Indigenous Museum Cafes Embrace Tradition and Innovation | Eater
"Guided by trailblazing 82-year-old chef Loretta Barrett Oden — a Citizen Potawatomi Nation member and Emmy Award-winning chef who recently cooked for over 3,000 guests at the museum’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day event — the museum restaurant remains rooted in Indigenous food traditions. "My garden is where it all starts," Oden explains, and she uses its produce in recipes like her silken, flower-adorned butternut squash soup: "It’s about growing the ingredients, understanding the cycles of nature, and cooking with what the land provides." The restaurant, located within Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum, pays culinary homage to the state’s 39 distinct First American Nations; it opened in 2021, closed for reconceptualization in 2023, and is slated to reopen in early 2025. Its outdoor kitchen and expanded garden — tended by Native youth and supported by the Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust — include corn, beans, squash, and edible flowers and serve as a hands-on learning space about planting, harvesting, and traditional foods. The menu highlights high-protein and precolonial ingredients, avoiding pork and dairy in favor of bison, turkey, and wild greens, and aims to educate and nourish guests; playful items include the Prickerita (a prickly pear margarita) and Oden’s described "kick-ass buffalo chili," a bold, spicy bison stew, while a Thanksgiving-inspired plate of sautéed turkey breast with cornbread dressing and cranberry au jus has been particularly popular. Oden’s culinary advocacy extends beyond the restaurant: in 2023 she published the cookbook Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine, with approachable dishes like spicy sage popcorn and braised bison short ribs, and as a founding member of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance she champions food sovereignty and cultural preservation. Signature dishes that honor multigenerational wisdom include her Three Sisters sauté (corn, beans, and squash) and a pineapple, jicama, and avocado salad that blends teachings from two grandmothers — one who taught her to grow and cook Indigenous foods and another who instilled modern etiquette. On reclaiming and transforming difficult culinary legacies, she explains: "I have a puffy, fried bready-like thing, almost like a pita, that I do in a Lincoln Impinger oven, forced-air conveyor belt oven that is air-baked, and it puffs and has the same feel of fry bread. I call it my healthy, unfried bread. Fry bread was born out of hardship," she explains, "but we want to move forward by reclaiming the foods that truly sustained us." - Mary Ladd
