Her recipes include avocado hominy salsa, spiced squash waffles, wild rice stuffed squash and venison roast and gravy. government rations of white flour, sugar and lard.īut “pre-Contact” cooking is more than a foodie trend for people like 13-year-old Maizie White, an Akwesasne Mohawk seventh-grader who writes about Indigenous food and shares recipes on her blog,. Few realize that frybread was created by Navajos in 1864, during their forced removal, when they had little to eat other than U.S. This excludes frybread, often considered a traditional Native food enjoyed at powwows and other Indigenous events. Some Indigenous chefs are incorporating traditional foods in anti-Thanksgiving pop-up dinners, cooking without any dairy, processed flour or sugar, all ingredients introduced after European contact. “There is also a lot of interest from Native communities across the country to revitalize their Native foods, not only for the health benefit but for the connection to our ancestors and to recognize our identities as Native people,” she said. Her recipe for salmon cornmeal cakes, which takes just five steps and five ingredients, appears in a how-to video on her “Indigikitchen” (Indigenous kitchen) Facebook page, which has more than 1,400 followers. But Gladstone, who shops at the grocery store, hunts or receives food from family and friends, wants to show how easy, affordable and tasty Indigenous cooking can be. When Native Americans were forced to assimilate – confined to reservations and placed in Indian boarding schools – traditional food preparation waned, forgotten in a world of processed foods and modern cooking conveniences.
DURANGO WILD LANDS KITCHEN INGREDIENTS HOW TO
“We’re missing a lot of information on how to prepare food,” says Gladstone, 24, who started making cooking videos two years ago after she learned about various tribes’ efforts to increase access to affordable, nutritious foods. But through outreach endeavors like her cooking videos, Gladstone and other Native cooks are helping their peers embrace their culinary traditions by teaching about traditional foods, what they are, and how to find and cook them. The connection between traditional foods and culture can be lost if it is not practiced.
While it’s not exactly what her Blackfeet ancestors ate, the ingredients have a long history: They have helped sustain entire civilizations. In a white ceramic bowl, Mariah Gladstone mixes canned salmon, corn meal and chia – creating the kind of nourishing meal anyone can fix at home in minutes.