更多美洲原住民厨师正在开设餐厅——考虑到子孙后代和可持续发展

(CNN)Crystal Wahpepah has made it her mission to share her Indigenous community's rarely seen foods with the world.

Wahpepah, who is Kickapoo and Sac and Fox, recently opened Wahpepah's Kitchen, the newest Indigenous restaurant in Oakland, California -- and likely the newest in the country.

"When I was around 6 or 7 years old, I would go pick berries and I would actually see different berries but the kinds you wouldn't see when you're being raised in urban areas," Wahpepah told CNN, adding that she grew up in a family that made traditional and ceremonial Native foods. "That's when I put two and two together. We don't see our foods."

Wahpepah knew early that she wanted to open a restaurant, but she needed to figure out a way to present ceremonial foods to the public. She traveled to Oklahoma and asked her elders how to market these traditional foods, and she started catering 12 years ago -- which is when she noticed the lack of Native chefs or restaurants. She developed her brand at La Cocina, a San Francisco organization that offers opportunities for working-class women entrepreneurs, and soon after she was preparing food for Silicon Valley tech giants -- though she noticed most people were still unfamiliar with Native foods.

After a decade of catering and research, Wahpepah has opened her brick-and-mortar restaurant. The menu boasts bison blueberry sausage with blue corn and huckleberry, Kickapoo chili, three sisters salad and chia berry pudding. And she is not alone.

Other Native-owned restaurants -- and restaurants serving Native-inspired foods -- are amongst those that have opened this year. Sean Sherman opened Owamni in Minneapolis, Loretta Barrett Oden started Thirty Nine Restaurant at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, and Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino are planning to reopen Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley, California.

Native American eateries still remain relatively rare due to challenges linked to a history of trauma and colonization, as pointed out by Sherman and Wahpepah. But it's important for Indigenous chefs to share their cultural traditions where they can.

"This is something that needs to be represented for our next generation," Wahpepah said.

Why are there so few Native restaurants?

Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef, began The Sioux Chef as an Indigenous food education business and catering company. Sherman, who started cooking at a young age, said he quickly noticed a complete absence of Indigenous foods in the mainstream, a dearth of recipes without European influences, and a lack of restaurants serving foods of the land they are on.

Today, there are 574 federally recognized tribes across the US. At the start of the 19th century, about 80% of the landmass that makes up the US was under Native control, but by the end of the century, that number had dwindled to just 2%, Sherman noted in a 2020 TED Talk. Beyond losing land, Native people lost their Indigenous education -- such as how to live sustainably, how to fish and hunt, and how to identify plants.

Native children were sent to boarding schools, so they could assimilate into White society. That stripped them of previous generations' knowledge and forced them to learn nontraditional skills and speak different languages, with many subjected to physical and mental abuse.

Native Americans did not become US citizens until 1924. Various tribes were relocated or dismantled over the course of the late 1940s into the early '60s.

Because of this traumatic history, according to Sherman, many Native Americans are not fully aware of their culinary traditions and are unfamiliar with many sustainable practices. The "invisibility that has been placed over us," as well as continuing segregation, has made it difficult for many Indigenous chefs to receive the support -- and money -- to open up restaurants or shops, he told CNN.

"In Manhattan, you can go out for anything. If you want Peruvian food, if you want northern Japanese food, you can pick it, but you can't get the food of where you actually are," Sherman said.

"We felt it was really super necessary and important to showcase that there is a true food of North America and that there is Indigenous culinary history here, and it doesn't start with European history, but it starts with Indigenous histories."

Sherman said a lot of Indigenous chefs who came from reservations and work in restaurants started at the very bottom -- since a lot of economic resources were stolen from their ancestors. Because land and natural resources were taken away from many tribes, Sherman said that there is little ancestral wealth or land to help with business development. For many Indigenous chefs, he said it's a huge struggle to come up with necessary funding to open a restaurant, which can cost upwards of $100,000 just to get started.

Marketing Native American cuisine to the general public is also a challenge, according to Wahpepah. It took her almost two years to get the space for Wahpepah's Kitchen, and she acknowledges there is an added risk of opening up a Native restaurant serving food that most people know little about -- and is difficult to define.

For Loretta Barrett Oden, a Potawatomi chef behind Thirty Nine Restaurant, which opened in September, marketing has been not as large a problem as differentiating between different Native cuisines "because our food systems overall have been so disrupted." She noted if she called her food "Potawatomi fare" while Sherman called his "Lakota fare," most people would not understand these distinctions.

"There's a very distinct difference between Italian food and French food and German food, and we don't have that luxury here in the United States because people have been moved around so much and we don't have distinct states of Indianness," she said.

Previous tribal relocations significantly impacted these recipes, which were often passed down orally. There were no Native American cookbooks written by Native chefs until recently, and most Native traditions were recorded by White people, the chefs said. The long-lasting stigma associated with following Indigenous traditions further separated people from their culture, and the commodification of foods has contributed to health problems in Native communities, according to the chefs.

Through The Sioux Chef, Sherman, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is working with nonprofits to raise money and connect chefs with others in the industry. He's also educating them on financial terms, and how to speak to banks. But Sherman said that for many chefs, they're "starting from scratch."

The future of Indigenous restaurants and foodways

Indigenous chefs in different parts of the country are finding different ways to highlight their food traditions.

Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone) opened Cafe Ohlone as part of cultural institution mak-'amham in 2018 to honor the legacy of the Ohlone, Indigenous people of California's Central Coast. Much of the menu is sourced from the San Francisco Bay and the surrounding area. Dishes range from bay laurel crispy duck breast to venison and gathered mushroom stew to dandelion soup with duck fat and Indian potatoes.

But Medina and Trevino did not open the restaurant -- first located in the back of a bookstore -- for innovative dining.

Medina noted they felt "a beautiful responsibility" to their ancestors to carry on their culinary traditions so future generations would "have access to culture and also are able to grow up culturally empowered so they can be those cultural leaders."

Manageable rent and widespread community support -- the latter of which has helped put money into Ohlone cultural programs -- helped them achieve their mission, Medina said. Though they closed their first location a few days before Covid-19 mandates went into place, they continued offering 12-course Sunday Suppers for pickup and curated dinner boxes, while also conducting virtual language and cooking classes. They are gearing up to open a location at the University of California, Berkeley early next year.

"When we opened up Cafe Ohlone, we made this intentional effort in fact not to market it. We don't want to commodify these foods, we want to make sure that they're presented in very respectful and very dignified ways that are that are going to lead to education and awareness for those who aren't Ohlone, but... we don't want to go out there and market things that are very personal to us," Medina said.

Oden had a similar story. She closed her previous restaurant Corn Dance Cafe after 10 years to move to Oklahoma and be with family. After focusing on Emmy award-winning series "Seasoned with Spirit" for a few years, she took the opportunity to share the culinary traditions of the state's 39 recognized tribes at Thirty Nine Restaurant.

Oden sources ingredients for the new restaurant from across the Americas, from Nunavut in northern Canada to Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile and Argentina. She joked that she will never run out of ingredients to use on her "modernized Indigenous menu," which features dishes like white bean hummus, hominy stew, bison burgers and turkey cutlets with a cranberry gastrique.

"To be able to tell the stories and to talk about this food and to really speak to the health issues, the creativity of our food ways, how our foods traveled and came back to us, how we're still here, (it shows) we're still here, we're not a relic in a museum," she said.

Out in Florida, the restaurant Ulele celebrates the ingredients from Florida waters and land once home to Native tribes. Although not Native American himself, owner Richard Gonzmart said he received the blessings of multiple members of the Seminole tribe, who gave him approval to erect a statue of the 16th-century Tocobaga princess Ulele.

Ulele's menu features dishes like alligator hush puppies, Tocobaga tuna, freshwater catfish with root vegetable succotash and flourless chocolate torte. This menu continues evolving to become more reminiscent of the dishes that Native populations in Florida ate hundreds of years ago.

"My goal is to educate those that visit this restaurant and understand the people that lived here, how they lived, how they worked and how they respected Mother Earth," Gonzmart told CNN.

Sherman at his new restaurant Owamni, which opened in June, takes a "decolonized approach" to his menu, avoiding dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, chicken, pork and other ingredients that were not originally from North America. Sherman also prioritizes purchasing directly from Indigenous food producers, leading to dishes such as bison tartare, preserved rabbit with fermented blueberry and corn sandwiches called choginyapi.

"We look at the world around us today through an Indigenous perspective and try to find out what is our relationship with these plants that grow around us today as our indigenous ancestors did," Sherman said. "Is it edible, medicinal, can you craft with it, like what is the purpose, what is our relationship?"

"Indigenous peoples everywhere had figured out how to survive sustainably utilizing the world around them. That's the biggest lesson."

For Lois Ellen Frank, a James Beard Award-winning chef with Kiowa heritage and co-founder of catering company Red Mesa Cuisine, owning a brick-and-mortar restaurant was not the way she wanted to showcase Native American culinary traditions. Frank did not want to be constrained by a set menu that would lead to supply chain issues and instead wanted to work in Native communities with doctors, health educators and leaders in sustainability.

Frank is a proponent of "re-Indigenizing" instead of "decolonizing," noting how the US can never completely decolonize because many European foods have become essential components of modern Indigenous diets. If a dish needs a squirt of lemon or a touch of flour, she'll add those ingredients. She will use, for example, watermelon in her recipes since watermelon is a large part of many ceremonies, even if it came over via Europe.

It's just one approach of many to share Native traditions with the country while working toward sustainable practices and connecting Native populations more with their cultures.

For Wahpepah, it's opening a restaurant to show "how beautiful those foods are." And for Frank, it's catering and educating during a period when people are more willing to hear these stories.

"History is like a bicycle wheel. In the center is a historical event, but there are tons of spokes on that wheel that get to the same historic event, altering perspectives and differing ways of doing it," Frank said, noting that she doesn't know if there's a "right" or "wrong" way to educate others about Indigenous cuisine.

"I think there are just different ways, and that's a beautiful thing."

更多美洲原住民厨师正在开设餐厅——考虑到子孙后代和可持续发展

(CNN)Crystal Wahpepah 的使命是与世界分享她的土著社区罕见的食物。

Wahpepah 是 Kickapoo 和 Sac and Fox，最近在加利福尼亚州奥克兰开设了 Wahpepah's Kitchen，这是最新的土著餐厅，而且可能是该国最新的餐厅。

“当我大约 6 或 7 岁时，我会去采摘浆果，我实际上会看到不同的浆果，但是当你在城市地区长大时，你不会看到那种浆果，”Wahepah 告诉 CNN，并补充说她长大了在一个制作传统和礼仪本土食物的家庭中。 “那是我把两个和两个放在一起的时候。我们看不到我们的食物。”

Wahpepah 很早就知道她想开一家餐厅，但她需要想办法向公众展示礼仪食品。她前往俄克拉荷马州，问她的长辈如何推销这些传统食品，她 12 年前开始提供餐饮服务——那时她注意到缺乏本土厨师或餐馆。她在旧金山的 La Cocina 组织开发了自己的品牌，该组织为工薪阶层的女企业家提供机会，不久之后她就为硅谷科技巨头准备食物——尽管她注意到大多数人仍然不熟悉本土食物。

经过十年的餐饮和研究，Wahpepah 开设了她的实体餐厅。菜单包括野牛蓝莓香肠配蓝玉米和越橘、Kickapoo 辣椒、三姐妹沙拉和奇异果布丁。她并不孤单。

其他原住民拥有的餐厅——以及供应原住民风味食物的餐厅——都在今年开业的餐厅中。 Sean Sherman 在明尼阿波利斯开设了 Owamni，Loretta Barrett Oden 在俄克拉荷马城的 First American Museum 开设了 Thirty9 餐厅，Vincent Medina 和 Louis Trevino 计划在加州伯克利重新开设 Cafe Ohlone。

正如 Sherman 和 Wahpepah 所指出的那样，由于与创伤和殖民历史相关的挑战，美洲原住民餐馆仍然相对较少。但对于土著厨师来说，尽可能分享他们的文化传统很重要。

“这是我们下一代需要代表的东西，”Wahpepah 说。

为什么原居民的餐厅这么少？

奥格拉拉·拉科塔 (Oglala Lakota) 厨师肖恩·谢尔曼 (Sean Sherman) 创办了 The Sioux Chef，最初是一家本土食品教育企业和餐饮公司。 Sherman 很小就开始做饭，他说他很快注意到主流中完全没有土着食物，缺乏不受欧洲影响的食谱，并且缺乏供应他们所在土地的食物的餐馆。

今天，美国有 574 个联邦承认的部落。谢尔曼在 2020 年的 TED 演讲中指出，在 19 世纪初，构成美国的大约 80% 的陆地都在土著人的控制之下，但到本世纪末，这一数字已减少到仅 2%。除了失去土地之外，土著人还失去了他们的土著教育——例如如何可持续地生活、如何捕鱼和狩猎以及如何识别植物。

土著儿童被送到寄宿学校，这样他们就可以融入白人社会。这剥夺了他们前几代人的知识，迫使他们学习非传统技能并说不同的语言，许多人遭受身心虐待。

美洲原住民直到 1924 年才成为美国公民。在 1940 年代末到 60 年代初的过程中，各种部落被重新安置或拆除。

Sherman 表示，由于这段痛苦的历史，许多美洲原住民并不完全了解他们的烹饪传统，也不熟悉许多可持续的做法。他告诉美国有线电视新闻网，“我们一直处于隐形状态”以及持续的隔离使许多土著厨师难以获得支持和资金来开设餐馆或商店。

“在曼哈顿，你可以出去吃任何东西。如果你想要秘鲁食物，如果你想要日本北部食物，你可以选择它，但你无法得到你所在的地方的食物，”谢尔曼说。

“我们觉得展示北美有真正的食物和这里有土著烹饪历史真的非常必要和重要，它不是从欧洲历史开始，而是从土著历史开始。”

谢尔曼说，许多来自预订和在餐馆工作的土著厨师都是从最底层开始的——因为很多经济资源是从他们的祖先那里偷来的。由于许多部落的土地和自然资源被夺走，谢尔曼说，几乎没有祖传的财富或土地可以帮助企业发展。对于许多原住民厨师来说，他说找到必要的资金来开一家餐厅是一项艰巨的任务，开办餐厅的成本可能高达 100,000 美元。

Wahpepah 表示，向公众推销美洲原住民美食也是一项挑战。她花了将近两年的时间才获得了 Wahpepah's Kitchen 的空间，她承认开设一家供应大多数人知之甚少且难以定义的 Native 餐厅的餐厅的风险更大。

对于 9 月开业的三十九餐厅背后的 Potawatomi 厨师洛雷塔·巴雷特·奥登 (Loretta Barrett Oden) 来说，营销问题并不像区分不同本土美食那么大，“因为我们的食物系统整体已经被破坏了。”她指出，如果她称她的食物为“Potawatomi 美食”而谢尔曼称其为“Lakota 美食”，那么大多数人将无法理解这些区别。

“意大利菜、法国菜和德国菜之间有非常明显的区别，我们在美国没有那种奢侈，因为人们经常搬家，而我们没有明显的印第安人状态，”她说。说过。

以前的部落搬迁对这些经常口头流传的食谱产生了重大影响。厨师们说，直到最近，还没有土著厨师写的美洲土著食谱，而且大多数土著传统都是由白人记录的。厨师们表示，与遵循土著传统相关的长期污名进一步使人们与他们的文化分离，而食品的商品化也导致了土著社区的健康问题。

在南达科他州 Pine Ridge Reservation 长大的 Sherman 通过 The Sioux Chef 与非营利组织合作筹集资金并将厨师与业内其他人联系起来。他还在财务方面教育他们，以及如何与银行交谈。但谢尔曼说，对于许多厨师来说，他们是“白手起家”。

原住民餐厅和餐饮的未来

该国不同地区的土著厨师正在寻找不同的方式来突出他们的饮食传统。

Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) 和 Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone) 于 2018 年作为文化机构 mak-'amham 的一部分开设了 Cafe Ohlone，以纪念加州中部海岸土著人 Ohlone 的遗产。大部分菜单来自旧金山湾和周边地区。菜肴范围从月桂香脆鸭胸肉到鹿肉和蘑菇炖肉，再到鸭油和印度土豆蒲公英汤。

但麦地那和特雷维诺并没有开设餐厅——最初位于书店的后面——是为了创新餐饮。

麦地那指出，他们对祖先感到“一种美好的责任”，继承他们的烹饪传统，这样子孙后代将“有机会接触文化，也能够在文化上成长，从而成为那些文化领袖。”

梅迪纳说，可控的租金和广泛的社区支持——后者帮助将资金投入 Ohlone 文化项目——帮助他们实现了使命。尽管他们在 Covid-19 指令生效前几天关闭了他们的第一个地点，但他们继续提供 12 道菜的周日晚餐，供取货和精选晚餐盒，同时还开设虚拟语言和烹饪课程。他们正准备明年初在加州大学伯克利分校开设一个分校。

“当我们开设 Cafe Ohlone 时，我们故意做出这种努力实际上不是为了推销它。我们不想将这些食物商品化，我们想确保它们以非常尊重和非常有尊严的方式呈现将为那些不是 Ohlone 的人带来教育和意识，但是……我们不想出去推销对我们来说非常私人的东西，”梅迪纳说。

奥登也有类似的故事。 10 年后，她关闭了之前的餐厅 Corn Dance Cafe，搬到俄克拉荷马州与家人团聚。在专注于艾美奖获奖系列“Seasoned with Spirit”几年后，她借此机会在三十九餐厅分享了该州 39 个公认部落的烹饪传统。

Oden 从美洲各地采购新餐厅的食材，从加拿大北部的努纳武特到智利南部和阿根廷的火地岛。她开玩笑说，她的“现代化土著菜单”上的食材永远不会用完，其中包括白豆鹰嘴豆泥、炖玉米粥、野牛汉堡和带有蔓越莓胃的火鸡排等菜肴。

“能够讲故事，谈论这种食物，真正谈论健康问题，我们饮食方式的创造力，我们的食物如何旅行并回到我们身边，我们如何仍然在这里，（它显示）我们还在这里，我们不是博物馆里的遗物，”她说。

在佛罗里达州，Ulele 餐厅以佛罗里达州水域和曾经是土著部落家园的土地的食材为特色。尽管他本人不是美洲原住民，但所有者理查德·冈兹马特 (Richard Gonzmart) 表示，他得到了塞米诺尔部落多名成员的祝福，他们同意他竖立一座 16 世纪托科巴加公主尤莱勒 (Tocobaga) 的雕像。

Ulele 的菜单包括鳄鱼皮幼犬、Tocobaga 金枪鱼、淡水鲶鱼配根茎类蔬菜多糖和无面粉巧克力蛋糕等菜肴。这份菜单不断演变，让人想起数百年前佛罗里达州土著居民吃过的菜肴。

“我的目​​标是教育那些光顾这家餐厅的人，了解住在这里的人，他们的生活方式、工作方式以及他们如何尊重地球母亲，”冈兹马特告诉 CNN。

Sherman 在他的新餐厅 Owamni 于 6 月开业，他的菜单采用“非殖民化方法”，避免使用乳制品、小麦粉、蔗糖、牛肉、鸡肉、猪肉和其他并非来自北美的食材。 Sherman 还优先直接从土著食品生产商那里采购，例如野牛鞑靼、蓝莓腌制兔肉和称为 choginyapi 的玉米三明治。

“我们今天从土著的角度看待我们周围的世界，并试图找出我们与今天在我们周围生长的这些植物的关系，就像我们的土著祖先所做的那样，”谢尔曼说。 “可食，可药用，能不能用它炼制，像是有什么目的，我们是什么关系？”

“各地的土著人民已经想出了如何利用周围的世界可持续地生存。这是最大的教训。”

对于拥有 Kiowa 传统的詹姆斯比尔德获奖厨师和餐饮公司 Red Mesa Cuisine 的联合创始人 Lois Ellen Frank 来说，拥有一家实体餐厅并不是她想要展示美洲原住民烹饪传统的方式。弗兰克不想受到会导致供应链问题的固定菜单的限制，而是想在土著社区与医生、健康教育者和可持续发展领导者一起工作。

弗兰克是“重新本土化”而不是“非殖民化”的支持者，他指出美国永远不可能完全非殖民化，因为许多欧洲食品已成为现代原住民饮食的重要组成部分。如果一道菜需要一点柠檬或少许面粉，她会添加这些成分。例如，她会在她的食谱中使用西瓜，因为西瓜是许多仪式的重要组成部分，即使它是通过欧洲传来的。

这只是与国家分享土著传统，同时努力实现可持续实践并将土著人口与他们的文化更多地联系起来的许多方法之一。

对于 Wahpepah 来说，它正在开设一家餐厅，以展示“这些食物有多美”。对于弗兰克来说，这是在人们更愿意听到这些故事的时期提供餐饮和教育。

“历史就像一个自行车车轮。在中心是一个历史事件，但是那个车轮上有很多辐条可以到达同一个历史事件，改变视角和不同的方式，”弗兰克说，并指出她没有不知道是否有“正确”或“错误”的方式来教育他人有关土着美食的知识。

“我认为只有不同的方式，这是一件美丽的事情。”