Black Indigenous Chefs Are Reclaiming Identity Through Food — One Dish at a Time
Black Native food workers are passing down culinary traditions, restoring lost connections and feeding body and soul.
The Indigenous food movement has seen a renaissance in North America, with restaurant openings, cookbook releases and community initiatives that announce the presence, expertise and heritage of Indigenous food workers. Amidst this moment, Black Native food workers have seen both the beauty and the harshness of living at the intersection of Blackness and Indigeneity, as the dominant settler colonial culture of the United States often tries to erase or flatten all parts of their identities.
But those attempts at erasure have also provided moments of reflection and insight, and a realization that the mission of Black Indigenous food workers is profoundly spiritual and political healing work. For Stephan Oak, a Black and Lakota forager and woodworker who lives in Detroit, the threads of connection that Black Indigenous people hold in their family stories that are “steeped in violence, but also steeped in love and resistance” are also guides that allow them to connect in the past, present, and future — a shared cosmology.
Crystal Wahpepah, who is Black and Kickapoo and the executive chef and owner of Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, Calif., says that often, through representation and education, Black Native people in the food industry come to a deeper peace about their identity and heritage. At Wahpepah’s Kitchen, over cornbread dishes from the Ute and Kickapoo people, wild rice from the Great Lakes tribes and bison from the Great Plains, people often find themselves.
“I meet so many people who are Black and Native but never felt connected to their Indigenous side, and when they meet me, they start talking about it, about culture, about those things that have been lost,” she says. Wahpepah is also opening a new restaurant, A Feather and a Fork, which is also the title of her upcoming cookbook.
That loss is something felt in both Black and Indigenous communities and can often feel pronounced because of family separation through residential schools, land expulsions, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trade that broke up Black families across the country. “Because of colonial violence, there's a fractured relationship to home or your connection to your ancestors,” says Oak. “The intent of the colonizer is to stop you from looking … to accept the identity of the conditions they’ve placed on you.”
Food is one of the ways Oak and others are reclaiming autonomy over their identities, especially as governments use food as a weapon by depriving communities of affordable, culturally relevant food. Oak points out that even amidst food deserts on reservations and urban Black communities, people find ways to be more self-sufficient and connect back to the land, which helps them reconnect with the essence of who they are.
“In my Lakota culture, harvesting anything yourself makes whatever is created or made with it after have more power,” he explains. “You could harvest Timpsila, a [Lakota prairie] turnip, and in that process, the relationship you have to it, whether you eat it or make it into a tea, has more medicinal and spiritual power in it.”
Oak’s art — both in furniture and food — is about the intersection of lived experience, heritage and spirituality, something that is evident in his work with burned wood, inspired by his time as a firefighter in the Great Plains. “I want to have a connection to the things I work with as an artist, and to the things I eat,” Oak said.
Dandelion, he points out, is a powerful medicine for both Black and Indigenous people. Black enslaved people foraged the plant to sustain themselves — and even today, Black people locked away in prison forage the plant to supplement poor diets the prison provides them — and Indigenous people in North America used the stem, flower, leaves and root as medicine for centuries. “Even if it’s just a dandelion that you picked up — you held it with such care, brought it home, made a salad or tea from it, and it brought you life,” Oak says.
Brit Reed, a Black and Choctaw food sovereignty activist, agrees. “Plants and animals, those are our relatives. When you are growing, gathering, hunting or fishing your own food, you have to jump when the land says jump, because if you don’t understand the land and what it’s saying to you, then you may have lost your chance for that entire year.”
However, through colonization and separation from our lands — the Great Migration was once such severance for Black people in the South, a severance from the traditional skills of farming — even Black Indigenous people struggle to remember how to listen to the land.
That’s why Charity Blanchett, a Yup’ik and Black woman, founded The Dipping Spoon Foundation in 2019 to grow the next generation of Black Indigenous food workers and to help deepen their relationships to land. This idea is deeply connected to her own family story. Her father, David Blanchett Sr., recalls that his mother always talked about moving to Alaska after she saw an Ebony Magazine story in the ’60s about Black people starting farms in Alaska, which only became illegally annexed as a U.S. state in 1959.
So when David moved to Alaska in the 1970s, met Charity’s mother, Rev. Martha Blanchett, and began immersing himself in Native culture, he too found a freedom in land and food.
“In Alaska, we have the bush, which is just totally rural, very cut off. And in the bush, you're living off the land and your own persistence, and the abundance of whatever God provides,” Blanchett Sr. explains. He learned how to hunt moose and make frybread, and he loved eating akutaq, a Yup’ik ice cream made of snow, condensed milk, animal fat like caribou or seal (modern versions use vegetable shortening), and a variety of tundra berries like salmonberries (atsalugpiak), blackberries (t’an’gerpiit) and fresh blueberries (Surat).
“Back home in Alaska, we live a subsistence lifestyle,” Charity says. “We live off of the land, the sky, the ocean,” adding that not only is this cultural, but necessary, as most rural and Indigenous areas in Alaska are food deserts where basic groceries are expensive, partly because over 80% of Alaska is only accessible by boat or plane.
Raised in suburban Alaska but rooted in her mother’s rural village of Tuntutuliak, Blanchett says her move to New Orleans clarified that the Black and Indigenous liberation movements are inextricable, and that food sovereignty is at the center of those movements. In New Orleans, she learned about how Black farmers, hunters and foragers were disenfranchised, how Black people were put on government subsidy food like Indigenous people, food that wasn’t culturally resonant or healthy. “In rural Alaska, Indigenous people mostly live in food deserts, and the Black New Orleans neighborhood I live in is also a food desert.”
Blanchett’s community focus is common among Black Native food workers. “When you're an Indigenous chef, it's rule No. 1 that you work within your community,” says Wahpepah, adding that Wahpepah’s Kitchen has become a teaching kitchen, allowing young food workers of color to learn how to cook Indigenous food.
Wahpepah is Kickapoo from what’s now called Oklahoma. The Kickapoo, like many tribes, were forcibly displaced from their original lands near the Great Lakes region. Being from a displaced tribe, Wahpepah says, makes the work of memory-keeping and preserving all the more critical. “Our food comes with a lot of education, because our people can’t survive if we don't pass this food and land knowledge down,” she says.
Blanchett echoes the sentiment. “Our traditional pathways are what have kept us alive. And if we do not share them and get them in a textbook or get them written down somewhere, where are they gonna go? How are we going to survive?”
Brit Reed, a Black Choctaw woman and food sovereignty activist, says the dominant culture often rewards the chefs who stand at the helm of award-winning restaurants, but that giving credit to the people and families in communities carrying the light of these traditions is essential. “There are professionally trained people, but at the same time, I feel like we can't discount the people in our communities who are on the ground, cooking for people,” Reed says. “Whether they get highlighted or not, they are the keepers of that food knowledge.”
And as the changing climate threatens our relationships with the land, Black Native food workers prepare to buckle in to serve their communities. As Blanchett says, “My Yup’ik name is Qalutaq, and it means ‘dipping spoon.’ The literal meaning of dipping spoon is, you dip into the water; the water is given to everyone; it grows and keeps going. And once I harnessed that, once I dipped into my own water, once I dipped into myself, that's when I realized that I was not dipping into the water for white people.
“I'm not here to fix their mess,” Blanchett says. “I'm here to steward this next dipping spoon into water.”
Nylah Iqbal Muhammad is a two-time James Beard-nominated food writer. Her work focuses on Black, Indigenous and South Asian foodways, as well as hunting, sustainability and food sovereignty.
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Black Americans are connected to the land in so many, many ways. "You have jump when the land says jump!"
This is what my soul writes about.