Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History by Michael D. Wise (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History by Michael D. Wise
• Andrew H. Fisher

Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History. By Michael D. Wise. Food and Foodways. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2023. Pp. x, 200. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-68226- 238-2.)

Any trip to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., should include a meal at Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe, which offers a living testament to the history explored in Michael D. Wise’s new book Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History. Voted the best cafe in D.C., among other accolades, it features Indigenous dishes from the Great Plains, Mesoamerica, the Northern Woodlands, the Northwest Coast, and South America that are designed to educate visitors about the traditional cuisines and culinary practices of the Western Hemisphere’s diverse Native cultures. Many of these foods and foodways have survived centuries of settler colonialism, yet until recently Mitsitam was one of the few restaurants in the country where the public could readily sample them. As Wise suggests, our general ignorance of Indigenous cuisine reflects “a logic of erasure and replacement that seeks to confine Native lives in the past in order to legitimize the dispossession of Native land and labor in the present” (p. 7). [End Page 599] Native Foods challenges this eliminatory logic by refuting four intertwined colonialist myths: namely, that American Indians “did not practice agriculture,” that they lived mainly by hunting, that they “were usually hungry as a result,” and that persistent privation made them indifferent to flavor or cuisine (p. 9).

To make his case, Wise employs five case studies that trace the progress of American settler colonialism across the continent and through four centuries of history. Predictably, chapter 1 locates the roots of settler discourse concerning Native agriculture in the contest for control of New England during the seventeenth century. Chapters 2 and 3 mainly detail the consequences of this logic for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and the Cherokee Nation, respectively, but also delve into the ways food production shaped intercultural diplomacy, gender roles, and the landscapes of the Eastern Woodlands. Chapter 4 carries the story out onto the Great Plains, using the Blackfeet Reservation to explore how western Native nations adapted to wrenching changes wrought by federal Indian policy and ecological imperialism. In each section, Wise strives to emphasize Indigenous agency and to turn the tables on settler colonial narratives of Indian food insecurity and culinary incompetence, but only in chapter 5 does Native activism form the analytical centerpiece. Wise’s brief coverage of the fight over federal commodity foods and food stamps in the 1970s nicely whets our appetite for more discussion of tribal efforts to achieve food sovereignty. Like the government policies that have undermined Indigenous self-sufficiency, however, this slender volume promises more than it can effectively deliver in 154 pages of text.

That said, Wise provides an enticing taste of the emerging field of Indigenous food history. The most satisfying portions of his analysis focus not on colonial-ist discourse regarding Native land and labor—which has been thoroughly plumbed by scholars such as Francis Jennings, Daniel H. Usner Jr., and Alexandra Harmon—but on the environmental history of Indigenous agriculture and agroforestry. Although some of that ground has also been covered by the likes of Alfred W. Crosby and William Cronon, Wise’s interdisciplinary approach teases fresh insights from current scientific studies of agronomy and interviews with Native chefs, farmers, and seed savers. “As the expansion of colonial capitalism over the last two centuries drives our planet toward environmental exhaustion,” he concludes, “all would do well to learn from the history of Native foods—not in order to romanticize a lost past but in order to appreciate the possibility for humanity’s successful adaptation to a future marked with inexorable changes in the geographies of our resources, climates, and structures of power” (p. 152). The depth of Indigenous ecological knowledge and the resilience of Native foodways are subjects in need of further study, and suggestive works like this one should encourage historians to dig in.

Andrew H. Fisher William...