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Across the United States, fry bread is hands-down the most ubiquitous Native American food. For tribal communities, the crispy circle of pillowy deep-fried dough represents many seemingly contradictory concepts: love, comfort, celebration, community, survival, colonialism, oppression, tragedy. At best, the so-called Indian taco is a complicated symbol of Indigenous resilience passed down from one generation to the next. At worst, it’s a relic of cultural genocide, a contributor to marked health disparities, and a factor in the falsehood that Native culture is a monolith.
Fry bread is thought to have originated some 160 years ago as a result of the Long Walk, the 300-mile journey that thousands of Diné (Navajo) people endured after being forcefully relocated from their homelands to New Mexico’s Bosque Redondo Reservation. Hundreds died along the way, though others would starve once they arrived at the internment camp. In place of traditional Diné foods such as corn, beans, and squash, the government provided only sparse commodities like flour, salt, sugar, and lard. Through ingenuity and experimentation, fry bread was born as a means of survival.
What, then, do we make of fry bread today, during a time of undeniable Native reckoning and reclamation? For James Beard–winning chef Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota), revitalizing Indigenous foodways means honoring how his ancestors ate before European contact. As such, the decolonized fare at his Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni, is prepared without Eurocentric ingredients—think beef, chicken, pork, dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar—and instead using hyper-local ingredients like wild game, endemic plants, and heirloom produce. In other words, no fry bread.
