When he opened his progressive Indigenous restaurant Naagan in Ontario, Canada, in late 2024, Ojibwe chef Zach Keeshig knew that he wouldn’t serve wine, beer or spirits. The alcohol-related death rate among Native people in North America remains three to five times higher than the general population’s—statistics that, for Keeshig, are hardly abstract. He’d seen many people close to him succumb to alcoholism. His own father had recently died, “sitting by himself, drinking.” Moreover, Keeshig wanted to “tell the story of what Indigenous food could be,” and like white flour, processed sugar and other ingredients he’d omitted from Naagan’s kitchen, alcohol was not part of the pre-contact Indigenous diet. For many North American Indigenous chefs, alcohol presents a conundrum: Bar programs are cash cows and it’s tough to run an upscale restaurant without one, but what kind of bar program makes sense in an Indigenous restaurant?
Let’s get this out of the way: The theory that Native peoples have some biological weakness to alcohol has been soundly debunked. Historically, that theory has functioned as a convenient blame-shifter, used as “proof” that Natives simply can’t hold their liquor, and that “the problems Natives face have nothing to do with settler violence,” says Michael D. Wise, author of Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History. “Alcohol is this deus ex machina force that absolves American settlers.”
Although for millennia, Indigenous peoples brewed fermented drinks and ingested mind-altering substances, particularly in ceremony, it was European settlers and their descendants who industrialized alcohol, bringing beer to the Americas, introducing Vitis vinifera for wine and eventually distilling spirits. By the late 1800s, the federal governments of the United States and Canada had forced hundreds of thousands of Native people off their ancestral homelands, disrupted their food sovereignty and herded them onto reservations. Most Indigenous people today live in urban and suburban environments, but those who remain in tribal communities (about 20 percent in the United States and 40 percent in Canada) contend with a slew of alcohol-abuse risk factors, including remoteness, lack of resources, stigma and poverty. “Environments in which Native people live expose them to PTSD-qualifying events (death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence) far more frequently than the environments of their non-Indian counterparts,” says Spero Manson, director of the Centers for American Indian & Alaska Native Health at Colorado School of Public Health. “We’re talking 60-70 percent of individuals living in tribal communities being exposed to serious trauma.”
In Indigenous restaurants, alcohol is not neutral, so some chefs serve it with caveats. “We don’t mix alcohol with medicine,” says Inez Cook of First Nations restaurant Salmon n’ Bannock in Vancouver, British Columbia. She reserves traditionally medicinal ingredients like sweetgrass and sage for mocktails. In cocktails, she showcases hard-to-come-by Indigenous ingredients, including soopolallie, or soap berries. When she can source soopolallie, she whips it into a foam to garnish a blend of orange juice, sparkling water, vodka and “Bella Coola tea” prepared with berries, rosehips, hibiscus and maple.
For Cree chef Shane Chartrand, dinners at his restaurant Paperbirch in Alberta, Canada, aren’t ceremonial. “There’s no smudging or land acknowledgement or anything,” he says. “This is just the culinary arts. It’s just dinner.” Because of that, though he’s sober himself, he feels comfortable offering local mead, beer and wine. He also acknowledges the demand for alcoholic beverages. “I can only be as Indigenous as the world allows me to be at a dinner where people are paying $120,” he says. Choctaw chef David Skinner of Ishtia in Kemah, Texas, concurs: “We don’t add alcohol to any of the food,” says, “but if you’re spending a couple hundred dollars and three hours of your life in a restaurant, you’re going to want a glass of wine or a cocktail.”
It’s true that they are going to want it. But they also might act suspicious about it: Although Natives in the food and beverage space are expected to supply booze, doing so subjects them to stereotypes. As Chiricahua Apache Nde and Rarámuri brewer and distiller Roxanne Fernandez Tiburolobo put it, “I’ve had people that I brewed with be like, ‘Oh, you’re native? I didn’t know you people could have alcohol.’”
“To have a successful Indigenous restaurant at all, in a part of the world where Indigenous peoples have suffered so much abuse and erasure, is nothing short of remarkable.”
Omitting alcohol, or serving it with ambivalence, is only a piece of the puzzle in Indigenous restaurants, much less important than what Indigenous chefs are elevating—their cultures, their traditions, thousands of years of history. “When we’re talking about the impact alcohol has had,” says Manson, “there’s another side of the coin: strength, resilience, and the assets of our communities that have allowed us to survive.” To have a successful Indigenous restaurant at all, in a part of the world where Indigenous peoples have suffered so much abuse and erasure, is nothing short of remarkable.
Chef Crystal Wahpepah doesn’t serve alcohol in her Oakland, California-based restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, but that’s not how she phrases it: “We highlight non-alcoholic drinks,” she says. “We make Indigenous teas with ingredients that connect us to the land, our traditions, and generations of plant knowledge.” At Naagan, diners can order the 12-course tasting menu with five pairings, each beverage handmade in house from foraged ingredients. Prior to every service, Keeshig picks the greenery from cedar trees in a nearby park, makes a tea from it and serves it, sweetened with birch syrup, with the first “snack” course. With the fish course, he offers something tart, currently a wild gooseberry juice sweetened with elderflower syrup. With the main course, a meat dish, in place of a full-bodied red, Keeshig offers a room-temperature beverage from black currant, magnolia vinegar and bee balm. “You get the smokiness, the acid, the savory flavors,” he says. With dessert, he doesn’t serve coffee because it’s not indigenous to the Americas, either, but he makes a coffee substitute with either chicory root or dandelion root.
“We haven’t had any complaints,” Keeshig says. “The guest feedback has always been, ‘I can’t believe how good this is. I didn’t miss alcohol whatsoever.’”
