When Crystal Wahpepah opened Wahpepah’s Kitchen five years ago, Native food spaces were, even that recently, still hard to find. When she was a child, Wahpepah told me, she never saw or set foot inside a Native restaurant. Now the chef gets to see her community, young and old, experience a “healing connection” when they walk through the door. “We need to have our foods visible to people when it comes to talking about health and wellness,” Wahpepah said. At the same time, a Native kitchen “uplifts food producers” and the ingredients she cooks with that other chefs don’t.
Earlier this spring Wahpepah, with Amy Paige Condon, published her first cookbook, A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior. Wahpepah’s biography provides the backbone of the book. The recipes are all informed by and connected to her life story. She recounts the good memories—foraging for berries, cooking with her auntie Johnella—and contextualizes the more troubling ones within the many destructive government policies directed toward Native Americans.
