The story of American Indian food is as complex as the story of the American Indian people. It’s a story we’re not told often. And the hard truth might be that it’s a story that most Americans have been afraid or haven’t thought or wanted to ask.
But that dissociation might end soon. Ben Jacobs is co-owner of Tocabe, a restaurant in Denver that is one of the only commercial establishments to serve American Indian food in the country. Jacobs is a member of the Osage Nation, a tribe with roots in Oklahama, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas. He sees Tocabe as a way to reintroduce the story of American Indians through interesting and new food.
“We have a goal of trying to make American Indian cuisine have a voice in the larger culinary world,” says Jacobs. “From Korean to Ethiopian, you name it, you can find it, but you can’t find American Indian food many places. We want to help build that story of what American Indian food is on a larger scale.”
It is difficult for the casual diner to define what American Indian food is. There is a lack of education about, and presence of, the cuisine in American culture, and tribes from across the country have access to different native foods and thus have different cuisines.
The solution, Jacobs says, is to slowly add chapters to the story, taking firsthand recipes from tribes he and coowner Matt Chandra visit, and relaying that to their customers.
“The way to try to help build this voice is bring these foods together and tell the story, and tell the story of different tribes within one dish, or in one concept,” he says.
Much of Tocabe’s menu is derived from recipes from Jacobs’ grandmother, and the recipes of Jacobs’ parents who briefly owned an American Indian restaurant in the early ’80s.
Jacobs says Tocabe has been slowly introducing more adventurous items on the menu to ease diners into American Indian cuisine. But the foods Tocabe is easing people into aren’t necessarily exotic or distasteful. In fact, it’s quite the opposite — the foods are native.
Native is relative to the region of course, but Katrina Mora, an assistant at the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder, says there are four main food groups that most tribes consider staples: berries, meat, corn and water.
“There’s a lot of native foods [in Colorado], because this is the backbone of our mother,” says Mora, pointing to the Flatirons and referring to the Rockies. “This goes all the way up to the Lakota, all the way down to the Apache.”
Mora, a member of the Lakota tribe, says there are numerous ways in which preparations of native foods are still performed today. Take buffalo, for instance, where what used to be a multi-day process of dry curing muscle in the sun without salt has now been modernized by the advent of dehydrators. Mora says now, “very few people dry it in the old way.”
A common Lakota recipe also native to Colorado is a chokecherry mash, Mora says. Chokecherries are ground with their pits to form a paste, and then it is dried in the sun. Mora says there’s something in the pit that preserves the mash, but the pit also cuts the natural sourness of the berry and makes for good eating.
Women historically gathered the water using buffalo bladders (“We used every single thing in the buffalo,” Mora says) from nearby waterways. And the final staple group, corn, is the typical “Indian corn” you see in the stores. It is less sweet than yellow corn, but is robust in flavor.
“The corn these days is sort of tasteless,” Mora says. “One year our family was able to get some seeds of non-GMO Indian corn to plant, and it was the most delicious corn. Now everything is GMO enlarged, but what’s surprising is the stalks of the Indian corn aren’t big and long.”
Sourcing those native foods commercially is tricky, Jacobs says, but Tocabe has been able to set up a network of American Indian producers, as well as rely on friends and family on the Osage Nation reservation.
“We’re sort of flip-flopped,” Jacobs says, “and we say native first and local second, so if we can find a food that’s native-produced even if it’s farther away, we will get that first because it sustains native food business.”
Jacobs plans to grow native foods for Tocabe like stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns and hickory nut. Jacobs also burns cedar wood from his grandmother’s trees in Oklahoma to create an ash that is cooked into blue corn.
Sourcing native foods and bringing the history of American Indian cuisine to modern diners is an opportunity to also provide those diners an understanding of the greater American Indian culture and what modern day life is like on reservations.
In addition to little access to health care and epidemics of alcoholism, diabetes and suicide, Jacobs says a main cause of health issues on reservations is that “there’s no access to quality ingredients,” and many of the restaurants that come in are fast food chains. It’s symbolic of a larger discrepancy between native tribes and the U.S. government, and Jacobs says that conflict can be best expressed through food. One food, actually: frybread.
“Frybread came from food offered by the government to tribes once they were placed in reservations or forts,” he says. “So it was like, ‘Here’s flour, here’s lard.’ In my mind, something had to be reared, and so they created frybread.”
Tocabe serves frybread, and Jacobs sees it as a “survivor food.” But frybread is more about the technique than the ingredients, Jacobs says, because American Indian tribes had been cooking food in animal fat for years.
“So they took what they knew, and instead of frying meats or things they had foraged and cooking it, they had to make this dough and bread,” Jacobs says. “I think it’s so tied into the culture, and I think it’s important to not just do away with frybread. We [at Tocabe] serve it as something that’s meaningful to us.”
Conversely, Mora says a lot of tribes go to her Lakota people to learn about traditions, language and food because the Lakota “did not sell out to the U.S. government,” and so were able to retain unique aspects of their culture and identity that other tribes sacrificed.
One cultural aspect is the way food is involved in communal events. During a wake, the community will mourn for four days and nights, Mora says, and at all times at least one person must be on hand to watch over the body and serve food to visiting mourners.
Mora says there’s also a ritual of spiritual offering before many meals.
“One of the most important things is we take a spiritual plate first before anybody eats,” she says. “We take a piece of every single solitary food that’s displayed, and we make a prayer to the spirit and tell the spirit that it’s time to come and eat, and we put it next to a cedar tree, and we come back inside, and it’s our turn. We always respect the spirit in that way.”
Sharing those traditions is part of the story for Jacobs and Tocabe. He’s excited about exploring a whole style of food with new ingredients that has yet to be tapped into commercially.
“Obviously being the first peoples here, we’re the oldest culture in the Americas, but right now we have the youngest cuisine, because it’s not clearly defined,” Jacobs says.
Mora doesn’t see anything inherently wrong with sharing American Indian food commercially. But she says that for some tribe members, there remains mistrust of people from outside the community to appropriate parts of American Indian culture for their own gain.
“In our Lakota language, we have this word wasi’chu, and what that word defines is ‘fat taker,’ and the fat is really important to us from the buffalo,” Mora says. “But if someone’s called wasi’chu, that means they come in and they take all the wonderful things, and they say, ‘That’s mine now.’ So there’s not a greedy mindset with how we are as people, but there might be Indians out there that say, ‘We don’t want no white people here because they take the fat.’ If they could pay respect to the people from where they got the knowledge from, then there might not be a problem at all.”
