Btw, If anyone knows any pre-Columbian restaurants for Italian and Indian cuisines, let me know.
Yes and this nearly amorphous identity is a tragedy that needs unbundling. Scratch the surface and none of it makes sense for any single pre-colonial culture on the whole continent.
There are like 300 recognized distinct pre-colonial cultures here at the US federal level, most of which were grandfathered in before a cutoff for the reservation system and additional ones each requiring an act of Congress for recognition, even more at the state level, and even more vying for recognition as they are just noticing and regrouping after ages of separation, in a combination of forced separation or lineage dilution.
> There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food. Frybreads are a good example since they come directly from the reservation system and the typical ingredients provided by the government for cheap calories: flour, beans, oil, "cheese", and some form of meat, sugar, etc. Despite the common name, it's a shared culinary heritage for many tribes in the US.
At least this shared identity wasn't built over unmarked graves for children like elsewhere. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mas...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/world/canada/mass-graves-...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-grav...
Don't kid yourself; the American boarding schools for the Native Americans weren't much better than the Canadian ones, were they any better to begin with. In general, I'd be hard-pressed to declare Canada any better or worse in its treatment of indigenous peoples than the US was--they were both pretty appalling.
The real issue is that there's been very little widespread systematization of "traditional" indigenous cookery. We've started seeing that over the past few decades through the efforts of people like Lois Frank and many, many others, but it's a process.