article
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical
and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food
that once sustained them, and finding allies in the
nation's culinary elite and marketing experts.
NATIVE FOODS NOURISH AGAIN
By KIM SEVERSON
NY Times, November 23, 2005
Last week, Noland Johnson pulled the season's final
crop of tepary beans from the piece of desert he farms
on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, about 120 miles
southwest of Tucson.
The beans look a little like a flattened black-eyed
pea. The white ones cook up creamy. The brown ones,
which Mr. Johnson prefers, are best simmered like
pinto beans.
As late as the 1930's, Tohono O'odham farmers grew
more than 1.5 million pounds a year and no one in the
tribe had ever heard of diabetes. By the time Mr.
Johnson got into the game four years ago, an elder
would be lucky to find even a pound of the beans, and
more than half of the adults in the tribe had the kind
of diabetes attributed to poor diet.
While researchers investigate the link between
traditional desert foods and diabetes prevention, Mr.
Johnson grows his beans, pulling down 14,000 pounds
this fall. Most will sell for about $2.50 a pound at
small stores on the reservation.
Mr. Johnson, 31, began farming beans partly as a
tribute to his grandfather, who died from
complications related to diabetes. He always saves
some beans for his grandmother, who likes to simmer
the white ones with oxtail.
"I see my grandmother telling her friends, 'Yeah, I
can get some beans for you,' " Mr. Johnson said. "The
elders, they're so glad to see it."
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much
as $9.50 a pound for teparies online. Big-city chefs
are in love with the little beans, too, turning them
into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised local pork.
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical
and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food
that once sustained them, and finding allies in the
nation's culinary elite and marketing experts.
One result is the start of a new sort of native
culinary canon that rejects oily fry bread but
embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska
and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the
Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great
Plains and dozens of squashes, beans, berries and
melons.
Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three
sisters soup, built from the classic Indian trilogy of
beans, squash and corn. At the Mitsitam Cafe, opened
last year in the National Museum of the American
Indian in Washington, cooks create dishes with roasted
salmon, chilies and buffalo meat.
At the Cave B Inn, a resort a couple of hours' drive
east of Seattle, Fernando Divina, the chef and a
co-author of "Food of the Americas: Native Recipes and
Traditions," uses fresh corn dumplings, local beans,
squash and Dungeness crab to augment a sophisticated
menu meant to match wines from the resort's vineyards.
Smoked whitefish chubs from Lake Superior and
sassafras gel�e ended up on the table at Savoy
restaurant in Manhattan earlier this fall, and later
this month pine-roasted venison with black currants
and truffled hominy will star at a $100 indigenous
foods dinner at the Equinox restaurant in Washington.
Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures.
"There's only now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of
what Native food can be," said the author Louise
Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about
tribal food in many of her books and is working on a
cookbook with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle
Mountain Reservation.
"You're talking about evolving a cuisine from a people
whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a
long time," Ms. Erdrich said.
American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the
nation that has yet to be addressed in the culinary
world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who learned
to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi
reservation in Oklahoma.
"You can go to most any area of this country and eat
Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can't
eat indigenous foods native to the Americas," said Ms.
Oden, who has been traveling the nation filming
segments for a 2006 PBS series titled "Seasoned With
Spirit: A Native Cook's Journey."
One item that won't be featured on her show is fry
bread, the puffy circles of deep-fried dough that
serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with
sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations.
That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is
wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved
from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one
that relied on federal government commodities,
including white flour and lard - the two ingredients
in fry bread.
In a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
in South Dakota, the poorest and one of the largest
reservations in the country, Larry Pourier, a film
producer, is working on a healthier fast food. He is
developing a snack bar based on a recipe for wasna, a
patty Lakota elders used to fashion from the kidney
fat and meat of bison mashed with chokecherries. Over
the next couple of months he will add other dried
fruits, grains and alternatives to the suet to make a
modern snack bar that is high in protein and low in
sugar.
"I'm trying to keep it traditional, but in order for
it to be successful it has to taste good," Mr. Pourier
said.
Eventually, Mr. Pourier and his colleagues at Lakota
Express, the economic development company behind the
bar, want to manufacture an entire line under the
brand Native American Natural Foods. The idea is that
products from their tribe and others might be sold in
special American Indian food sections, the way kosher,
Mexican or Chinese products are grouped in many
mainstream grocery stores.
"There are a lot of people trying to figure how to
create a Native-based food product and having a real
struggle to find market access, whether it's salmon or
wild rice or teas or baked goods or corn chips,
whatever," said Mark Tilsen, who helped to found
Lakota Express. "By trying to build a brand, we can
provide some market access."
American Indians and Alaska Natives make up only about
1.5 percent of the nation's population, and those
people are spread among almost 600 tribes. Even in the
largest tribes, knowledge of how to forage and farm
traditional food has faded.
Efforts like the White Earth Land Recovery Project,
which harvests and sells rice from the lakes in
northern Minnesota, are helping to keep that knowledge
alive. The project, run by Winona LaDuke, is part of
an effort by food activists and chefs to save
traditional American Indian foods and cooking methods.
Mr. Johnson's tepary bean farm has its roots in Native
Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson-based organization that Gary
Nabhan, a professor at Northern Arizona University,
founded to preserve native plants in the Southwest and
northwestern Mexico.
Last year, Mr. Nabhan started RAFT, which stands for
Renewing America's Food Traditions. The coalition of
seven nonprofit food, agricultural and conservation
organizations has published a "red list" of 700
endangered American foods, including heritage turkeys
and Louisiana Creole cream cheese.
Several dozen items are tied directly to Indian
tribes, including wild rice and the tepary, said
Makal� Faber, who tends the list as part of her work
with Slow Food USA.
During the first week of December, members of the RAFT
coalition, including the culinary organizations Slow
Food and the Chefs Collaborative, will gather at the
annual Tohono O'odham Community Action basket makers
and food summit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix to
discuss how to expand the list of endangered foods and
figure out ways to nurture American Indian cuisine in
the Southwest.
People involved say the evolution won't work without
chefs.
"Having people at a high-end restaurant buy some of
this makes it available for the rest of the community
that it originally came from," said Patty West, a
forager who works at the Northern Arizona University's
Center for Sustainable Environments and is an
organizer of the December food workshop.
John Sharpe, the chef at La Posada Hotel in Winslow,
Ariz., devises as much of his menu as he can from
local tribal foods. About four times a year, he is
lucky enough to get a delivery of Navajo Churro lambs
from a small, scrappy breed that was almost extinct.
The animals are smaller than most commercial breeds
and have very little fat. Mr. Sharpe, who has often
paired chops from the lambs with tepary beans, will
roast legs from four carcasses he received last week
with wild local herbs, and serve them on his
Thanksgiving buffet.
He also borrows from Hopi traditions, turning tepary
beans, roasted corn, a little French mustard and some
olive oil into a dip that echoes a traditional Hopi
dish. He uses thin Hopi piki bread, made from ground
blue corn and cooked like a crepe, for dipping.
"Do the Hopis like it?" asked Mr. Sharpe, who will be
at the December workshop. "They kind of laugh at it,
but they love it. They say, 'This is a crazy white man
who likes our food.' "
and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food
that once sustained them, and finding allies in the
nation's culinary elite and marketing experts.
NATIVE FOODS NOURISH AGAIN
By KIM SEVERSON
NY Times, November 23, 2005
Last week, Noland Johnson pulled the season's final
crop of tepary beans from the piece of desert he farms
on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, about 120 miles
southwest of Tucson.
The beans look a little like a flattened black-eyed
pea. The white ones cook up creamy. The brown ones,
which Mr. Johnson prefers, are best simmered like
pinto beans.
As late as the 1930's, Tohono O'odham farmers grew
more than 1.5 million pounds a year and no one in the
tribe had ever heard of diabetes. By the time Mr.
Johnson got into the game four years ago, an elder
would be lucky to find even a pound of the beans, and
more than half of the adults in the tribe had the kind
of diabetes attributed to poor diet.
While researchers investigate the link between
traditional desert foods and diabetes prevention, Mr.
Johnson grows his beans, pulling down 14,000 pounds
this fall. Most will sell for about $2.50 a pound at
small stores on the reservation.
Mr. Johnson, 31, began farming beans partly as a
tribute to his grandfather, who died from
complications related to diabetes. He always saves
some beans for his grandmother, who likes to simmer
the white ones with oxtail.
"I see my grandmother telling her friends, 'Yeah, I
can get some beans for you,' " Mr. Johnson said. "The
elders, they're so glad to see it."
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much
as $9.50 a pound for teparies online. Big-city chefs
are in love with the little beans, too, turning them
into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised local pork.
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical
and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food
that once sustained them, and finding allies in the
nation's culinary elite and marketing experts.
One result is the start of a new sort of native
culinary canon that rejects oily fry bread but
embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska
and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the
Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great
Plains and dozens of squashes, beans, berries and
melons.
Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three
sisters soup, built from the classic Indian trilogy of
beans, squash and corn. At the Mitsitam Cafe, opened
last year in the National Museum of the American
Indian in Washington, cooks create dishes with roasted
salmon, chilies and buffalo meat.
At the Cave B Inn, a resort a couple of hours' drive
east of Seattle, Fernando Divina, the chef and a
co-author of "Food of the Americas: Native Recipes and
Traditions," uses fresh corn dumplings, local beans,
squash and Dungeness crab to augment a sophisticated
menu meant to match wines from the resort's vineyards.
Smoked whitefish chubs from Lake Superior and
sassafras gel�e ended up on the table at Savoy
restaurant in Manhattan earlier this fall, and later
this month pine-roasted venison with black currants
and truffled hominy will star at a $100 indigenous
foods dinner at the Equinox restaurant in Washington.
Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures.
"There's only now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of
what Native food can be," said the author Louise
Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about
tribal food in many of her books and is working on a
cookbook with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle
Mountain Reservation.
"You're talking about evolving a cuisine from a people
whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a
long time," Ms. Erdrich said.
American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the
nation that has yet to be addressed in the culinary
world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who learned
to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi
reservation in Oklahoma.
"You can go to most any area of this country and eat
Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can't
eat indigenous foods native to the Americas," said Ms.
Oden, who has been traveling the nation filming
segments for a 2006 PBS series titled "Seasoned With
Spirit: A Native Cook's Journey."
One item that won't be featured on her show is fry
bread, the puffy circles of deep-fried dough that
serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with
sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations.
That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is
wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved
from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one
that relied on federal government commodities,
including white flour and lard - the two ingredients
in fry bread.
In a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
in South Dakota, the poorest and one of the largest
reservations in the country, Larry Pourier, a film
producer, is working on a healthier fast food. He is
developing a snack bar based on a recipe for wasna, a
patty Lakota elders used to fashion from the kidney
fat and meat of bison mashed with chokecherries. Over
the next couple of months he will add other dried
fruits, grains and alternatives to the suet to make a
modern snack bar that is high in protein and low in
sugar.
"I'm trying to keep it traditional, but in order for
it to be successful it has to taste good," Mr. Pourier
said.
Eventually, Mr. Pourier and his colleagues at Lakota
Express, the economic development company behind the
bar, want to manufacture an entire line under the
brand Native American Natural Foods. The idea is that
products from their tribe and others might be sold in
special American Indian food sections, the way kosher,
Mexican or Chinese products are grouped in many
mainstream grocery stores.
"There are a lot of people trying to figure how to
create a Native-based food product and having a real
struggle to find market access, whether it's salmon or
wild rice or teas or baked goods or corn chips,
whatever," said Mark Tilsen, who helped to found
Lakota Express. "By trying to build a brand, we can
provide some market access."
American Indians and Alaska Natives make up only about
1.5 percent of the nation's population, and those
people are spread among almost 600 tribes. Even in the
largest tribes, knowledge of how to forage and farm
traditional food has faded.
Efforts like the White Earth Land Recovery Project,
which harvests and sells rice from the lakes in
northern Minnesota, are helping to keep that knowledge
alive. The project, run by Winona LaDuke, is part of
an effort by food activists and chefs to save
traditional American Indian foods and cooking methods.
Mr. Johnson's tepary bean farm has its roots in Native
Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson-based organization that Gary
Nabhan, a professor at Northern Arizona University,
founded to preserve native plants in the Southwest and
northwestern Mexico.
Last year, Mr. Nabhan started RAFT, which stands for
Renewing America's Food Traditions. The coalition of
seven nonprofit food, agricultural and conservation
organizations has published a "red list" of 700
endangered American foods, including heritage turkeys
and Louisiana Creole cream cheese.
Several dozen items are tied directly to Indian
tribes, including wild rice and the tepary, said
Makal� Faber, who tends the list as part of her work
with Slow Food USA.
During the first week of December, members of the RAFT
coalition, including the culinary organizations Slow
Food and the Chefs Collaborative, will gather at the
annual Tohono O'odham Community Action basket makers
and food summit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix to
discuss how to expand the list of endangered foods and
figure out ways to nurture American Indian cuisine in
the Southwest.
People involved say the evolution won't work without
chefs.
"Having people at a high-end restaurant buy some of
this makes it available for the rest of the community
that it originally came from," said Patty West, a
forager who works at the Northern Arizona University's
Center for Sustainable Environments and is an
organizer of the December food workshop.
John Sharpe, the chef at La Posada Hotel in Winslow,
Ariz., devises as much of his menu as he can from
local tribal foods. About four times a year, he is
lucky enough to get a delivery of Navajo Churro lambs
from a small, scrappy breed that was almost extinct.
The animals are smaller than most commercial breeds
and have very little fat. Mr. Sharpe, who has often
paired chops from the lambs with tepary beans, will
roast legs from four carcasses he received last week
with wild local herbs, and serve them on his
Thanksgiving buffet.
He also borrows from Hopi traditions, turning tepary
beans, roasted corn, a little French mustard and some
olive oil into a dip that echoes a traditional Hopi
dish. He uses thin Hopi piki bread, made from ground
blue corn and cooked like a crepe, for dipping.
"Do the Hopis like it?" asked Mr. Sharpe, who will be
at the December workshop. "They kind of laugh at it,
but they love it. They say, 'This is a crazy white man
who likes our food.' "