Toasted Sister Podcast

Seeds carry tribal stories, history and nourishment for Native bodies. That’s why seeds are crucial to Indigenous food sovereignty. Rowen White (Akwesasne Mohawk), seed keeper, founder and director of Sierra Seeds Cooperative and national project coordinator for the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, is out to plant a new crop of Native seed stewards.

Once, Monica Braine (Assiniboine, Hunkpapa Lakota) ate a whole large pizza by herself. She has an eating disorder and she’s on a journey to love food. We don’t often talk about this side of food where it creates a hellish nightmare for those struggling with food addiction. But in this episode, Monica, a Native journalist, talks about the struggle to take control and treat her disorder.

He learned classical French cooking from the best and became an esteemed chef. These days, humble chef, Nephi Craig (White Mountain Apache, Diné), is between kitchens and looking to truly feed his Native community by starting up a new cafe on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona. In this episode, I talk with Craig about the resurgence of Native food, decolonization and breaking away from the mainstream food and wine culture.

With no Indigenous teachers or elders to learn about traditional foods from, Andrea Murdoch largely taught herself. And now, she can’t stop the learning process. She’s trained in pastry arts, but crossed over to full-on Indigenous food. Murdoch, Indigenous from the Andes, is the creator and owner of Four Directions MKE in Wisconsin (soon to move to Colorado).

The Toasted Sister Podcast is radio about Native American food because it has come a long way. Traditional, indigenous foodways were lost, found, redefined and modernized in the last few hundred years. And here it is today, in the hands of Native chefs and foodies who work to keep their traditional flavors and ingredients alive. In this first episode, I talk with chef Karlos Baca (Tewa, Diné, Ute) about foraging, being a judgy eater and how Native food and people are defined in mainstream media.

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