Wild rice is a native traditional cree bannock recipe of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and some areas of North Dakota. Indigenous cuisine of the Americas includes all cuisines and food practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In other cases, documents from the early periods of Indigenous American contact with European, African, and Asian peoples have allowed the recovery and revitalization of Indigenous food practices that had formerly passed out of popularity. Indigenous cuisine of the Americas uses of domesticated and wild native ingredients.
In traditional tribal societies, the gathering of shellfish, wild plants, berries and seeds is often done by women. Bison have traditionally been an important source of food for the Plains Indians in the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Recipes were initially passed down through oral tradition. Over a period of hundreds of years, some tribes migrated into different climate zones, so by the time European settlers recorded these recipes the cuisine had probably adapted to use local ingredients. For the American sense of the term, see Cuisine of the Southern United States. Yellowknife, the capital and only “large community”. In the eastern Canadian Arctic, Inuit consume a diet of foods that are fished, hunted, and gathered locally.
The cultural value attached to certain game species, and certain parts, varies. For example, in the James Bay region, a 1982 study found that beluga whale meat was principally used as dog food, whereas the blubber, or muktuk was a “valued delicacy”. In 2017, the Government of the Northwest Territories committed to using country foods in the soon-to-open Stanton Territorial Hospital, despite the challenges of obtaining, inspecting, and preparing sufficient quantities of wild game and plants. A 19th-century illustration, “Sugar-Making Among the Indians in the North”. Maple syrup is another essential food staple of the Eastern Woodlands peoples. Tree sap is collected from sugar maple trees during the beginning of springtime when the nights are still cold.
Venison has always been an important meat staple, due to the abundance of white-tailed deer in the area. Livestock, adopted from Europeans, in the form of hogs and cattle, are also kept. One traditional method of preparation is to cut the meat into thin slices then dry it, either over a slow fire or in the hot sun, until it is hard and brittle. The animals that Great Plains Indians consumed, like bison, deer, and antelope, were grazing animals.
Due to this, they were high in omega-3 fatty acids, an essential acid that many diets lack. The edible rhizomes were gathered and could be roasted in the embers of a fire, or dried, ground and the meal pressed into a cake which “served well as bread” as noted by Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In the Pacific Northwest, traditional diets include salmon and other fish, seafood, mushrooms, berries, and meats such as deer, duck, and rabbit. In contrast to the Easterners, the Northwestern peoples are traditionally hunter-gatherers, primarily.