Wild rice is a native bannock recipe traditional food 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.
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.
Birch bark containers are used in the process of making maple syrup, maple cakes, maple sugar, and maple taffy. Southeastern Native American culture has formed the cornerstone of Southern cuisine from its origins through the present day. Though a less important staple, potatoes were also adopted from Native American cuisine and have been used in many ways similar to corn. Native Americans introduced the first non-Native American Southerners to many other vegetables still familiar on southern tables. Many fruits are available in this region. Muscadines, blackberries, raspberries, and many other wild berries were part of Southern Native Americans’ diet.