaurant successfully operated for 10 years before she closed it to move closer to her grandchildren. The Pueblo Harvest Café has been open since the 1970s. Many chefs looking at the popularity of New Nordic or New American cuisine believe that the time is ripe for Native foods to move to the forefront. Though people love trying new foods, eaters tend to like some aspect of the familiar. These New Native chefs who combine indigenous ingredients into familiar salads, roasts, and stews are doing just that. At one of Divina’s restaurants, he moved away from French terminology to describe Native-inspired dishes and focused on “the provenance of ingredients” instead. At the time, tapas were quite popular and he snuck in unfamiliar ingredients through that recognizable format. “You can’t challenge people too radically until they trust you,” he says.

Black Sheep Café purposefully describes itself as a Southwestern restaurant with Native American influence. “I’m taking a lot of well-known dishes and slowly, methodically incorporating some Native American ingredients and approaches to the food,” Mason says, adding, “people will keep coming back for familiar food.”

Barrett Oden travels throughout the United States cooking once-off dinners of Native American foods and believes the cuisine could become popular anywhere. “It’s a cuisine that people, once they are exposed to it, absolutely love,” she says. And it’s not just diners but classically trained chefs who she’s exposing to indigenous ingredients like acholla tree buds, huitlacoche, or game meats. “We need to push Native restaurants because all that’s opening now are more frybread houses,” Barrett Oden says. As she sees it, the only thing keeping new restaurants from opening is the one thing all aspiring restaurateurs have in common — lack of capital. And convincing investors to spend the amount of money needed to open a restaurant in a major city is difficult enough when you’re not working with a relatively unknown cuisine.

But the ingredients and methods that define Native American cooking also make it a no-brainer for today’s eaters — especially the pre-colonial variety. It’s made from local foods without modern processed ingredients like white flour, white sugar, or industrial yeasts. Native cooking can easily be vegetarian- or vegan-friendly, gluten-free, low-fat, paleo, and totally delicious. The only real barrier may just be the fact that few people have heard of it. As Barrett Oden says, “In this country, Native American food is the only ethnicity not represented in the culinary world.” Perhaps the times are finally changing.