‘We want everyone in the world to experience it’: New food truck brings Indigenous meals to Vancouver’s streets
“We try to focus everything on indigenous food and culture that we grew up on.”
by Brendan Kergin, Vancouver is Awesome | March 4, 2025
Just over a year ago, Raymond and Hannah Yamelst noticed a gap in the Lower Mainland food market.
“The idea started back in December of 2023,” Raymond tells V.I.A. “We noticed there weren’t many Indigenous food options out there.”
They figured there was space to share the foods they grew up with.
“There are so few Indigenous food options, and we want everyone in the world to experience it,” says Raymond.
The couple, part of the Nlaka’pamux Nation near Spence’s Bridge, grew up eating bannock. The fried flatbread is a staple for Indigenous people across what is now Canada.
Hannah had spent her life in the food industry, so she and Raymond started making bannock tacos for a local weekly powwow group. Read more…
Indigenous Food Reciprocity as a Model for Mutual Aid
For centuries, Native communities have focused on the collective rather than the individual. Here’s what we can learn from them.
by Kate Nelson | March 3, 2025
In the Arctic and Far North, where a successful hunt can mean the difference between feeding the village or scrounging to make ends meet, one might assume a scarcity mindset would take hold. Instead, reciprocity prevails.
Examples of this sharing-focused approach abound. A recent documentary, One With the Whale, follows the hunting practices of an island community in the Bering Sea. In one scene, after a long period without finding game, a hunting crew harpoons a seal, which will allow them to feed some of the community. “It’s always a blessing to receive any animal that you catch,” Siberian Yupik hunter Daniel Apassingok tells the filmmakers. “As small as the game is, the game is dispersed with four or five other boats. We don’t ever say no to anybody.” Later, when the hunters take a whale, his wife, Susan, characterizes this too as a “blessing,” describing it in a way that recognizes it as beyond a commodity. Read more…
Local Indigenous communities are reclaiming their food sovereignty
by Amanda Beland, WBUR | Nov. 26, 2024
It’s around lunchtime on a sunny November day and chef Sherry Pocknett is at her flat-top grill making breakfast. She cracks two eggs alongside two scoops of her Johnny Cake recipe, a griddled corn pancake. As she cooks, she talks about her parents.
“My mom and dad are both Wampanoag Indian,” said Pocknett. “They both taught us, they wanted us to know our lifeways, how we survive, how to survive. So, I’m so fortunate to grow up back then and [be] able to teach my children, my grandchildren now.”
Pocknett is doing just that at her restaurant Sly Fox Den Too in Rhode Island. It’s a love letter to her tribe and her family. Sly Fox is her dad, and a beloved former chief of the Mashpee Wampanoag. The menu is full of memories, foods she grew up eating — from her grandmother’s blueberry buckle to baked and smoked fish. Read more…
The foods chefs urge people to try during Native American Heritage Month (and beyond)
by Amanda Cappelli, CBS News | Dec. 3, 2024
The United States is known as a great melting of people, food and culture. In major cities across the country like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, people can find nearly any cuisine that fits their heart’s desire.
However, as Chef Sean Sherman of the Oglala Lakota Tribe has pointed out in the past, these cities have few – if any – restaurants focused on Indigenous cuisines from the more than 570 recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Native entities. Each of these tribes has their distinct food traditions.
Eateries like Watecha Bowl, Tocabe: An American Indian Eatery, and Owamni aim to change that by reviving or paying homage to the centuries-old techniques and flavors passed down through generations.
“We all are on the same mission of food sovereignty,” Watecha Bowl owner and entrepreneur Lawrence West told CBS News. “And introducing the world to Native American food.” Read more…
A chef transformed his life by eating an Indigenous diet
Now he’s spreading the word
by Tim Trudell, Flatwater Free Press | Oct. 5, 2024
Pricking his finger with a small needle, Anthony Warrior squeezed a drop of blood onto the test strip. As he saw the number illuminate, the then-40-year-old Absentee Shawnee citizen and Muskogee descendant knew his days of bad eating had caught up with him.
With his weight nearing 500 pounds and his blood sugar dangerously high, Warrior was facing a future of possible blindness, kidney failure and limb amputation – all complications of unchecked diabetes.
If he didn’t address his eating habits and weight, he’d eventually be in a wheelchair or a casket.
That moment was the beginning of a dramatic change for Warrior, now 49, and it eventually led him to try to change others’ lives for the better. Read more…
First of its kind: Indigenous Food Lab debuts at Minnesota State Fair with 1,200 pounds of bison
The Indigenous Food Lab will offer bison meatballs and sweet potato dumplings at the Midtown Global Market booth from August 28 through September 2.
by Elza Goffaux, Sahan Journal | Aug. 20, 2024
To prepare for the Indigenous Food Lab’s first appearance at the State Fair, manager Jason Garcia had to reorganize the restaurant’s kitchen. Garcia started ordering ingredients — including 1,200 pounds of bison meat — in June.
“We had to completely redo our freezer storage downstairs to make room for all of the bison,” said Garcia. “We are really pushing ourselves this year.”
A year after opening its market in South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Food Lab will appear as a new food vendor at the State Fair. During the last week of the Fair, it will be serving a nixtamal and wild rice bowl with bison meatballs or sweet potato dumplings at the Midtown Global Market booth. Read more…
Tribal partnership with UW-Madison combines ag research with Indigenous food knowledge
Federal grant funding will support the expansion of tribal food producers, processing
by Hope Kirwan, Wisconsin Public Radio | July 23, 2024
For thousands of years, Indigenous farmers have cultivated crops like wild rice and corn, and have raised fish in fisheries.
Now, new federal grant funding will help Indigenous farmers and food access programs in Wisconsin expand their reach.
A partnership led by the Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition and the University of Wisconsin-Madison received $10 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems program earlier this summer. Read more…
How a Newfoundlander Became a Champion for Indigenous Food in BC
Chef serves contemporary version of Indigenous recipes
By Adrian Brijbassi, Victoria News | July 2024
The epiphany that sparked his dramatic decision to depart as chef of Canada’s premier luxury property took place for Murray McDonald on the edge of the land on which he was raised, doing the work he undertook to celebrate the only heritage he knew.
It was while foraging for ingredients for his dishes at the Fogo Island Inn that McDonald stood upright to stare into the North Atlantic – a body of water whose waves perpetually slap Newfoundland with salt, ocean and motivation. He recalls watching the sea and allowing a thought to slam into him like a hit of adrenaline. “Yes,” he told himself, “I am cooking Indigenous food.” Read more…
A New Native American Cuisine Is Emerging in New Mexico
Blue corn gnocchi and frybread tacos are the modern iterations of Indigenous cuisine, complete with the three sisters and New Mexico’s trademark chile peppers.
by Veronica Stoddart, Food & Wine | July 18, 2024
“Corn is very sacred to the Zunis,” says Celia Tsabetsaye, an 81-year-old Zuni Pueblo great grandmother in her kitchen on the reservation. “If you drop a kernel, you better ask for forgiveness. It’s like dropping your child.”
Tsabetsaye is showing me how to make traditional cornballs using her mother-in-law’s special blue cornmeal. As her experienced hands carefully roll the balls, she says, “I learned to cook in my grandma’s kitchen. But cornballs are only made for ceremonial purposes nowadays because the diet has become Americanized.” Read more…
Indigenous chef creates sweetgrass ice cream in partnership with frozen treats giant
Sweetgrass ice cream has a floral vanilla flavour, says chef
by Kendra Seguin, CBC News | July 12, 2024
An Owen Sound chef is bringing his Indigenous-inspired sweetgrass ice cream to one of Canada’s most iconic frozen treat manufacturing facilities.
Zach Keeshig, who is from Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation at Cape Croker Reserve, is teaming up with Chapman’s to create a limited edition ice cream flavour. Read more…
A People’s History: Native American Food Sovereignty, Explained
What is food apartheid? Learn how historical injustices led to Native food insecurity.
by Tsanavi Spoonhunter, PBS Digital Studios | June 2024
Today, many Native Americans live in food apartheid and insecurity. But it wasn’t always this way. Watch here…
Native Foods: Indigenous Texas food traditions date back thousands of years
By Robyn Ross, Texas Highways | June 28, 2024
People have lived in the area we now call Texas for at least 13,000 years and have resourcefully transformed the landscape’s plants and animals into food in all seasons. Early inhabitants hunted mammoth, horses, camels, and the Bison antiquus—a much larger forerunner of today’s animal—until the herds were supplanted by modern bison around 7,500 years ago. Indigenous people also hunted pronghorn, deer, rabbits, turkeys, and quail. They harvested persimmons, mustang grapes, and pecans; and ground acorns and mesquite pods into flour. They ate catfish, turtles, freshwater mussels, and crawfish, as well as large land snails. By about 1100, several peoples, including the Antelope Creek in the Panhandle, the Caddo in East Texas, and the Jornada Mogollon near El Paso, had made forays into agriculture. They planted crops that included, at different times, corn, beans, and squash. Read more…
‘A sanctuary’: how neglected Native American communities are organizing their own food hubs
The hubs seek to produce, store and distribute food to the one-quarter of Native Americans experiencing food insecurity
by Samuel Gilbert, The Guardian | June 6, 2024
On the Hopi reservation in the high desert of northern Arizona, construction is underway.
A dilapidated auto garage is being converted into a fully-equipped kitchen, food storage areas, dining room and an attached greenhouse. The new facilities will become the first-ever Hopi-region food hub, used to increase Indigenous access to fresh, healthy and affordable food through farm shares, farmer’s markets, agricultural workshops, seed sharing, cooking lessons and other programs. Read more…
Javelina is bringing Indigenous cuisine to Portland
The only Native pop-up restaurant in Portland brings Indigenous comfort foods and traditional first foods to the city’s fine dining scene.
by Nika Bartoo-Smith, Underscore News + ICT | April 5, 2024
Big beaded earrings glinting in the fluorescent kitchen lights, Alexa Numkena-Anderson directed her small team as they began preparing the kitchen at Street Disco in Southeast Portland on the last Wednesday night of February, hours before customers would begin to trickle in for the dinner rush.
Since November, Numkena-Anderson, enrolled Hopi and a descendant of the Yakama, Cree and Skokomish nations, and her team of three have brought Indigenous cuisine to the dining scene in Portland. Read more…
Labors of Love
Near Shiprock, Zachariah and Mary Ben nurtured their son with the healthy ancestral crops they farmed, then launched a baby food business for Indigenous children.
By Lynn Cline, New Mexico Magazine | April 03, 2024
AFTER THE BIRTH OF THEIR SON, Yabiito Yehoshzho, in 2021, Zachariah and Mary Ben became frustrated with the lack of fresh baby food at area grocery stores. So Zachariah, a sixth-generation Diné farmer, and his wife, Mary, a first-generation Hungarian American with experience in public health, started growing their own traditional foods—Navajo corn, amaranth, squash, beans, and melons. With Zachariah’s background in permaculture and traditional farming, the couple coaxed crops from his grandmother’s farm and turned them into dehydrated white-corn-based baby cereals. Little Yabiito Yehoshzho, whose name means “Water from the sky, the ground is softened with,” savored the fruits of his parents’ labor so much that the Bens launched Bidii Baby Foods to provide Indigenous children with nutritious ancestral food and reconnect families with the relationship between nurturing children and nurturing the land. Bidii Baby Foods has already fed thousands of children, mostly in New Mexico, through school programs and other organizations providing food to young children. Read more…
With bison herds and ancestral seeds, Indigenous communities embrace food sovereignty
by Jim Robbins, KFF News | Dec. 7, 2023
Behind American Indian Hall on the Montana State University campus, ancient life is growing.
Six-foot-tall corn plants tower over large green squash and black-and-yellow sunflowers. Around the perimeter, stalks of sweetgrass grow.
The seeds for some of these plants grew for millennia in Native Americans’ gardens along the upper Missouri River. It’s one of several Native American ancestral gardens growing in the Bozeman area, totaling about an acre. Read more…
A conversation with The Sioux Chef
Sean Sherman on what it means to run a “political” restaurant, and why he won’t serve frybread
by Theodore Ross, Food and Environment Reporting Network | Nov. 30, 2023
Chef Sean Sherman arrived at Owamni, which received the James Beard Foundation Award for the Best New Restaurant in the country in 2022, dressed in blue jeans, black leather clogs, and a slightly faded T-shirt. It was late September but still warm, especially by Minneapolis standards, so he only needed an unzipped hoodie on top. He kept his long, straight hair tied in two neat braids, parted in the middle. His plaits reached nearly to his waist. His voice was a calm, clear baritone that he used to speak in full, studied paragraphs. It was clear from our conversation that he is practiced at long, expansive conversations, but he showed no evidence of tiring of his subject: to acknowledge and understand the cuisine and foodways of this continent’s Indigenous peoples. Read more…
The Three Sisters
A brief look at how corn, beans and squash have sustained life and culture in Haudenosaunee communities
by Lauren J. Mapp, Off the Mapp |
Corn, beans and squash are prevalent food staples in many indigenous cultures of the Western Hemisphere, including my own: the Kanienʼkehá:ka or Mohawk nation of present-day New York and southeastern Canada.
The Three Sisters have been some of the main Haudenosaunee food staples since before European contact and their creation is found in our traditional, oral origin stories.
It is said that when the daughter of Skywoman (who fell from the sky and made our continent, known as Turtle Island) died during childbirth, five plants grew where she was buried. From her heart grew strawberries, from her head tobacco, corn from her breast, beans from her kidney and squash from her navel. Read more…
Haudenosaunee Strawberry Drink Recipe
by Lauren J. Mapp, Off the Mapp |
It’s finally strawberry season in San Diego, and what better to celebrate than with a fresh pitcher of traditional, Haudenosaunee strawberry drink?
Strawberries are an important part of the Haudenosaunee food culture, so much so that they are even mentioned in our creation story. According to one version, the Earth was created when a woman fell from the Sky World and landed on a turtle’s back. Many water animals tried to dive to find mud from under the sea, but the only one to survive was a muskrat. He brought mud up from deep below the surface of the water and put it on the turtle’s back, helping to create Turtle Island as we know it today.
When the Sky Woman died and her body was buried, various plants sprouted from the earth. The Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash came from her head; tobacco from her heart; and various medicines and strawberries from her feet. Read more…
Slow Food Turtle Island Association 