Chef Freddie Bitsoie--Making A Pathway For Native Cuisines

Though Native American food is the oldest cuisine on the continent, it has only started showing up in glossy food magazines and the high-end restaurant scene in recent years.

Chef’s like Sean Sherman, of The Sioux Chef, approach Native cuisine through foraging traditional ingredients and bringing back the foods his Oglala Lakota ancestors may have eaten.

Chef Ben Jacobs is a tribal member of the Osage Nation and the co-founder of Tocabe. Their place is fast-casual Native American food with two locations in Denver.

There is not one Native Cuisine.

As the executive chef at the cafe in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, my guest Freddie Bitsoie gets that.

The museum’s cafe is called " Mitsitam," which means "Let's eat!" in the Native language of the Delaware and Piscataway peoples. The menu is crafted to enhance the museum experience by exposing guests to some of the indginous cuisines of the Americas, and to offer a chance to explore the history of native foods. But there are so many traditions.

Chef Freddie Bitsoie was a guest of the IU Bloomington Arts & Humanities Council as part of Indiana Remixed. He prepared a few recipes for the small crowd gathered in the basement cafe of the Wells Library on the IU campus, and is featured on this episode of Earth Eats.

Check out his reicpe for Three Bean Ragout with Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin.