Nourishing Culture

Native American chefs create a healthier future by reclaiming the past

BY NANCY ZIMMERMAN | PHOTOS BY LOIS ELLEN FRANK

Eating is not only a physical act based on biological necessity, it’s an expression of cultural identity rooted in geography and ancestry, with far-reaching effects on health as well as on a given society’s worldviews and self-definitions. How food is acquired, prepared, and presented informs gender roles, social structures, family relations, rituals, and spiritual beliefs, and it underlies humankind’s earliest artistic endeavors, from crafting baskets and pottery to store and cook food to creating cave and rock art depicting hunting and farming scenes. In Native America, a growing movement to revive traditional cuisines of centuries past addresses issues of health and well-being and, in the process, reclaims a vital cultural heritage.

Tiffany Georgeina Morgan with a sunflower in her grandmother’s garden.

This movement has been spurred in part by crisis. Throughout the United States, type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, and Native American communities have been especially hard hit. Related illnesses like obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease are at alarming rates as well. And while everyone from healthcare professionals to researchers to desperate dieters struggles to find a solution to these growing health threats, a dedicated cadre of Native American chefs, scholars, and educators are working to forge a new path to wellness and cultural continuity via the ancient foodstuffs and dietary practices that may be in danger of being forgotten.

One of the first to recognize the importance of Native cuisine as a cultural force was Loretta Barrett Oden, a Potawatomi chef and food historian from Oklahoma who is revered as a leader in the movement to return to a Native diet. In 1993 she and her son, Clayton Oden, opened the highly acclaimed Corn Dance Café in Santa Fe, the first upscale restaurant to offer indigenous foods to sophisticated diners. “My absolute, all-consuming passion is the relationship between food and culture,” she says. “There’s no way to separate one from the other.” Oden spread the word via her cooking show, Seasoned With Spirit, which ran on PBS between 2005 and 2007, as well as through appearances on Good Morning America and The Today Show, among others, and she continues to serve as a consultant on a variety of food-related projects.

Taking the movement to the next level is Santa Fe–based Lois Ellen Frank, PhD, a renowned chef and culinary anthropologist of Kiowa-Sephardic ancestry, who is also an educator, author, food historian, and photographer. Frank has made the revival of traditional foodways her life’s work, and her results so far have been impressive and encouraging.

“Returning to an ancestral, plant-based diet is a way to reclaim our health,” she says. “And when traditional foods are revitalized, all of the cultural traditions associated with them are also revitalized—the songs that go with the planting, the sustainable agricultural techniques that each tribe uses, traditional knowledge of how to harvest wild foods, the foods that have medicinal qualities, the language, the stories, the baskets, everything.”

Frank is the chef/owner of Red Mesa Cuisine, a catering company whose mission is to bring Native American cuisine into today’s kitchen and to promote traditional foods, agricultural practices, and cooking techniques from throughout the Americas. She brings a contemporary flair to ancient recipes while promoting heirloom agriculture and introducing exciting “new” products to receptive diners. Along with Diné chef Walter Whitewater, who has done turns in the kitchens of such Santa Fe landmarks as Mu Du Noodles, Bishop’s Lodge, and the late but fondly remembered Café Escalera, she prepares meals for a varied clientele.

Chefs Walter Whitewater and Lois Ellen Frank. Right: Grilled quail with a chile-honey glaze garnished with fresh herbs.

Whitewater grew up in Pinon, Arizona, outside of Chinle, and he credits his grandmother with teaching him about the traditional foods and imbuing in him a reverence for the sustaining gifts of the land. “I remember the foods my grandmother used to make,” he says, “and the prayers she taught me, the songs that go with the food. Food is our medicine. When we take an animal or a plant for our own use, we make offerings. And we don’t take everything—we must always leave something for others. We need to go back to what we’ve been taught by the elders, and not get lost in the Western way. It’s our seeds that will be our survival, not our money.”

The traditional Southwest diet Whitewater’s grandmother taught him about was based on the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. These symbiotic foods thrived in particular when planted together, and they provided nutritional balance through their well-proportioned mix of fiber and protein. Cactus fruits and game animals supplemented this fare, which was further expanded when the Spanish arrived and introduced sheep along with their own food products. Elsewhere in North America, Native populations enjoyed varied cuisines based on local bounty: salmon, berries, and herbs in parts of the Pacific Northwest; wild rice and corn in the upper Midwest; buffalo and grouse in the Great Plains; cranberries and turkey in the Northeast.

The forced relocation that sequestered tribes into reservations in the 18th and 19th centuries dealt a huge blow to Native food sovereignty and disrupted the chain of knowledge. Many of the healthy, natural foods that had sustained people for centuries were replaced by U.S. government–supplied commodities like flour, lard, and sugar. “It’s when food became commodified by European immigrants that it lost its intrinsic value,” Frank says.

Nephi Craig, executive chef of the fine-dining restaurant at his White Mountain Apache tribe’s Sunrise Park Resort Hotel near Greer, Arizona, refers to this unfortunate break with the past as the Great Interruption. “Pre-contact, we were expert farmers, hunters, gatherers, fishermen, and cooks,” he said in a recent interview with Indian Country Today Media Network. “Then we suffered a violent clash of cultures that lasted 500 years and ended in the reservation system and cheap, high-fat, high-carbohydrate commodity foods.”

Ever resourceful, the people found new uses for these less nutritious commodities, creating dishes like fry bread and Indian tacos that have since become emblematic of pan-Indian cuisine. Native chefs tend to embrace their culinary history in its entirety, both the good and the bad, so even less-healthy options like fry bread are sometimes incorporated into the innovative new approaches to contemporary cuisine. “It’s part of history, after all,” says Frank, “and it’s delicious. But we often do it in healthier ways now, using whole-wheat flour or grilling the bread rather than deep-frying it.”

Gallup-based chef Freddie Bitsoie, a food historian with a background in cultural anthropology, believes that the move away from traditional food preparation actually pre-dated the introduction of government commodity food, suggesting that it goes back to the trading-post era. “The trading post was the McDonald’s of its time,” he says. “Instead of growing or hunting food, people started buying tinned food.”

Bitsoie sees the devaluation of Native foods as a product of colonization, and points out that its effects continue today. “It’s a question of respect. Native cuisines have always been seen as inferior because the Native cultures themselves are seen as inferior,” he says. “People are willing to pay well for European cuisine, but nobody’s going to pay $50 for an Indian taco. Once when I worked at a culinary school, the chef objected to my paying $60 a pound for cholla buds, whose harvesting is quite labor-intensive, but he had no problem paying for French truffles, which cost $3,000 a pound.”

The issue of respect Bitsoie raises is key, and chefs throughout the Southwest are addressing it through a variety of educational initiatives, directed toward both Native Americans and the general public, which emphasize the wisdom of the ancient ways. Frank has created a curriculum for a required four-credit science course at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe that includes a hands-on lab to teach students to cook traditional foods. The course examines the cultural, ecological, and medicinal properties of Native foods and is offered each spring semester. “It provides a blueprint for living within an ecosystem rather than at odds with it, or at the expense of it—a practice that has sustained Native cultures for millennia,” she says.

She also teamed up with Santa Fe Public Schools’ Indian Education Program to create the Kids’ Cooking Camp, which teaches children about such topics as food history, what protein is, how calories are counted, and how food can be medicine. “We use kid-friendly ingredients to make fun dishes like a Native American parfait, a blue-corn pudding layered with a mixed-berry compote,” says Frank. “We also use a 72 percent dark chocolate for our snacks, and teach the students about natural dark chocolate, a cacao product that’s full of antioxidants and native to the Americas, rather than an overly sweetened chocolate. The kids love it!”

Frank’s other projects include a DVD and companion booklet, produced in conjunction with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine based in Washington, D.C., that encourages Native peoples to return to an ancestral diet to combat diabetes, and she is the author and photographer of a popular cookbook, Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations, that received the James Beard Foundation Book Award in the Americana category. Whitewater, who was the first Native American chef to cook at the James Beard House in New York, worked with Frank as a culinary advisor to test and adapt the recipes in the book, which includes a detailed discussion of the history, ingredients, and cultural meanings of the food. The recipes showcase indigenous ingredients in ways that appeal to contemporary tastes in dishes like blue cornmeal and piñon hotcakes with prickly-pear syrup and peach honey, and spicy pinto bean ravioli with corn and chile cream sauce.

Frank also teaches classes for the general public at the Santa Fe School of Cooking, and travels extensively, along with Whitewater, to offer demonstrations and lectures at museums and organizations. Even her Red Mesa Cuisine catering company uses an educational approach. “We always bring the story in,” she says. “We’re not an ordinary catering company.” Adds Whitewater, who tends a flock of 15 churro sheep on the Navajo reservation when he’s not at the stove, “We like to do a presentation that includes a blessing to start the meal and a song at the end, and we explain about the foods and what they mean to the culture.”

Acorn and piñon soup garnished with wildflowers and chives

One of Frank’s newest projects is a cookbook that includes information about sourcing local foods that stresses the concept of terroir, the French term for the natural growing environment and its influence on a plant’s flavor. “I like to include all of the ‘scapes,’” she says. “It’s important not only to appreciate the landscape but also to listen to the soundscape, the noises made by the plants and animals, and let your body be in the moment so you’re aware of your own bodyscape and mindscape. The foodscape is thus embodied in the food that you eat. It’s a way of becoming more mindful about your food, and about life in general.”

Bitsoie, too, has his own catering company, FJ Bits Concepts, and, like Frank, has appeared at events and institutions around the country, among them Kraft Foods, the Heard Museum, and Yale University, to promote a healthy, traditional diet brought up to date with modern flourishes. His creations include such dishes as Navajo herb-rubbed roasted lamb, blue corncakes, and pumpkin bread pudding, and he uses traditional ingredients like tepary beans, acorn squash, corn, and cholla buds. He won the Native Chef Competition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2013 and is currently working on a pilot for a television cooking show, Rezervations Not Required, that he hopes will get picked up by a national network.

Native cooking generally is attracting attention and carving out a place for itself in the larger world of contemporary cuisine. The popular Desert Rain Café in Sells, Arizona, about 60 miles southwest of Tucson, celebrates traditional Tohono O’odham foods that have sustained these people for countless generations. According to consulting chef Mary Paganelli Votto, each dish on the menu contains at least one traditional ingredient, such as cholla buds, tepary beans, or saguaro fruit syrup, which are brought together in tasty dishes like prickly pear–glazed pork ribs, or cholla bud citrus salad with jicama, fresh spinach, and pineapple. The café is a project of Tohono O’odham Community Action, a nonprofit
that is dedicated to creating a healthy, culturally vital, and sustainable community on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Native American ingredients featuring wild- harvested and cultivated foods. Opposite: Juanita and Maria Kavena (Hopi) from Polacca, Arizona, eating yellow and red piki bread (a paper-thin cornbread). Below: Abiquiú farm growing Native American ingredients and heirloom vegetables.

Another hot spot in Provo, Utah, is the family-owned Black Sheep Café, a neighborhood café during the day and a fine-dining restaurant in the evening, where Diné chef Mark Mason serves up an imaginative mix of Navajo-, Pueblo-, and Hopi-influenced creations. His signature dishes include appetizers like spicy chicken wings served with creamy cotija-chipotle-lime dressing, and an entrée of braised beef short ribs in a Cabernet-guajillo mole sauce, served over yellow-corn polenta enlivened with lime zest and mascarpone.

Designed as an authentic representation of the Gila River Indian Community’s heritage and culture, the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort and Spa in Phoenix features a fine-dining restaurant, Kai, that uses locally farmed ingredients and heirloom products. Its menu includes entrees like grilled tenderloin of buffalo accompanied by smoked-corn puree, cholla buds, and scarlet runner-bean chili with saguaro-blossom syrup.
Amaya at Hotel Santa Fe, the city’s only Native American–owned lodging, features a seasonally changing menu of fresh ingredients and traditional regional foods from around the country that highlights local Pueblo and Northern New Mexico influences.

The Native food movement continues to gather steam, fueled by the passion of its proponents and their congenial camaraderie, which fosters cooperative efforts to reach out to ever-larger constituencies. This outreach has effects beyond the immediate community—it benefits the population as a whole, many of whose members suffer from the same diet-induced ailments as the Native Americans. As healthy traditional fare joins forces with haute cuisine, it becomes more than just the fad du jour—the movement is going mainstream.

Times and tastes may change but ancient wisdom endures, offering us fresh opportunities to heal ourselves and find common ground through our shared human need: nourishing, satisfying food.

Navajo Chef Freddie Bitsoie. Right: White Mountain Apache/Navajo chef Nephi Craig at work in the Sunrise Park Resort kitchen.

GOING NATIVE

When artist Kathleen Wall was growing up in Jemez Pueblo, she enjoyed home-cooked meals made from real ingredients, far from the lure of drive-through “restaurants” and prepackaged meals. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” she says, “so we didn’t buy processed food. We made our own meals from scratch.”

Years later, as a married mother of three living in Albuquerque, she found herself immersed in a fast-food culture that led to weight gain and, for her husband, diabetes. “He was truly addicted to sugary, high-starch foods,” she says, adding that her kids were also inclined to want sodas and fast foods. “Although I had never cared much for that kind of food myself since I wasn’t raised on it, I tended to give in to my husband’s cravings, bringing home boxes of sugary Froot Loops, his favorite breakfast, and not objecting when he ate at McDonald’s.”
His diabetes diagnosis forced Wall to rethink her food priorities, and she decided to move the family back to Jemez Pueblo, where they’d have less exposure to the temptations of the city and more control over their diets. “My husband is much better now,” she says, “and my kids don’t eat fast food or drink sugary sodas. It’s a healthier environment.”

Wall has tried to spread the word about healthy eating, but she has concluded that it’s better to remind people of the good things about a traditional Native diet rather than to harp on what’s bad about the current ways. “I know people get tired of hearing me go on and on about nutrition,” she says, “and I thought that it would be easier to get the message across using art.”

Thus was born Harvesting Traditions, an exhibition at Santa Fe’s Pablita Velarde Museum of Indian Women in the Arts, running through January 4, 2015, which celebrates Native foods. Working with co-curators Marita Hinds and Martha Becktell, Wall fashioned a show of ceramic clay figures in traditional garb and paired them with paintings relating to indigenous foodways that show the kinds of foods, utensils, and cultural manifestations that made for a healthy lifestyle. A series of live presentations, the Noonday Dialogues, held on the third Thursday of each month, initiates conversations about how food was gathered and prepared and its relevance to the present. —N.Z.

From the Fall 2015 issue