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News > Culture

Indigenous Chefs Celebrate Native Dishes of North America

  • Brian Yazzie, also known as Yazzie The Cook, is a Navajo Chef from Dennehotso, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation.

    Brian Yazzie, also known as Yazzie The Cook, is a Navajo Chef from Dennehotso, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation. | Photo: The Sioux Chef

Published 23 November 2017
Opinion

Their aim is to combat the "Columbusing" of native food: the practice of acting as if something created by people of color didn't exist until caucasians took note of it.

This Thanksgiving, six indigenous chefs from North America are cooking together for the first time in New York to celebrate indigenous ingredients and launch a new food-activist group, I-Collective.

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The exact dishes in the seven-course meal served at Dimes restaurant in Manhattan's Lower East Side are a closely guarded secret, but ingredients include chula buds, mesquite and tepary beans from the Southwest United States. Also featuring are cushaw squash, rabbit, prickly pear, yucca fruit, bitter acorn, amaranth and epazote oil, smoked quail, blue corn and bear root.

The chefs include Brian Yazzie, from the Navajo Reservation in Arizona; Hillel Echo-Hawk (Pawnee and Athabaskan), from Alaska; Seattle-based Brit Reed (Choctaw tribe), and Karlos Baca, a Diné/Tewa/Nuche indigenous food activist.

Their aim is to combat the "Columbusing" of native food: the practice of acting as if something created by people of color didn't exist until caucasians took note of it. The mainstay of the mission is to bring to the forefront native North American ingredients and recipes.

Baca was approached by a regional magazine recently and invited to provide a recipe for their Thanksgiving issue. "Instead of getting a recipe from me, they got three pages of activism," said Baca, who along with some other Native Americans considers the holiday as whitewashing the harm colonists did to indigenous people. They refer to it instead as "Takesgiving" or "Hatesgiving." "What we’re doing is rewriting history," Baca said.

On Friday, there will be an open-to-the-general-public tasting of Native food, cooked by I-Collective chefs at the prep kitchens of The Pixie and the Scout, in Brooklyn. I-Collective offers hosts of the dinners the chance to understand the state of Native America and its history — to learn about seed keepers and native food pathways.

"Going through this education process is as valuable as having a dinner, and in this way, we are creating the movement," Neftalí Duran told Vogue. Duran leads the Nuestra Comida Project in western Massachusetts, an organization that works to promote healthy environments and a more equitable food system in New England through education and food policy change. "One of the most important things is that we are sitting down together and we are talking about things that don’t get talked about."

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