Native Roots

By Kibbe Conti, Registered Dietician
Tribal Connections

Celebrating Native Food

In September we saw a couple of big events happen in Indian Country to promote Native foods. The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian opened on September 21st on the National Mall in Washington D.C. featuring a restaurant with Native dishes. The Mitsitam Cafe in the museum offers visitors meals and snacks inspired by the indigenous foods and culinary traditions of the Native peoples of the Americas. Mitsitam means "Let's eat!" in the Native language of the Delaware and Piscataway peoples.

Mitsitam features full course meals from regional tribal areas such as the Northern Woodlands, Great Plains, Southwest, Pacific Coast and other regions. The Woodlands menu features roast turkey or lobster with wild rice salad, corn bread, Indian pudding, and maple popcorn. The Great Plains menu offers buffalo chili with fry bread and berry pudding, or an Indian taco, or a buffalo burger with onion rings and watermelon and tomato salad. The Pacific Northwest menu features a smoked seafood platter and salmon, yellow turnip with horseradish puree and a celery root salad. Numerous other items are featured from different regions in North and South America such as black bean soup, tamales, yellow corn tacos and tortilla soup. For more information about the cafe see: www.AmericanIndian.si.edu

September also brought us the Second Native Food Summit, held in Milwaukee, and hosted by the First Nations Development Institute, www.firstnations.org. This event drew 160 attendees from food-related, non-profit organizations focused not just on Native cuisine but on building sustainable food systems on tribal lands. The theme of the summit was "A Native Food Movement: Creating a Recipe for Change." Recognizing that new Native food enterprises are starting, tribal enterprises and individual entrepreneurs are marketing their food products internationally. Traditional agriculture and foods are being restored in part with the hope that by improving access to traditional foods, this is a step in the right direction toward promoting a healthy lifestyle.