The special Wabanaki menu of locally sourced foods prepared for the Goodfire Brewing Co. restaurant by the James Beard-nominated Penobscot chef Joe Robbins. Foods on the table include broiled oysters with smoked cranberry BBQ sauce; fried duck wings topped with a sauce of apple cider, guajillo and fermented honey; the “three sisters” of delicata squash, cranberry beans and hominy, flavored with black walnut and spruce; a whole griddled Mi’kmaq trout with wild rice pilaf, black trumpets and sunchoke. Courtesy of James McCarthy

Last weekend, a steady stream of Mainers swept through the Goodfire Tasting Room and Kitchen to taste Wabanaki-inspired dishes and celebrate the closing days of Native American Heritage Month.

“We do a lot of these events but on reservations, and then it’s only Native people,” said Penobscot Nation chef Joe Robbins. “So, to see that mixture and have both people feel welcome was also extremely important, I think.”

Chef Joe Robbins, a member of the Penobscot Nation, collaborated with Goodfire in Freeport last weekend. Courtesy of Joe Robbins

Robbins, who collaborated with the restaurant to bring last weekend’s pop-up menu to life, learned to cook at a young age and has been in the industry for about 14 years. Some may know him as the executive chef at Bissell Brothers Three Rivers Brewery and Taproom in Milo, an award-winning restaurant that permanently closed in August. While untied to a restaurant, he is continuing his work educating Mainers on Indigenous food and tradition.

“This is an intimidating thing for some people,” Robbins said, noting that the outcome of the Freeport pop-up was positive. “[The event] was pretty welcoming and a lot of people had a lot of questions that I had never even heard before, and it was just a different energy than other things I’ve done.”

Goodfire served a range of items, including broiled oysters with a smoked cranberry barbecue sauce; fried duck wings with an apple cider, guajillo and fermented honey glaze; and a whole griddle Mi’kmaq trout with wild rice.

The food showcased locally and sustainably sourced ingredients that originated from the Americas. In fact, Robbins pointed out that a lot of the food we eat everyday — such as blueberries and tomatoes — has Indigenous roots. He also joked that while Italians may lay claim to red sauce, he can’t imagine that Indigenous populations — within the 14,000 years they occupied the land here — did not create multiple types of tomato sauces over the centuries.

A closeup of the entree featuring a whole griddled Mi’kmaq trout with wild rice pilaf, black trumpets and sunchoke. Courtesy of James McCarthy

Last weekend’s food drew nearly 1,000 people to the brewery, or between 250 and 350 a day, by Robbins’ estimation. To his surprise, the crowd overwhelmingly loved the whole trout dish. He had expected attendees to favor something more familiar to the typical American palate.

The turnout was one that Wabanaki Alliance volunteer James McCarthy saw as a hopeful sign that better days are ahead for the Wabanaki Nations — a collective that includes the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Penobscot and Passamaquoddy nations.

“This is encouraging evidence that the Wabanaki Nations are becoming less invisible and that more and more Mainers are eager to turn the page on more than 400 years of colonial-settler history that treated the Wabanaki people as second-class citizens of Maine,” McCarthy said, noting that there is more work to be done.

Piecemeal victories

This year in particular is a milestone for Indigenous communities in the U.S., as 2024 marks the 100th year since the Indian Citizenship Act (also referred to as the Snyder Act, after a Republican U.S. representative for New York, Homer P. Snyder) was passed, which gave citizenship to all Native Americans born within the United States borders and its territories.

The victory materialized in fragments over the past century, however, since the right to vote was left up to the states. Maine granted the right to participate in state elections only decades later, in 1967.

McCarthy also pointed to a Harvard study released in 2022, which highlighted the negative impacts of the 1980 Settlement Act on the Wabanaki Nations in Maine. The federal policy allows state government to block “federal Indian policy” — a mechanism that has allowed economic and government growth in tribes across the country — in Maine. All four tribes within the Wabanaki Nations, the study said, underperform economically compared to other tribes in the Lower 48. Those interested in the specifics can read more on the Wabanaki Alliance website, but overall, the organization asserted this year that these issues from the 2022 study still ring true.

Robbins hopes that it will inspire other communities to do similar things that celebrate and educate the public on Native culture. He noted that he has been exploring cultural tourism and what tribes can do that are more positive for the community and highlight Indigenous traditions. Last weekend’s event is a start, and exposure like this could be a gain for tribal businesses, he said.

He also noted that maintaining traditional roots while bringing them into a more modern context is another method of pursuing change. For instance, he said, the act of cooking or creating art requires looking into the past to assess what has been done before and then adjusting that knowledge to current times. This can sometimes be challenging with Indigenous culture, given how long it was suppressed in the Americas.

“The difficult part is that we didn’t write the encyclopedia, we didn’t write history books,” he said. “Even in my work, I don’t have a bunch of cookbooks to go off from for all these thousands of years of tradition, so a lot of what I do is kind of dealing with what little I know for sure and seeing where it goes, and kind of using the guidelines of ‘Is it helping more than just me? What’s the end goal?’ ”

With the Indigenous cooking, Robbins simply aims to get the knowledge of the history and the culture out there. In a sense, honoring history is the main takeaway that Robbins wants Mainers to gather from the pop-up, especially during the holiday season when consumerism is high and climate change is an increasing anxiety for many. The pop-up highlighted the value of sustainably sourced foods, reflecting a practice long held by Indigenous communities that supports local economy (and is good for the environment).

“A lot of what we’re doing currently is very much what our culture has been doing for years — you know, trying to support your local farms, trying to do all the work you that you need to to help the environment,” Robbins said. “And all of these things that we’re constantly fighting to do, we think that they’re new concepts, they’re new ideas. Those are very old traditions that we kept for thousands and thousands of years.”