Missed Post: Wanuskewin Cultural center

K so I missed this post. It's somewhere in between Saskatoon and Regina, so slot it in there memory style. We visited a native heritage center in a desperate search for the so far elusive native cuisine. Though it by far yielded the best results of any effort so far, it was nevertheless disappointing. We've been looking for any kind of refined traditional cuisine, but have found very little. Certainly preserved foods, by wind, smoke and salt, but no real effort to make it taste amazing. They had a restaurant at the heritage center, which meant we were able to sample the goods. Sadly it was wildly westernized. The bannock was baked, which is intrinsically wrong, due to the lack of ovens, and there was pot pie and other European dishes on the menu. We had bison bannock pizza, fries, salad, and a venison pot pie. The flavours weren't great, and the tradition was definitely not there. After eating in the restaurant we asked the cultural interpreter what he knew about it. Very little. He had a spoon carved from a bison hoof, some hunting tools and a few other doodads, but no real history of cuisine among the aboriginal peoples. He spoke a little bit about how they boiled water and cured skins, but not much about eating on a day to day basis. It was really a mind blowing thing, because I think culture revolves around food and the ability to feed yourself. Once a society has developed a cuisine, it usually has reached a point where high culture is present, because it has become so comfortable with it's food source that other things are possible. Aboriginal cuisine is difficult for two reasons. The first is that they didn't have much in the way of permanent agriculture, and lived a nomadic existence, following the herds of buffalo. This lifestyle entailed rapid preservation of food to survive the long journey it inevitably had to undergo. Rapid preservation doesn't lend itself to flavours that we know scientifically humans are geared to go far. Fats, salts and sugars. There was also very little industrial process, so flour, sugar and many other refined foods were unavailable. A mill would be impossible to follow the buffalo with. The second reason their food is difficult to decipher is that they lack a written tradition to delineate what they ate. Maybe they did have massive feasts with whole animals, rubbed in roots and berries to enhance the flavour. We won't know, because they didn't write it down. Even the interpretive center was open to a lot of speculation on traditions and the interpreter gave his personal opinion on a bunch of things. Sad to see. I hope theres somewhere that has preserved the food traditions and we'll know more, but I don't hold out much hope.