Indigenous Alaska Native food looks like wild game meats, fish, seafood, marine mammals, and plants — like fiddlehead ferns, sourdock, beach greens, berries, fireweed, rose petals, spruce tips, and mushrooms. It also entails dishes like akutaq, which is an Alaska Native ice cream traditionally made with snow, wild berries, and whipped fat from the animals they hunted like reindeer, seals, bears, etc.
Traditional gaming meats like moose, musk ox, or bear are very difficult to get USSA certified. (Wild game served at restaurants, for example, has be to certified before it is slaughtered, which is hard to do, especially for animals that do not herd or are not domesticated.) To make matters a little more difficult, there are certain laws against the sale and purchase of traditional foods—like whale in the form of muktuk, which is cubed skin and blubber of bowhead whales. Some more publicly available foods traditional and local to Alaska are frybread, crab, spruce tips, reindeer sausage, salmon, and halibut.
Most Alaska Native indigenous cooking happens in homes. Another way to try hunted-and-gathered Alaska Native foods is through donations to food service programs, senior meals, food banks, schools, and hospitals.
However, there are a handful of restaurants that offer dishes that are as close to traditional as legally and available as possible, like Nuniaq and Aaka’s Place.
