Starting with the obvious - potatoes and corn.
Native Americans were eating boiled potatoes and potatoes in stew (and maybe roasted or baked potatoes). There was no dairy to make mashed potatoes and no abundance of cooking oil to make fried potatoes. Everything else comes after colonization.
Americans were also eating flint corn and sweet corn (although it was much less sweet than modern sweet corn). Flour corn was mesoamerican and dent corn was made by colonizers. So you’d get corn in boiled and in stews and maybe roasted, and you’d get jonnycakes (although they wouldn’t be like modern jonnycakes), but most of the corn dishes we eat today are based off of mesoamerican cuisine (save for cornbread, which is probably inspired by Jonnycakes but is made with dent corn as well as wheat flour and chemical leavening).
So we have a lot of American Indian ingredients and even some dishes inspired by American Indian dishes, but nothing which is culturally distinct as American Indian food.
It's tough to maintain that continuity when writing is expensive or nonexistent, and the people who survived contact with Europeans were repeatedly forcibly resettled in different parts of the continent.
What does exist is inspiration from traditions and ingredients, and I think that certainly applies. Even if it might be foolish to pursue what constitutes an "authentic" Native American cuisine, it's probably worthwhile and a good idea to think about what we want from Native American cuisine, or where we want it to go, where Native Americans want it to go. If Native American chefs are experimenting and bringing something new, that's Native American cuisine.
Ingredients are a powerful thing, too. There is a lot of convergence between ecological conservation and researching and exploring Native American ingredients, in the sense that there are many forgotten and useful crops and food sources to be explored and maybe developed. Pawpaws are one example that's received attention, one of many possibilities. The promise there is increasing dietary and agricultural diversity, to say the least of improving our understanding of history and anthropology.
Yaupon is another interesting example in this regard. The scientific name for this plant reflects European American ignorance about it and its use, an ignorance that drastically affected assumptions about it until relatively recently. It's basically a weed, but one that could be an agricultural crop like tea or coffee, or -- to make a more direct comparison, being botanically closely related -- mate.
I guess at some level I don't disagree with you, but maybe see authenticity as a moot point at some level? I don't care what's "recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine" because that's often inaccurate, outdated, or unmeaningful anyway. Inspiration and knowledge from Native American foods of the past, however it's used in the present, seems like a win-win to me.
mixing up and confusing south-of-the-border indigenous culture with 'hispanic' and north-of-the-border indigenous culture as 'native american' probably doesn't help this much, dishes aside
I love Jonnycakes! I grew up on them though, which may be swaying my opinion.
This makes me curious. At what point does a culture start to to mature it's "cuisine"? Is it driven by commerce? Can family cooking alone drive cuisine forward?
> Wouldn't the same apply to Hawaii? Which it would be hard to argue they don't have ethnic cuisine.
Not to say the GP is right, but I was in Hawaii a few years ago and the native food wasn't especially common. IIRC, there were only a few places that served poi, which used to be the staple food, and I had to specially seek it out. Plate lunches were everywhere by comparison.
Hawaiians are different than North American Indians, since, IIRC, the Hawaiians remained independent until much more recently. It's plausible that more of their traditions survived into modern times where preservation of such traditions seems to be a higher priority.
(To the GP) Aren't Jonnycakes European?
And Al-pastor tacos are effectively Sharwarma kebabs introduced by Lebanese immigrants in the mid 20th century!
I will say that other oppressed groups have successfully integrated foods that came out of hardship into their cuisines - think matzah and components of Soul Food.
As well as being lacking in nutrition.
Most of what people ate prior to modernization was really, really gross by the standards of modern restaurants because decisions were driven by limited ingredients and limited fuel. Most of what anyone ate at that time was boiled and, outside of regions with easy access to spices, unseasoned. When the rest of the world was developing modern food cultures, American Indians were being subjugated and, later, forcibly assimilated by American colonizers. The only really good recent food invention from American Indian cultures has been fry bread which, while delicious, lacks something in sophistication. There are lots of good indigenous mesoamerican dishes but they’ve been assimilated into mainstream Mexican cuisine. No one thinks of chili verde as a “Native American food.”
Look at Wikipedia’s article “Indigenous cuisine of the Americas”. How many of this dishes under the North America subheading would you actually want to eat? Probably fry bread, maybe fish or meat jerky or pemmican, and definitely maple taffy.
Everything else is either an ingredient or not very good. I have tried Jonnycakes and they are a step down from cornbread. My mom talks about occasionally eating “mush” (acorn porridge, which would have been called t’epna by her grandparents) as a kid. She describes it as “pretty bad.” Everyone in her family far preferred the version of the dish that was invented in the 20th century, “Frito mush,” which is pretty much Frito pie but with soggy Fritos.
What you’re left with is modern attempts to make new dishes featuring the ingredients pre-assimilation American Indians were using. Mitsitam in DC is doing this, and I like their food (or, at least, liked - I haven’t been there in years and reviewers say it’s gone down hill). It’s stuff like “Indian tacos”, “seared boar”, and “salmon chowder.” The only thing there any Indians I know would eat day-to-day is Indian tacos, and I think there are literally no ingredients in those which are native to America except maybe some of the spices in the seasoning (they are regular Tex-mex tacos, with ground beef and the packets of seasoning, but made on fry bread instead of tortillas). I think this is probably the right way to go about doing American Indian cuisine, but it’s just not going to be recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine in the way that Italian and Chinese cuisines are. Instead, it’s going to look like traditional ingredients prepared with modern American and occasionally modern Mexican cooking techniques. Without knowledge of the history, that seems like it’s “inauthentic” or “westernized”, but really it’s all we’ve got. Well, that and frybread.