The Indian in the Kitchen: Colonialism, Cultural Identity, and Food inAugust: Osage County

Abstract

Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County uses Native-American culture and food production to examine the sources and symptoms of white middle-class dissipation in twenty-first-century America. Specifically, the economic need and cooking skills of Johnna, the housekeeper, become emblematic of the historical exploitation of Native Americans. Her employers, the Weston family, may praise Johnna’s traditional “American” meals – from biscuits and gravy to apple pie – but these foods merely reflect a nostalgic desire to view the country in cliché terms of bounty, progress, and community. Letts’s portrait of the Westons suggests the opposite. Like this broken family, America is buckling under economic inequity, racism, and the environmental harm caused by modern food production. Its history of injustices also exposes the country’s profound moral failure to care for others and the planet. Beginning with a discussion of the decolonial food movement, this article examines Letts’s use of food – particularly the tensions between home cooking and processed foods, between vegetarianism and meat-eating – to explore the legacy of Native-American genocide and to critique culinary injustice as emblematic of the forces that continue to exploit non-whites and the environment.