Left: Chef Loretta Oden, preparing is a Three Sisters Salad with a light coriander vinaigrette, says,“What goes into the food is not just the ingredients. It’s your love and your spirit.” Right: Chef and caterer Tawnya Brant, here holding a red Boletus mushroom, says about 70 percent of the food she serves is harvested locally.
reintroduced them in 1531. Other tubers were available, however. Fernando and Mar- lene Divina (Chippewa/Cree and Assiniboine descent) co-authored NMAI’s book “Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes and Tradi- tions.” Fernando recalls gathering wapatos in Oregon wetlands. With arrow-shaped leaves, these tuber-producing plants are found from southern Canada to Ecuador. “In fact, Native Americans had a pretty
delicious diet until March, when people got tired of root vegetables,” says Lewis. “That’s what makes early spring greens like ramps and sochan so desirable. By then, people need them both nutritionally and for their mental well-being.” Wheat only arrived with Europeans. Thus
while some may view fry bread as a “typi- cal” American Indian food today, it holds an ambiguous place in culinary history. On one hand, wheat is the embodiment of col- onizing cuisine, one of the bulk foodstuffs forced onto Natives as part of the reservation
process. Some Native chefs won’t serve fry bread because of that association, but Cana- dian chef Tawnya Brant (Haudenosaunee) takes no sides in that argument. She says, “Our grandmothers fed us with what they had, and I won’t talk down the things that sustained us.” Brant has been a chef for 27 years. She
is now catering, and in November 2020, she finally had a chance to open her own restau- rant, “Yawekon.” For now, her restaurant is a takeout-only lunchtime eatery on the Six Nations Reserve near Hamilton, Ontario. Slow-cooked favorites include corn soup, rabbit stew with root vegetables, and a braised bison and wild rice bowl with maple glazed squash, cilantro, lime, onions, beans and corn. “At least 70 percent of our food is harvest-
ed locally, but I’m open to any Indigenous cuisine,” said Brant. “All our edibles cycle through our calendar year, and I’d like to expose our people to that.” She looks to the
future, when she may be able to serve more customers again. Other Native chefs are dealing with the
present but also have their eyes on the hori- zon. Sherman and Thompson will eventually open Owamni by The Sioux Chef, their dream restaurant on Native lands by the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Back in California’s East Bay, Medina and
Trevino are slowly pulling the pieces together for a revived, post-COVID Cafe Ohlone on their ancestral homelands. They want to buy a building to house not only a full-scale restau- rant but also a cultural center for the Ohlone people, one that will foster both the culture and the language of their ancestors. In time, they will join other Native chefs across North America in again bringing the immense va- riety of Indigenous foods to customers more than ready for a post-pandemic dinner out.X
Aaron Levin is a freelance journalist based in Baltimore, Maryland. He wrote about the long history of corn farming in the “Heart of the Hopi” in the Fall 2019 issue of American Indian magazine.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 33
PHOTO COURTESY OF LORETTA ODEN
PHOTO BY LISA MACINTOSH PHOTOGRAPHY
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