Indigenous Foods of the Great Lakes Region

The U.P. is home to multiple tribal nations. In honor of Native American Heritage Month in November, we are offering a cooking class that celebrates traditional ingredients and honors the ingenuity of indigenous cultures to utilize ingredients introduced through colonization. The class will highlight the bounty of the Great Lakes region that native people have long appreciated, such as fish, wild rice, berries, and mushrooms. It will also cover foods that are products of the reservation system, such as fry bread, which both highlights the problems of colonization and is a testament to resilience. All these ingredients will come together for a delicious meal and demonstrate that Native American foodways are not snapshots of the past, but a vibrant, ever evolving, and thoroughly modern cuisine.