How Indigenous chefs and farmers are restoring Native American cuisine in New Jersey

There aren’t many places to get indigenous food in New Jersey. You may even not know what Native American food is. A handful of local chefs and farmers are working to change that.

Leo Cordier ran away to home. 

After seven years in the foster care system, he left Colorado Springs at age 16 and drove to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he was born, to rejoin his Sicangu Lakota tribe. He brought gifts.

“Going through Nebraska, we’d see box turtles, and I’d get all those turtles and I’d put them in a box in the back of the car,” Cordier says. 

He parked at his great-grandmother’s house on the reservation and, overcome with the emotion of being home, he left the box of turtles in his car and walked around the neighborhood, cataloging what had changed and what hadn’t.

When he got back, his great-grandmother had already found the turtles — and was preparing turtle soup.

“Coming back home is very sacred and a common thing for Natives, because we’ve always been displaced or taken away by foster care or boarding schools,” said Cordier. “We have a saying: ‘We always come back.’ My great-grandmother was able to make me that turtle soup as my gift for returning.”

Cordier was reminded of this homecoming story while putting together a menu — turkey breaded with amaranth flour, bison chili, blue corn bread with wojapi and that turtle soup — for Indigenous People’s Day (Oct. 14) events he’ll service through his Indigenous food business, Buffalo Jump NYC.

“My people’s elders mention how they miss turtle soup, so that’s my secret surprise,” he says.

Buffalo Jump NYC is one of the only Indigenous food purveyors in the tri-state area, which is to say it’s one of the only in the U.S.: there are more NFL teams than restaurants serving Native American cuisine in this country.

The scarcity is due to financial obstacles for tribal members, the destruction of ecosystems and historic Indigenous foodways, and a general misunderstanding (or no understanding at all) of what Native American food is.

But a handful of Indigenous people in New Jersey and beyond are working to restore their cuisine in kitchens, classrooms, community centers and farms and elsewhere. The payoff of this work is the revitalization of centuries-old, truly local cooking and the improvement of Indigenous people’s lives. It’s also, these Indigenous food makers say, a recognition of a people long forgotten.

“We are the most invisible diaspora in the United States,” Cordier says. 

Chef Joe Rocchi, a Native foods educator in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and a member of the Pamunkey tribe, puts it this way: “Natives aren’t discriminated against because they’re Natives. They’re discriminated against because they don’t exist.”

What is Native American cuisine?

Rocchi recalls asking an instructor about Indigenous cuisine while studying at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. He was told there wasn’t one.

After training in the Marine Corps and earning his culinary degree, Rocchi spent a decade building a career in fine dining and opening several casinos in the Philadelphia area. But that original question — what did his ancestors eat? — kept gnawing at him.

“About 10 years in, I asked myself a question: Why can I speak on a niche pasta from the Puglia region of Italy and I’ve never set foot there, but if you ask me a question about Native American food culture, I didn’t have much to say. And I didn’t like the answer.”

He didn’t like the answer because he didn’t have one. So he turned to his mom. He didn’t like her answer — ’I don’t know, we ate chicken casserole?’ — either.

“If your Native American recipe starts with two cans of Campbell’s soup, that’s not Native American,” he says. 

Rocchi’s story is common among indigenous people, particularly here in the Northeast. The culinary history of any one family, clan or tribe was lost or obscured in the centuries of violence against Native people and mass relocation of tribes, often to environments with vastly different flora and fauna, from the time Europeans first set foot on American soil in the 1600s.

There are two wicked ironies therein: 1) That if one does happen to think of a Native American food item, it’s frybread, a result of Natives surviving on reservations by making do with measly government rations of flour and lard. And 2) Staple foods we associate with more heralded, European cuisine — tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, beans — originated in the Americas.

“You would not have pizza or pasta without us. You wouldn’t have French dishes or French sauces without Indigenous ingredients,” says Brooke Rodriguez, the Borikua Taino co-owner of Buffalo Jump NYC and founder of Grinding Stone Collective, which works to restore Indigenous foodways in New Jersey and the Northeast. “For [people] to not have that knowledge plays into some much colonialism and Indigenous erasure.”

The examples are endless.

“Ratatouille, you take away the basil you’ve got nothing but Native ingredients,” Cordier says.

“I found out barbecue, as we know it today, the roots of that started in Virginia. When the English traders got here, they saw what Native Americans were doing with smoking with hickory woods over an open hearth,” Rocchi says. 

Rocchi, unsatisfied with the answers he was getting about what actually is Indigenous food, did some internet sleuthing, eventually contacting local anthropologists and historians, who helped him discover the culinary history of not only his Pamunkey people, but tribes throughout the country. With a better understanding of Native food, he started to make Indigenous meals at select events (like an Indigenous dinner at Princeton Theological Seminary’s farm on Nov. 7), and switched careers into culinary education, so he can pass on this knowledge.

Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota Sioux chef and author who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, has become an authority on Indigenous cooking. His cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” and his Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni, both won James Beard Awards.

Sherman says his focus in cultivating the menu at Owamni was not to replicate what was done in the past, necessarily, but to follow Indigenous food traditions of eating local, native foods, prepared simply, but with culinary adaptations for a modern audience.

“I first just cut out colonial ingredients to showcase a lot of the diversity of food through these different cultures: dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken,” Sherman says. “We really try to feature regional foods by paying homage to the land we’re standing on and the tribes that were here.”

Though Owamni’s menus are thus local to Minnesota, it’s helpful to review them to get a sense of what types of meals modern Indigenous food looks like: bison picahna (chile crisp aioli, roasted tomato, pumpkin seed oil and cured duck yolk) and a smoked rack of elk (with pumpkin carrot purée and cranberry mint) along with plenty of local plant-forward dishes and a menu of teas all made from local herbs.

“I think we try to keep things really simple. Our food isn’t laced with lots of butter and cream, so it comes off really clean,” Sherman says. “A lot of plant diversity, protein diversity. We push a lot of crickets just to showcase protein diversity.”

To put a fine point on it, Indigenous cuisine is a wide variety of dishes made from locally sourced plants and animals that are native to the region in which they’re being served.

Sometimes, though, the foods native to a region are no longer there. Earlier this year, Rodriguez and Grinding Stone Collective held a bison harvest with about 100 people from the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Indian Nation in Mahwah.

“Largely, Eastern Indians are deer people, but they’re also bison people,” Rodriguez says, citing the historic existence of bison in the Northeast. “We skinned the animal and harvested it, and that meat was distributed among the people, and they’re still working on the hide.”

Rocchi recently provided an art show with Indigenous cooking to promote his platform of restoring food sovereignty to Native people. He offered braised bison short rib with wojapi-infused barbecue sauce, sumac dust and jicama slaw; sous-vide duck breast with butternut squash risotto; and a sweet corn parfait. He also made a colorful “three sisters” fettuccine dish with pasta made of squash, beans and corn, in homage to the Indigenous agricultural practice of planting those three crops in a symbiotic pattern that improves drought tolerance, deters pests and boosts soil health.

Millenia-old Native American ingenuity like that is evident in that dish. Providing a platform for that approach to food is what these food makers are trying to do, but it’s also what was almost lost in the last few centuries of violence against Indigenous people.

Why is there no Native American cuisine in New Jersey?

If you want the short answer it’s because Native people have been displaced throughout the country through the reservation system, they’ve battled environmental, financial and health issues, and access to agricultural and foraging grounds to get the native foods integral to their cuisine has effectively been eradicated. Colonization shattered Indigenous culture so thoroughly that only a few Native people have been able to piece together a culinary enterprise that is reflective of their history.

If you want the long story, ask Michaeline Picaro.

Picaro is a member of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, which encompasses Passaic and Sussex counties. She and Vincent Mann, chief of Turtle Clan of the Ramapough, started the 14-acre Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Sussex County in 2019.

The Ramapough are one of three state-recognized tribes in the state (along with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and the Powhatan Renape). Picaro, though, refers to the group of people in this region via their shared Algonquin dialect: Munsee. This group spanned most of New Jersey into Pennsylvania and New York. They were among the first Native people to encounter Europeans.

By the late 1800s, many of these Munsee-speaking Lenape people were relocated out of New Jersey — to New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Kansas and elsewhere. Today, there are more Lenape in Oklahoma and Wisconsin than in New Jersey. There are, at most, 5,000 Ramapough in New Jersey.

Those who stayed have faced hardship. The Ford Motor Co. turned a section of Ringwood into a Superfund site by dumping hazardous waste; housing for the Ramapough was built on that site even though it was never fully remediated, leading to high cancer rates and other adverse health outcomes. (The Record ran a five-part series on the dumping after a nearly yearlong investigation.)

Picaro says it’s just one example (of many) of why expecting Indigenous people to enter the food industry misses the point. They’re still fighting for survival, she says. The plight in Ringwood led her and Mann to consider how they could help, but they had few answers.

“Over the years, we’ve had notable people, congressmen and mayors, the [Department of Environmental Protection] … everybody’s been out here, but nothing happens. All the powerful people and all the movies, all the documentaries and newspaper articles … it gets silence,” Picaro says. “You figure what are you going to do other than win the lottery? Get a job? I have three jobs. Do you ask a dying people to get more jobs? OK, that makes a lot of sense. They have to help themselves out of a mess that was literally dumped on them?”

Picaro and Mann started the farm in hopes it would provide enough free food for the Ramapough people in need. They found a plot of land that had Munsee-Lenape artifacts on it: oyster shells and mortar and pestles. They still had to lease it, though. “That’s like generational trauma to know you have to pay full price, to know you have to ask your landlord what you can and cannot do on that land,” Picaro says.

She says she forewent a mortgage payment on her home in order to rent a tractor for a week. To irrigate the crops, they filled a tote with water from a hose, plugged the sprayer into their truck battery and watered the crops. “Indige-nuity,” Picaro says.

“This is what we did to get it moving in the right direction. So when you go back to that question of why isn’t there more organization in our tribe, well there’s a lot you have to give up in your daily sustainable life to do that extra thing you should be getting money for,” she says.

They were able to donate about 9,000 pounds of food in the first few years, but the last two years have been rough, with floods, other blight and an inability to secure labor. They have been awarded grants, however, to ensure more fruitful harvests in the future.

Imagine trying to make a cuisine without being able to understand how it’s described, or being unable to access the ingredients necessary to make it. Other cultures had relatively uninterrupted lines of communication and access to their homelands. Indigenous people didn’t, and that foundational food knowledge was lost in the centuries of relocation and separation from their tribal members.

So the question isn’t really why aren’t there more Indigenous restaurants, it’s how are there any at all?

How Indigenous people are restoring native food in New Jersey

It’s yet another irony that Indigenous people are the most relocated group in the country. Sometimes, though not often, that relocation is a positive.

Before launching Buffalo Jump NYC, Cordier worked at food halls on his reservation but was also an active participant in Indigenous protests. He was a member of the Red Warrior Camp, which organized direct-action nonviolent protests against pipeline builders at the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016.

After that experience, Cordier was given the option to fight another pipeline: the Pilgrim Pipeline in Mahwah in 2017. It was a less heated protest than Standing Rock — Cordier says he was “able to find his Zen” — and it was there he met Rodriguez, too. After working in a few New York City kitchens and making a few connections, Cordier started catering corporate and nonprofit events with Indigenous food. In just a few years, he was serving food at the first gathering of Indigenous people at Gracie Mansion in New York City in 2023.

Buffalo Jump NYC serves Indigenous food at the Queens Night Market every week, but also does special events in New Jersey and New York. The hope is to open a brick-and-mortar store next year. That’s a start to raising the profile of Indigenous food, but much work is being done to restore the foodways that will help foster more.

Rodriguez and Grinding Stone Collective do this, in part, through workshops, cooking demonstrations and events meant to teach folks about Indigenous food culture, food justice and climate change. They also operate an inter-tribal food pantry to get food from Native producers to Indigenous communities in need. And they’re turning plots of land into Native gardens for use by Indigenous chefs and communities. The group is currently planting 275 species with Sly Fox Den in Rhode Island and has similar plans for the Ramapough community in New Jersey.

Rodriguez says their efforts are rooted in education, reciprocity and action; for instance, they fed 2,000 people with poi, a native taro-based Hawaiian food, after the Maui fires. Intention matters, Rodriguez says, and it guides her group’s actions.

“I think more than anything, Indigenous food sovereignty is a collection of prayers over time,” she says. The guiding force behind starting the collective was the “larger history of not having access to traditional foods, bad health outcomes and not having access to historic hunting grounds due to colonization.”

Rocchi is also restoring foodways among Indigenous communities. He’s working with the Traditional Eastern Woodland Foodways Alliance (TEWFA) to achieve some audacious goals in the area; for instance, the group aims to accommodate every Indigenous person’s food needs in the lower mid-Atlantic region by 2040, with 80% of that coming from Indigenous food suppliers. 

Restoring those foodways is a way to restore the community, Rocchi says: “Through food you can change a lot of people.”

And through the North American Tradition Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS) program, Sean Sherman and the USDA are creating connections between Indigenous producers, chefs, tribal members and greater communities by building marketplaces for Indigenous food. In doing so, they also raise awareness of Indigenous food. They’ve also filmed a series of cooking demos from Indigenous chefs tailored to specific regions, including the Northeast. Sherman hopes he can bring an Indigenous market and food concept to the Northeast in the future.

Success looks different to all the people working in New Jersey and beyond, but it starts with ensuring that Indigenous people have control over where their food comes from and that they have enough of it. A greater emphasis on Indigenous food will likely lead to better agricultural processes in this country, and a greater appreciation among the general public for the foods native to the Americas.

But success also looks like an Indigenous restaurant on your town’s Main Street, Sherman says.

“We just want to see more normalization of Native foods,” he says. “We want the next generation of kids, when they go out to eat, are deciding if they want pizza or Chinese … or Native American. We just want to be on that list.”

Matt Cortina is a food writer for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.