[Undermined by displacement and centuries of cultural
assimilation, indigenous foodways are careening toward extinction. A
number of increasingly prominent Native chefs hope to change that. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE CHEROKEE CHEFS BRINGING BACK NORTH AMERICA’S LOST CUISINE;
RESEARCHING TRADITIONAL FOODS LED THEM TO THE REVELATIONS OF AN
ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG IN KENTUCKY.  
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Eric J. Wallace
June 4, 2020
GastroObscura
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_ Undermined by displacement and centuries of cultural assimilation,
indigenous foodways are careening toward extinction. A number of
increasingly prominent Native chefs hope to change that. _

,

 

In March, a few weeks before COVID-19 shut down the country, chef Nico
Albert and her longtime mentee, chef Taelor Barton, met at Duet
Restaurant + Jazz to discuss plans for their upcoming Native American
dinners and culinary classes.

Each November for the past two years, Albert has turned the menu at
Duet Restaurant + Jazz into full Native American fare. While the
seasonal, New American food that Albert serves year round has made the
140-seat eatery one of Tulsa’s most beloved fine-dineries, it is
this menu of contemporary Native dishes, available only during Native
American Heritage Month, that truly stands out. Locals and regulars
flock to the restaurant, and Cherokee and other tribal members come
from as far away as Michigan or Seattle. The offerings—which include
persimmon frybread pie made with Pawnee heirloom corn and crispy,
sumac-crusted snapper with roasted squash, wild greens, sweet corn
hazelnut sauce, and pickled blueberries—routinely sell out.

The women, both members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, were
slated to lead historical-foraging and Spring Onion Dinner experiences
about pre-colonial foodways and matriarchal roles, and cook suppers of
traditional Cherokee foods for local museums and historical societies.

They were also discussing possibilities for this year’s November
menu at Duet. (Barton may be a guest chef.) Of course, it should
continue to feature contemporary Native American food, whose presence
at a fine-dining restaurant remains rare and special. But might it
also debut their effort to restore one of North America’s oldest
regional indigenous cuisines—one that has been almost completely
lost, and is rarely referenced outside the pages of archaeology
journals?

Barton suggests doing at least one entrée—perhaps rabbit legs
seasoned with dried sassafras leaves and braised with cedar fronds in
wild sunflower oil, served over a bed of quinoa-esque pitseed
goosefoot grains and the plant’s sautéed leaves (reminiscent of
kale) and okra-like milkweed seed pods.

If that happens, it will be the first time such tastes have been
publicly available in at least 1,000 years, and one more step toward
their shared goal of launching a restaurant to showcase it and other
historic Native foods.

Barton and Albert stumbled upon the ancient cuisine essentially by
accident. The two met in 2011 at an event on the future of traditional
Native American foods. Albert gave a talk arguing for a chef-led
revitalization that would educate eaters, foster cultural awareness,
and preserve foodways through use. An industry of tribal farmers,
foragers, caterers, and restaurateurs could, for example, grow, sell,
and serve dishes with wild rice, a cherished Native ingredient long
grown along the Great Lakes but displaced by boaters and home owners
who see it as a weed
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Barton, then a student at the Oklahoma State University School of
Culinary Arts, was impressed.

 “That was a turning point,” she says. The truth hit her hard:
Undermined by displacement and centuries of cultural assimilation,
indigenous foodways were careening toward extinction. The hope, which
motivates a number of increasingly prominent Native chefs, was that
creating a nation of diners interested in Native American food would
provide resources to maintain them.

“We’ve inherited this rich, beautiful history centered in a deep
respect for nature and the sustenance it provides,” says Albert,
echoing the punchline from her 2011 talk. “Our traditional foodways
are the embodiment of that relationship. To lose them is to lose the
essence of our cultural identity.”

The women became friends, and Albert soon hired Barton to cook under
her at the first of various Tulsa restaurants. They researched
historic Native foodways, visited tribal elders to document culinary
traditions, explored obscure cookbooks (such as 1951’s _Cherokee
Cooklore_
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and used what they learned to craft contemporized dishes.

By 2015, the two were putting on Native dinners for local non-profits,
museums, and educational organizations. Regional chefs such as Brad
Dry joined the effort, and Sean Sherman—who won a James Beard
Foundation Leadership Award in 2019 for his efforts to revitalize and
boost awareness around indigenous food systems in a modern culinary
context— encouraged them to join national discussions around
defining Native American cuisine.

Attending events like 2018’s Native American Cuisine Symposium and
the 2019 National Native Food Sovereignty Summit brought separate but
mutual epiphanies: Albert and Barton realized most modern Native
cuisines, including their own, are pastiche-like. Without formal
precedents or pre-colonial records, chefs have to rely on clues from
early European descriptions, old cookbooks, and extant tribal foodways
from around North America.

“On one hand, that’s led to a fantastically creative culture of
interpretation and cross-pollination,” says Albert. On the other,
menus often pair foods from radically different cultures—like, say,
Floridian Seminoles and Southwestern Navajos.

There was also a problem of mixing historical eras. Chefs like Sherman
focused on decolonizing their cuisines by using only ingredients
present in the Americas before 1492. Others featured adaptions
stemming from colonial influences, displacement, and cultural
assimilation. Like echoes of a lost heritage, the latter pointed to a
land-based ethos of foraging, gardening, and seasonal ingredients. But
the picture was murky at best.

Citing the success of hyper-regional modern cuisines, Albert and
Barton wanted to do something more Cherokee-specific. They began to
focus on pre-European foodways from traditional Cherokee lands in the
central and southeastern Appalachian Mountains, and surrounding
areas—territory where the Cherokee lived until they were forcibly
relocated by the U.S. government over the Trail of Tears in the mid
1800s.

The chefs’ historical reconstruction began with scholarly books and
papers, then calls and emails with historians, archaeologists, and
paleoethnobotanists. They learned about iterations of Three Sisters
farming methods, which had proliferated throughout what is now the
eastern United States by about 1300
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They discovered reclaimed varieties of indigenous heirloom corn,
beans, squash, watermelon, and pumpkins.

Still, they wondered, what came before?

The question led Barton to scholars like David Morgan and Kristen
Gremillion, and obscure discoveries in places like Kentucky’s Red
River Gorge, a 29,000-acre canyon system in the Daniel Boone National
Forest.

Before the Gorge finds, archaeologists “assumed that the peoples of
this region just sat around passively, waiting for others to send them
the gift of agriculture,” says Morgan, director of the National Park
Service’s Southeast Archaeological Center. “But that simply
wasn’t the case.”

Plant materials recovered by archaeologists in the Gorge in the 1980s
and ‘90s led to a historical revision “that fundamentally alters
how we think about indigenous peoples of the [precontact eastern
U.S.],” says Morgan. A trove of ancient seeds debunked then-dominant
theories “depicting early inhabitants as backwater nomads that
didn’t acquire agriculture—and thus the markers of complex
society—until after A.D. 1, when maize arrived from Mesoamerica.”

Gremillion, a paleoethnobotanist, chairs the Ohio State University
department of anthropology and is the author of _Ancestral Appetites:
Foods in Prehistory_. She started working in the Gorge around 1989,
using techniques such as direct radiocarbon dating and
high-magnification microscopy to study ancient caches of seeds, food
stores, cooking refuse, and human feces. She found specimens buried
under massive stone outcroppings and in caves—all in remarkable
condition.

“We found things like 3,000-year-old sunflower heads and baskets
full of seeds,” says Gremillion, who compares the digs to opening
storage vaults. The finds were unprecedented, and old vanguard
archaeologists were dismissive. “They said the materials couldn’t
possibly be so old.”

Gremillion’s research proved them wrong; the region’s indigenous
peoples had been farming for more than 5,000 years. The work helped
establish the Eastern Woodlands as an independent center of
prehistoric plant domestication and agricultural
development—alongside areas like southeast Asia, Mexico, and the
Fertile Crescent.

“The importance of these finds cannot be overestimated,” says
Morgan. They pointed to stable residential patterns, ideas about land
ownership, and developed economies. To tribes that lived in
semi-permanent villages within defined territories and grew canny
agricultural complexes of crops.

Of particular interest to Barton was the nature of those crops. All
were native to southeastern North America and had been refined for
culinary purposes. The majority—along with the cuisine they
underpinned—had been lost to history. Today, most are considered
weeds.

“These gardens were radically different from those described by
early Europeans,” says Gremillion. So too, the foods that came from
them.

Barton wasn’t just learning about a few forgotten ingredients—she
was rediscovering an entire food culture. When ancient Greeks and
people around the Mediterranean were pressing olives into olive oil,
tribes in the Eastern Woodlands were cultivating sunflowers and marsh
elder to make cooking oil. Like rice farmers in ancient China, the
ancestors of the Cherokee grew amaranth, maygrass, erect knotweed, and
barley for pseudo-cereals and grains. Hog peanut and other bean-like
fruits played a role similar to soybeans. Sugar was unknown in the
Americas, so sweet tastes came from a slew of berries and fruits,
including American black nightshade, savory ground cherries, and other
interesting oddities. (Or at least they seem odd today.)

While squash, sunflowers, and berries remained staples, other crops
were replaced by foods like corn, beans, and tomatoes from South and
Central America. Archaeologists speculate they were abandoned because
harvesting the tiny seeds and grains was tedious and labor-intensive.
But that doesn’t mean the older foods weren’t tasty. Basically,
says Gremillion, the new foods were easier to grow and brought better
yields, which is why they eventually dominated agriculture throughout
parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, replacing longtime local staples.

Barton recognized the lost foods’ culinary potential immediately: It
was as if, in a world without olive oil, where the only olive trees
were wild ones, she was the only chef learning about the ingredients
used a millennium ago around the Mediterranean. She shared her
research with Albert, who found it equally exciting. Combined with
other Eastern Woodlands traditions—like nose-to-tail butchery
techniques, meats from wild game, unique approaches to fermented
foods, and the use of rare varieties of heirloom vegetables, fruits,
and spices—the crops could lay the foundations for an unprecedented
historic cuisine.

Barton says fully relaunching the cuisine will take time. As with
other rare native foods, “the biggest problem you face with
something like this is sourcing [ingredients].”

For instance, while pitseed goosefoot—sometimes called
lambsquarters, or pigweed—produces broccoli-like flowers and
quinoa-esque seeds, you won’t find it at farmers’ markets.
“You’re having to track down the seeds, establish demand, convince
farmers to grow these plants that haven’t been grown for food in
centuries—and all of that’s going on at more-or-less the same
time,” says Barton.

To make it happen, Albert and Barton are developing partnerships with
local Native American farmers and chefs, and organizations such as the
Cherokee Nation Seed Bank, Pawnee Seed Preservation Project, and Sean
Sherman’s North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems
program. Barton is talking with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
about founding a specialty farming collective. The work is continuing
through the pandemic, and the chefs are confident it will eventually
yield a restaurant.

“The response to Native American items on the menu at Duet has been
incredible,” says Albert. “Most people have never seen or
experienced anything like this. And it’s really encouraging,
because, once they’ve had a taste, they typically want more.”

Albert and Barton plan to use events like Duet’s Native American
Heritage Month dinners to prime the waters for, and continue telling
the story of, their ancestral Eastern Woodlands cuisine.

“Native dishes always come with a story,” says Albert. At Duet,
she trains servers to teach patrons about ingredients and traditional
uses. For instance, an appetizer of smoked trout and _manoomin_
fritters (made with indigenous wild rice) topped with cranberry relish
and finished with a drizzle of charred scallion vinaigrette is
prefaced by an explanation.

“Manoomin, which literally translates to ‘good berry or grain,’
is the word Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region use for wild
rice,” says Albert. The long, dark brown to black pseudo-grain has
been used for upward of 12,000 years. It’s sourced from tribal
agricultural cooperative Red Lake Nation Foods.

Barton hopes to partner with Albert to expand the approach at an
Eastern Woodlands-themed restaurant. She envisions prix fixe meals
that are both educational and reminiscent of a small ceremony.

“On one hand, it’s about recalling the symbiotic relationship we
once had with the land, plants, and animals that sustain us,” and
trying to replicate that in the context of a modern restaurant, says
Barton. On the other, “we want to teach people about these
incredible traditions and foodways.”

The meals will help tell the story of one of North America’s oldest
regional cuisines—and transport eaters deep into the past, to 1492
and beyond. As Cherokee, the women say such meals offer a way to
celebrate, affirm, and change perceptions around the ingenuity of
their ancestors.

_Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink. _
 

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