Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food

Introduction

introduction September 2005. The museum café is abuzz. People of every color are taking advantage of its wooden benches, easing feet wearied by the galleries above their heads. School parties commandeer long benches of their own, oblivious to the halo of empty tables developing around them. At a distance from their noisy voices, adults relax. Couples pour drinks, lone diners read the day’s newspapers, and scholars speak up to make themselves heard. Foreign tourists, unused to carrying their lunches on plastic trays, scan the hall for somewhere to sit. Together, all eat from the café’s awardwinning menu. Taste buds jaded by air-conditioning and the humid d.c. atmosphere reawaken as they anticipate dishes from the five regions into which the café has sorted Native American cuisine. Some try the Great Plains option, taking on the fire of buffalo chili, while others pick their way through a quahog clam chowder from the Northern Woodlands. Others choose from the “handheld” possibilities—from the precapitalist fast food of the South American corn pupusa, the Mesoamerican enchilada, or the calorific Plains taco. Others still savor what is perhaps the café’s finest dish, lingering over the delicate pink flakes of the “cedar-planked juniper salmon” representing the Northwest Coast.1 Hearing again the sound of running water, all from time to time look up to gaze out of the museum’s tall window panes. Here and there rainbows appear. Disappearing just as quickly, they come to life elsewhere, leaping about on the waterfall tumbling down the glass outside. Seen from within, these rainbows link the foreground with the background of the scene. Somehow they link the diverse customers eating in the museum café with the prospect of the Capitol, blurred by the waterfall, bulking large on the horizon. An outside view throws a different light on things. From here, the full breadth of the waterfall becomes visible, and the rainbows that shimmer in the September sunshine curve into the building { 1 } { 2 } introduction itself, brushing against the honey and tan exterior that in turn makes the neighboring monuments and museums seem whiter than they are. Now these rainbows seem a compass of the Amerindian heritage, a declaration that all that is rich and worthwhile in Native America can be found within the museum. They indicate that this eatery’s menu is neither idiosyncratic nor accidental, that it is narrating the recovery, diversity, and vitality of the Native peoples of the Americas, and that one might expect to find within it all leading indigenous foods. Surprisingly, however, the most popular food said to go by a Native name in the United States today is missing from the café’s menu. To come by it, you will need to get up and leave that busy hall behind. You will need to walk past security, to face the sting of the late summer sun, and to drift in among the crowd bustling hither and yon across the Washington Mall. You will need to move past stands representing the National Council of Negro Women and other organizations, past banners promoting Family Values and Economic Empowerment, and past a concert stage whose scaffolding shakes and shivers to a hip-hop beat. The music will shrink back down to its bassline as you walk away, again tracking the scent of the pork butt that is slowly smoking somewhere you have yet to find. Some secret mix of bourbon, cayenne, chili, molasses, paprika, and vinegar will mingle in your nose as you close in on the food outlets at the end of the lawn. Joining the line, you will look up at the menu above the vendor’s head. And there you will read, next to Fried Chicken and Gumbo, an acronym almost as famous as usa itself: bbq. The moneymaking efforts of the Mitsitam Native Foods café at the National Museum of the American Indian are as discreet as they are at other Smithsonian franchises. The championing of foods native to the Americas is already enacted in its name—mitsitam means “let’s eat!” in the Piscataway and Delaware tongues—and spills into its menu and information boards, all of which devote more attention to the history of given dishes and ingredients than they do to promoting daily specials. Prices, offered in small and bare fonts, seem incidental, secondary to the café’s endeavors to provide an “extension of the cultural experience” of the museum overall.2 By contrast, at the national...