Native Foods

Book excerpt: "Native foods are ubiquitous in America, but they often go unrecognized and unidentified. So too do the countless farms, gardens, and other places created by Native American people to feed and nourish their families and communities over generations. Over the last five centuries of settler colonialism, this inconspicuousness of Native American food and agriculture has helped configure Americans' imaginations of food and agriculture in ways that require critical identification. Drawing attention to this issue, Native Foods brings to bear approaches from the fields of food studies and Indigenous studies to explore how biophysical patterns of settler-colonial land use have worked as narrative frames for structuring historical views of Native agriculture. Following the lead of Indigenous food sovereignty advocates and activists, the book emphasizes the presence and persistence of Native American cuisine and documents how Native foods and agricultural techniques were never "lost" but only obscured by the peregrinations of colonialism, capitalism, and various other historical transformations"--