Me too!!

There are a few fry bread restaurants in Washington State. Obviously, native American cuisine goes much farther than just fry bread. But at the same time it is rather difficult to find any kind of authentic home cooked native American food that has not been incredibly bastardized over the last several hundred years.

(I am Lakota, I know a little bit of what I’m talking about)

The main problem (in my opinion) is that industrialization of food happened after Native American and Anglo-American food systems combined. (And that combination was enforced by the displacement and confinement of Native Americans).

There aren’t many restaurants providing Native American food as it was eaten 200 years ago. Similarly, there aren’t many restaurants providing English-American food as it existed 200 years ago. Most foods we eat could not have existed back then due to things like selective breeding, long distance shipping, and refrigeration.

These advancements changed food all around the world, and many foods were invented that couldn’t have existed before. Later waves of immigration brought new foods to America that were already part of industrialized food.

Many foods that Native Americans ate long ago are part of what is just considered “American food”. Just look at the list of vegetables that came from the americas during the Columbian exchange.

With the rise in “farm to table”, I think there has been a bit of resurgence in Native American food, it might just not be labeled as such. You do have people like Sean Sherman who are really advocating for food that is explicitly Native.

This article goes into that. ;)

I think part of it is the forced displacement of the Trail of Tears moved them across several different biomes over several waves, cutting their access to their original ingredients.

Nothing to add, but Owamni is amazing.