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.
There’s a joint in a little New Mexico Town that has amazing frybread. I wish I could remember where. It was somewhere I stopped on a whim on the way through.
We’ve got one in Minneapolis too that’s good. They do exist support em.
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.
I’ve had the food truck at the Ballard breweries! The fry bread is amazing.
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.
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.
Is that similar to geodude
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.
Check out Sioux Chef in Minneapolis. That one is pretty good!
Important to point out: native food culture was wiped out because of the forced migration of natives. The federal government subsidized natives with basic food ingredients that were not commodities to them. I can’t really imagine what they ate prior to being pushed out of their native lands without doing a serious deep dive into pre-19th century accounts of their food.
I’ve actually been to a native american restaurant. It was on a reserve. They served buffalo burgers. It was fucking delicious.
You got any of that fry bread.
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’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.
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.
Stress hormones taste like ass but that’s not game taste as such.
I had like five slices of Elk salami once while in Norway and I can still taste them.
Because you arent looking?
We have a few here in my city… Maybe you just gotta actually go look around a bit more…?
Spent my first 30 years in Oklahoma. Never heard of or seen one.
It’s not the same everywhere. Chicago has one of the biggest restaurant scenes in the country and there aren’t any Native American restaurants. There are a few Mexican restaurants that do one or two traditional dishes, but that’s it.
That’s surprising, there was one in the 50k pop town I grew up in.
You probably have more native folks than some regions. Columbus Ohio is a significant enough culinary city, but not only are there no reservations here in ohio, of the five states we border only Michigan has any. Illinois also doesn’t have any. Here’s a map and you can see the reason for the disparities clearly on it. Any Native American cuisine in this region would be a personal project of someone’s.
Then kidnapped the remaining children and put them in “schools” where they only thing even attempted was to erase indigenous culture…
Also, a lot of their descendants were forced into re-education to replace their cultures with settler cultures. A practice even still ongoing.
Tocabe in Denver is excellent too. It has some pretty unique flavor combinations going on.
Thank you for the suggestion.
i am glad i scrolled down i was typing the same response.
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.
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.
Worth noting GGS is incredibly poorly received in the anthropology community. If this was reddit most of the major history and anthro subs have a bot to debunk much of it.
Jarred Diamond, the author of GGS, is an eye doctor and bird expert. He isn’t a good source for this stuff.
Didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.
If you want to look into it the askhistorians FAQ is great
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CGP Grey is such an odd person. Charming, good presentation, sometimes has weird takes.
His video on how to solve traffic uses “mass automatic cars talking to each other” which ignores hundreds of thousands city planners and other actual experts advice: public transit.
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Worth noting that “solution” was strongly promoted when I sold cars. If you do have some from of assistive cruise control you should use it.
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.
People are weirdly against this idea, I think because they believe it diminishes the deliberate genocide that came later, which it doesn’t. The horrible truth is that disease spread through completely biologically defenseless populations starting in the late 15th century. By the time European countries were consolidating colonial power, the Native population had been obliterated by somewhere between 65–89%. Those aren’t extremes, that’s a range of completely plausible figures. The variance is so large because it’s hard to tell how many people used to live in a place when disease, unaided, killed every person in every settlement in unthinkably huge areas. To say entire tribes disappeared is an understatement, entire networks of multiple cultures were wiped out so thoroughly that their memory is lost forever. The Native American population in 1800 was a small fraction of the number of people who once lived.
Didn’t Lewis and Clarke note how often they found abandoned settlements?
Not sure about Lewis and Clark, but I have read that David Thompson did.
George Vancouver recorded beaches strewn with old human bones. Around the same time he wrote journal entries along the lines of, “Wow, look at all this rich, uninhabited land that would be ideal for settlements!” I don’t recall Ol’ George ever putting two and two together.
Never knew that, wow.
Even in the american mythos of the mayflower it mentions them surviving off established food caches and stores from abandoned settlements. People dont think much about that, but they werent left behind because the natives were so welcoming to the Pilgrims.
Their diminished population just made it a whole lot easier for Europeans to commit further atrocities
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
imagine never having a fry dough experience…
FUCKING SAD
Indian frybread is good stuff, yeah.
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.
“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.
shooting bison and smallpox blankets say hello
I mentioned starvation specifically because of the needless slaughter of bison.
my point is it is completely fair to say white America killed the vast majority of the natives
whitewashingly pedantic to blame the gun and not the man pulling the trigger
We count that in the genocide
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Active or not, the Europeans and then the Americans caused the collapse of their civilization.
Imo all deaths are related.
Many weren’t intentional though. There was diseases spread initially by livestock that killed many of that 3.6 million.
Yes, there absolutely were intentional campaigns of genocide but a lot of natives just caught the flu and had zero defense to it. Nobody intentionally gave them the flu because many of these people never saw Europeans.
I guess my sticking point is, does it matter if it was intentional? Contact with Europe destroyed them from both accidents and outright malice. It was still genocide even if it was on accident, imo.
I have a suspicion that if it weren’t for all the disease the colonizers would have destroyed them anyway.
Also nobody intentionally made them deathly ill? Smallpox blankets.
You’re not wrong.
However, it is worth pointing out that the documented “smallpox blankets” stuff happened in the 1700s and 1800s, which was already a century or two after the continent had been greatly depopulated by diseases spread unintentionally.
Measles, syphillis, rubella, mumps, chickenpox even. chickenpox is especially dangerous to adults who never had it.
“Guns, Germs, & Steel”?
Yes GGS= Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. OP already used the full name.
It’s worth remembering that most of them were killed by disease, and that the diseases travelled faster than the colonists. Europe had had centuries of people living in filthy cities where all kinds of diseases were constantly breeding. The survivors carried those diseases but were immune to them. As soon as they met the native populations, the natives were exposed to countless deadly diseases that were completely new to them.
Now, sure, the colonists went and tried to slaughter as many natives as they could, but often they’d get to a new native settlement and find it was mostly empty because everybody had already either died or fled. Who knows, the natives might have been able to put up a fight against the colonists if they hadn’t been so devastated by the diseases. I’d bet that the colonists just took all the natives dying as another sign that their conquest was blessed by their god.
The city of Cohokia was unrivaled in population on the continent until post-colonial Philadelphia about 800 years later, and by some estimates may have even rivaled contemporary London at its peak
There’s other native American cities being found hidden in the jungles of South America too.
The amount of history, stories and people that have been lost to the sands of time are incredible
Keep in mind that at the time London wasn’t all that big a city.
Cahokia is estimated at between 12k and 40k people. That’s a decent sized city for sure, but around the same time, Baghdad had a population over 1 million. Uruk in modern-day Iraq had 40k people at 3000 BC, and Ur hit 100k by 2000 BC. Rome and Alexandria hit 1 million 2000 years ago.
I think Tenochtitlan was more impressive, not only because of the population (estimated at between 200k and 400k on the day Cortez arrived) but also because of how the city looked, basically a city built into the middle of a lake. I still love to look at Thomas Kole’s visualizations of the city
By the way, if you haven’t read Cahokia Jazz, you should. It’s a fun crime story, set in a world where Cahokia didn’t fall, and where the independent native people are waging political battles to keep their freedom as Europeans claim the rest of the continent.
There’s a good reason that Hitler’s concentration camps and Final Solution were inspired by America’s campaign against the native nations.
We pioneered race science too
I’m from Oklahoma and rarely saw a Native American. Saw an old guy in Chicago one time and we about shit.
I’ve been living in Oklahoma for over 20 years now, and I’ve still never seen a Native American.
That’s true, but it’s also important to not overstate it. Anti indigenous groups love to claim that since we basically wiped them out it’s a fool’s errand to give the survivors their reasonable demands like traditional lands and respecting tribal sovereignty.
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?
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.
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.
Out on the Pacific coast, it’s salmon, shellfish, berries, and camas root.
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.
