Sagamité with Maple Syrup and Butternut Squash

My friend Leda told me about a meal she’d had in an upscale field-to-table restaurant in Canada, and on the menu was a word I’d never encountered before: sagamité. Sagamité comes up in European colonizers’ accounts of the foods prepared by Native Americans and Canadian First Peoples, and is most often described as a porridge of Indian corn (either nixtamalized or parched), sometimes with beans or a little wild game or fat, and chunks of pumpkin or other hard squashes