Toasted Sister Podcast

At The Boot in Durham, North Carolina, chef Robert Kinneen (Tlingit) makes a lot of pasta and breaks down a pig and half a cow a month. It’s different than cooking porcupine, moose and walrus in Alaska. In this episode, Rob talks about moving and cooking in different restaurants, feeding President Obama and why truffle oil is an unrealistic ingredient to use in rural Alaska. Kinneen is the executive chef at The Boot and Happy Cardinal Catering.

An endless search for food, tainted cheese, killer pastries, feasting on the Death Star: that’s how Native comic book artists and illustrators incorporated food into their work. I talk with a bunch of “Indigenerds” at the Indigenous Comic Con 2.

In the show:

Arigon Starr, “Super Indian”

Tatum Bowie and Damon Begay, “Spiral,” Interstellar Comix

Jason EagleSpeaker, Eagle Speaker Publishing

Jonathan Joss, actor and voice actor

Gloria Begay, Diné Food Sovereignty Alliance

Enoch Endwarrior, Reclaim Designs

Maria Wolf Lopez, freelance comic book artist and illustrator

Elroy Natachu Jr., artist, co-owner of Natachu Ink and Zuni cultural demonstrator and teacher

Ryan Singer, Diné artist

In this special episode, four Indigenous chefs talk about what it’s like being female chefs in a culinary world currently dominated by men. Guests are Claudia Serrato (Purépecha), anthropologist, professor and chef, Andrea Murdoch (Venezuelan Andean Native), creator and owner of Four Directions Cuisine, Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz (Tewa, Tiwa, Mexican, Spanish), holistic healer and chef and Marlene Aguilar (Purépecha), community-based chef.

In this special episode, I travel to Taos, New Mexico to talk with a few Native chefs, some tribal leaders and farmers about the importance of eating the food that our ancestors ate. The Indigenous Food Experience was a first-time event put on by the Red Willow Farm at the Taos Pueblo.

You can’t talk about climate change in Native America without talking about food and how it’s affected by changes in water, land and temperature. Dr. Kyle Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), Timnick chair in the humanities and professor of philosophy and community sustainability at Michigan State University, spends a lot of time thinking about traditional Native food and how tribes are trying to protect it. In this episode, Dr. Whyte talks about Indigenous science, the importance of water, wild rice and the upcoming Nibi and Manoomin Symposium (Oct. 10-11 in Mahnomen, MN).

(The strawberry video mentioned in the episode: “Reclaiming the Honorable Harvest: Robin Kimmerer at TEDxSitka”)

At age 5, Claudia Serrato (Purépecha) started cooking plant-based foods. Today, her passion is exploring raw foods, sweet flavors and making desserts with delicious combinations of Indigenous ingredients from all over Turtle Island. She’s an anthropologist, professor and chef who embraces words like “intimacy” and “Indigenous love” to describe the experience of ancestral foods. In this episode, Claudia talks about prenatal nutrition, being a woman in the kitchen and her project, Decolonial Food For Thought.

Freddie Bitsoie (Diné) is the executive chef of Mitsitam Cafe inside the National Museum of the American Indian where he uses his imagination and knowledge of history to bring Indigenous flavors to the museum experience. He studied anthropology in college but took a different route when he noticed everything he thought about was food. In this episode, Freddie talks about his culinary upbringing, the challenges of working in Indian casino restaurants and his thoughts on fusion and new Native cuisine.

Before food gets to your table it’s grown and cared for by someone. And that someone could be a Native farmer or tribal food producer. Dan Cornelius (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin) is a technical assistance specialist in the Great Lakes region of the Intertribal Agriculture Council (IAC) and manager of the Mobile Farmers Market. He and the IAC are working to reconnect trade routes by promoting foods produced by tribes and individual producers.

Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz (Tewa, Tiwa, Mexican, Spanish) is a holistic healer and chef (kitchencurandera.com). She learned about traditional food and plant medicine from her relatives and from growing up in the Southwest desert. In her work, she exposes people to the delicious bounty of the desert and bridges eastern medicine with Southwestern medicine. In this episode, she talks about her love and respect for plants, green chile and what she’s doing to help spread food knowledge in Native America through the new Northern American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS.org) organization.

Since he was 13 years old, Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota) was in the kitchen. The skills he learned over the years helped him rise above the ranks in culinary school to become one of many most awesome Native American chefs. He’s the owner of The Sioux Chef, an Indigenous catering and education group. He and the crew have some exciting things coming up, including launching a nonprofit organization called North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS.org).