Local foods have garnered much attention in recent years, but the concept is hardly new: indigenous peoples have always made the most of nature's gifts. Their menus were truly the "original local," celebrated here in sixty home-tested recipes paired with profiles of tribal activists, food researchers, families, and chefs.
A chapter on wild rice makes clear the crucial role manoomin plays in cultural and economic survival. A look at freshwater fish is concerned with shifts in climate and threats to water purity as it reveals the deep relationship between Ojibwe people and indigenous fish species such as Ginoozhii, the Muskie, Ogaa, the Walleye, and Adikamig, Whitefish. Health concerns have encouraged Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota cooks to return to, and revise, recipes for bison, venison, and wild game. Sections on vegetables and beans, herbs and tea, and maple and berries offer insight from a broad representation of regional tribes, including Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Mandan gardeners and harvesters.
The innovative recipes collected here--from Ramp Kimchi to Three Sisters Salsa, from Manoomin Lasagna to Venison Mole Chili--will inspire home cooks not only to make better use of the foods all around them but also to honor the storied heritage they represent.
Heid E. Erdrich, author of five books of poetry and coeditor of "Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community," teaches writing, performs her work broadly, and gives lectures on American Indian art, language, and literature.

The first posthumous survey of Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie’s paintings, which invite further conversation about American history, memory, and place   A prolific artist, Jim Denomie (La Courte Oreilles Band, Ojibwe, 1955–2022) did not begin his art career until the age of 35. Over the course of three decades, his award-winning work has been featured in national and international exhibitions and found in notable private and public collections. The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie explores themes in the artist’s work, such as the legacies of colonization, reconsideration of American history, and what he saw as the absurdity of our current zeitgeist. His paintings are satirical and surreal, displaying a vibrant palette, along with dark humor and pointed references to historical and contemporary issues and injustices.  Denomie drew upon lived experiences, pop culture, Ojibwe beliefs and traditions, and American history to tell stories with universal lessons. Alongside his satirical, history paintings, Denomie created a deeply personal body of work that depicts his spirituality, memories, and relationship to place.   In addition to its incisive essays, the book includes forewords by Denomie’s friend and gallerist, Todd Bockley, and the artist’s wife, the author Diane Wilson, as well as a transcript of one of his final interviews. In its totality, this catalogue begins the conversation around the lasting impact of Denomie’s work and life.   Distributed for the Minneapolis Institute of Art   Exhibition Schedule:   Minneapolis Institute of Art (July 8, 2023–March 24, 2024)  

This anthology of fiction, prose, and poetry celebrates the rich diversity of writing by Native American women today. Editors Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe have gathered stories from across the nation that celebrate, record, and explore Native American women's roles in community. The result is a rich tapestry that contains work by established writers along with emerging and first-time authors. Contributors include Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Diane Glancy, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Allison Hedge Coke, LeAnne Howe, Roberta Hill, Kim Blaeser, Linda LeGarde Grover, with a foreword by Winona LaDuke.

Shortlisted for The Minnesota Book Awards 2006. Poems in The Mother's Tongue move in images of the living world that include plants and creatures both native and non-native to American landscapes. These poems move via persona and personal lyric through expressions of ambivalence about choosing the life of the body - of womanhood and motherhood - through the strange realm of pregnancy into the netherworld of the post-partum period and out into the world again, into the enlarged world, the world at war, the world of work and words. Finally these poems move to enter the world of women as transformed within the love of language - of recovered Ojibwe language and English renewed as first language in the mouths of infants. These are poems that urge women to discover the power of their own tongues as they teach speech - the sweet, salty, sour and bitter desires - the taste on the mother's tongue.