DENVER — The smell of braised bison cooked for over 24 hours covered in a 10-spice dry rub fills the air. It overpowers the existing smells of fry bread dough and wild rice steaming in the corners of the kitchen. This is the scene created by the crew at Tocabe, American Indian Eatery in Denver before opening every day. Soon, those smells could fill your own kitchen.
Ben Jacobs, co-owner of Tocabe and its affiliated marketplace, said this is the next step in fulfilling their mission to tell the stories behind their food and make Indigenous food more commonplace.
“How can we bring nutrition back into people's lives on a convenient level that also has its cultural connectedness?” Jacobs wondered.
A direct-to-consumer prepared meal program was the answer. The meals’ packaging will be similar to other meal-kit services like Blue Apron or Home Chef. But this program will be unique in that it will offer Indigenous dishes made with ingredients sourced from Native food producers. While that fulfills a goal to support Indigenous communities, it does present its own set of challenges.
“A lot of our ingredients are traditionally kept — so dried beans, dried corn, rice being dried, something that has long shelf lives, that's great. But they also have a time factor to make. It's not instant rice. Wild rice takes time. It's not canned beans, it's soaked beans … It does take time,” explained Jacobs.
Tocabe: American Indian Eatery
An upcoming meal kit service will emphasize Native foods
Earlier this year, the company closed its Greenwood Village restaurant to make room for this new venture. Tocabe still has a brick-and-mortar location in Denver. The Greenwood Village location now serves as a production and packaging facility for its online marketplace, which sells Native foods and ingredients, and a recently launched program called “Direct to Tribe.”
“Direct to Tribe” sends meals to Tribal communities that are redistributed to those in need. Jacobs, who is a member of the Osage Nation, said those meals are free to consumers. The cost is covered by a series of grants.
“We're feeding people something that's important and something they're connected to and something that's healthy and nutritious, especially in a rural environment or even in an urban food desert-based environment. It's thoughtful food for people,” Jacobs said.
For thousands of years, hundreds of different tribes in North America developed their own sustainable food systems. From the wild rice cultivation of the Ojibwe to the buffalo hunting of the Arapaho, food has long shaped these cultures.
“Food is what's maintained us and kept us here and tells our stories moving forward,” Jacobs explained. “Native people have the oldest cultures on this continent, but in many ways have the youngest cuisine because it's not clearly defined, because we are so uniquely different from coast to coast and from North to South.”
The lack of clear definition of “Native cuisine” is also due to federal policies that forced relocation onto reservations, pushing tribes onto unfamiliar lands and cutting them off from their food sources. The federal government often gave displaced tribes, U.S. Army rations which were meant to simply sustain — not fulfill.
Another attack on the food supply for Indigenous tribes was the mass slaughter of bison across North America. Rick Williams, a Colorado scholar and member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and Cheyenne, said prior to European colonization close to 70 million buffalo roamed the continent.
“We reached the zenith of our existence on the earth because of the buffalo. We were eating well. We had a diet that was very healthy with buffalo meat and chokecherries, and we call them timpsala or turnips and all the other wild game,” Williams said.
Rick Williams shows the timpsala, or turnips, that were a part of Lakota diets.
Europeans displaced and killed both buffalo and Native Americans. In the late 19th century, U.S. military officials ordered soldiers to slaughter as many bison as possible as a means to move Native Americans from the land. People would shoot the bison from train cars. Unlike Native Americans, who used every part of the buffalo, Williams recalled reports of “men coming out and shooting 100 buffalo in one day and doing nothing but taking their tongues.”
“It went from being able to survive in a very comfortable environment on the plains and have a lot of success with food sources to starting to struggle,” said Williams. “And it was a very bad time for our people right after that.”
“[Buffalo] wasn't always utilized even in Osage feasts, meals and things like that. It was very much a specific item that you'd have on a special occasion a lot of times,” explained Jacobs.
This is why bison is so prominently featured on the Tocabe menu.
On the menu: Food with a story
Tocabe’s brick-and-mortar restaurant in north Denver is a fast-casual restaurant modeled after the restaurant Jacobs’ parents established in 1989 called Grayhorse.
“We wanted people to be able to see the food. We wanted engagement with our crew … since there's not a lot of Native restaurants, we wanted to have a lot of that personal interaction, dialogue building,” Jacobs explained.
Menu items include Indian Tacos, Stuffed Fry Bread (an Osage-style meat pie) and grain bowls. “We could share cuisine, but also really share cultural identity, cultural stories, and just make an environment that's made by native people, but for everyone,” Jacobs explained.
Behind the counter, about 75 percent of staff are Indigenous with various Tribal connections who are happy to share their knowledge and stories with customers. And as an Indigenous person who grew up in the area, Jacobs said helping the next generation is important him.
“We say we're a community driven experience, so it's really good to have Native peoples here and really as a job training center as well, to be able to teach people about getting their foot in the door in the culinary world is really cool,” said Jacobs.
Jacobs and other staff members can explain where each menu item comes from and, sometimes, where the recipe comes from as well. While there is much debate over fry bread and how to make it, Jacobs said Tocabe’s fry bread is his grandmother’s recipe.
“[Sharing of cultural food] is something that's very much about who we are, where we come from,” Jacobs explained. “What's great is for our crew, too, it's something that they can be connected to and something that they can speak to and have passion about and show up to work and have someone that may not look like them… to actively be interested in them.”
When it comes to sourcing their ingredients, Jacobs said the mantra is “Native first and local second.” If the item is not available through a Native producer, shopping local is the next best option. This is the case with their bison meat.
Tocabe buys its bison meat from a few different producers, including Cheyenne River Buffalo Company in South Dakota produced by Lakota peoples and Rock River Ranches, a Colorado non-Indigenous bison meat company. Any products from Rock River are hand-delivered by the owner.
“It's been fantastic because they're small and they're focused. It's nice to have someone bring you your products that own the company that are really a part of it,” said Jacobs.
At Rock River Ranches, the bison are mostly grass-fed and left alone in large spaces in eastern Colorado. Rock River Ranches does finish its bison in a grain feed lot before harvest, but knowing the freedom the bison had to roam gives Jacobs peace of mind.
“What's so unique about bison is how they raise themselves. They live off the land. They're very much even now, still kind of a wild animal where they roam vast areas, they naturally feed as they are hungry. They don't just over-consume, they're athletes. They're a really unique creature that we still have. And to be able to bring that back and support that growth in a very sustainable, thoughtful way is really important,” said Jacobs.
When the meat arrives at the restaurant, there is a long preparation process before it is served. First, Tocabe braises the bison overnight for 13 hours, then gives it a 10-spice dry rub with a quick cure. The bison is cooked again overnight, making it a 24-hour process until serving. All of it is worth it in Jacobs’ mind because even in Colorado, bison is not on a lot of menus.
“In many ways we try and break some barriers and break some molds and provide things that are unique from a culinary standpoint that people aren't familiar with, even as simple as like braised bison — It's like America's food,” said Jacobs.
Jacobs hope for Tocabe is to expand the reach of Native foods and the stories that go along with them.
“The experience that we provide and then the stories that we tell is, I think, very unique. Having the people here that can communicate about what's current about Native peoples is really important,” Jacobs said. “We're big on, as we say, breaking the romanticized image of what Native people are in many ways, what Hollywood generated. We're not this one kind of idea, this one image.”
Amanda Horvath is the managing producer at Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach her at amandahorvath@rmpbs.org
Julio Sandoval is the senior photojournalist with Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach him at juliosandoval@rmpbs.org.
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