Decolonizing Native Food

This is a new and hopefully growing digital-teaching platform called America’s NativeFoodTrail.org.

The purpose of this research project is to create a new digital asset to help reawaken our Indigenous people and the public to Indigenous culinary traditions and sustainable practices by Native American Indians in the United States.

Reaching into the four directions, this project will map out those contributing to our awareness of Indigenous pre-contact diets and post frybread era. The final result will include:

• America’s Native Chefs
• Native Food Authors
• Indigenous Restaurants
• Native Food Films
• Native Cook Book Stores

Is it possible to reconnect our Native people to their Native foodways and can this reconnection help heal? Could promoting traditional Native diets help turn American’s declining health around?

Contemporary health issues facing American Indians include higher rates of drug abuse, alcoholism, obesity, diabetes, cancer, poverty and malnutrition that compound post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, historical trauma, suicide and genocide.

NativeFoodTrail.org can help chefs like Sean Sherman, founder of The Sioux Chef and author of The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen draw attention to a “long-forgotten Native culinary tradition”.

Other native restaurants will include: cafegozhoo.com; owamni.com; makamham.com/cafeohlone; and wahpepahskitchen.com.

NativeFoodTrail.org will highlight award-winning documentaries like “Return: Native American Women Reclaim Foodways for Health and Spirit”. In this film, filmmaker Karen Cantor draws attention to the fact that American Indians have trouble tolerating most foods sold in commercial grocery stores, that “Over 15% of Indigenous Americans have type-2 diabetes”; and Native Americans’ lives are cut short due to declining health and a lack of access to their own foods.

​"Mapping America’s Native Food Trail is also a decolonizing way to create new possibilities to help reverse American Indian’s health conditions by empowering Native people as they struggle to survive assimilation and reclaim our ancestral foodways," shared student René Locklear White (Lumbee) who received the fellowship from her tribal university to research and create this project. 

"I believe food is medicine and I believe one way to help decrease health disparities is through reconnecting our Indigenous people to our Native 'First Foods'," added René.

Background, Student Research Project

René Locklear White (Lumbee chef photo right) is a recipient of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) Summer 2022 Pembroke Undergraduate Research and Creativity (PURC) fellowship. Her winning proposal is to map out America's Native Food Trail. Her friend Aaron Carapella and map-maker volunteered to help her.

The PURC Center at UNCP stimulates, supports and promotes inquiry, discovery and creativity in scholarship and the arts through mentored research experiences with faculty and other regional, national and international scholars and professionals.

René's mentor is UNCP's American Indian Studies Professor Dr. Jane M. Haladay. The PURC Center facilitates and coordinates preparation in research skills necessary for professional fields and graduate study.

The Center is designated to serve as a clearinghouse for undergraduate research and creativity opportunities on and off campus. For more information about PURC, visit or call 910-521-6841 or email purc@uncp.edu.

From Sunchokes to Frybread

The Sunchoke or Jerusalem Artichoke is one of the oldest known foods in North America and an amazingly healthy, eatable tuber-root. Click here for an interesting article by Chris Anderson (Cherokee).

​Are Sunchokes (Jerusalem Artichokes) suitable food for diabetics? Carol Bowman-Williams, a consumer information specialist for Frieda Caplan's Sunchokes, said the company's promotion of the vegetable as an excellent food for diabetics is supported by medical literature and a consulting doctor's advice. (Source: Washington Post)

Help Map Out America's NativeFoodTrail.org by emailing NativeFoodTrail@gmail.com or visiting Facebook and share with us what you know.