Dan Ninham
Special to ICT
BANCROFT, Nebraska — The Cultural Connections summer youth camp at the Neihardt Center seemed like any other camp on a late June morning.
Native girls and boys from elementary to high school were hustling and bustling with activities from Indigenous games to arrow-making to listening to a presenter talk about the parts and uses of a buffalo.
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When lunch time arrived, the campers gathered outside to Native foods and learn more from the towering Indigenous chef wearing traditional clothing, including a gustoweh on his head.
It’s one of the things chef Anthony L. Warrior loves to do — to educate and promote Native American food revitalization and traditional food ways with Native communities.
“I was raised in kitchens with my mother,” Warrior told ICT. “My own health issues helped to motivate me to learn what we as Natives once had for health and wellness. I have always been inspired by history, so learning about how we as Natives sustained ourselves and our ways of life drives me to learn more about behaviors and customs linked to our ways of life…
“During my younger years, I witnessed many tribes that celebrated the food through dances, feasts, and spiritual connection,” he said. “In the last 20 years, I see the absences of that connectivity coming to a critical point of losing our attachment to our Mother Earth.”
Warrior, or Ma-te-yi-ma-pe-to, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and also Absentee Shawnee of Oklahoma and Sicangu Lakota, is a celebrated chef and owner of Warrior’s Palate Catering and Consultation.
He also serves as the human resources director at Nebraska Indian Community College in Macy, Nebraska, in the heart of the Omaha Nation, and has worked as a chef for the Seneca Nation and for the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino Resort.
He is also author of a cookbook, “Warriors Palate Catering Recipes,” which includes such recipes as wildberry dumplings, bison meatloaf, breakfast blue corn mush, and Three Sisters soup.
This year marked Warrior’s second to attend the Cultural Connections camp at the Neihardt Center on the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site, which was established in Bancroft, Nebraska, at the former home of Neihardt, Nebraska’s Poet Laureate in Perpetuity. Neihardt was author of “Black Elk Speaks, Cycle of the West,” and other works of poetry and prose.
Rediscovering lifeways
The camp lunch was set up as an outdoor picnic, with bowls of food stretched along the middle of a string of picnic tables.
Among the foods presented were sage-roasted leg of bison with sweet potato, spring squash with Ukwakhwe white corn, smoked turkey with maple and blueberry wild rice, pickled hominy in maple-berry vinaigrette, fire-roasted mushrooms, Cherokee yellow rice pilaf, Kohnastole white corn, and wood-fired bison sliders with charred corn and red bean salad. Desserts included chocolate corn pudding with fresh berries, Kohnastole white corn and honey cake with berries, and dark chocolate, peanut butter and toasted quinoa bark.
Warrior has been a regular at the Neihardt Center the past few summers. He prepares, cooks and serves Indigenous foods at lunch time to the summer camp youth, but he also shares stories about the significance of eating, being Indigenous and using Indigenous languages.
He could be mistaken for a member of one of the Six Nations, since he wears the gustoweh, a traditional headdress often worn by men during the longhouse ceremonies. He was gifted it by a Mohawk friend and it has been one of his trademarks in attire while on the job.
“The gustoweh was a blessing from Mohawk artist Toteks Thomas,” Warrior said. “I was employed by the Seneca Nation of New York and the Akwesasne Mohawk of New York and I was treated like family. I also would frequent the longhouse ceremonies throughout the years along with singing practice to learn and share songs.”
He believes strongly that Native communities should return to their traditional foods and lifeways.
“I have seen many feast-tables, funeral observances, and naming ceremonies that are not utilizing our cultural foods, and instead are being replaced with processed and fast foods,” Warrior said. “We have to return to our tribal food pathways.”
Chris Stogdill, special projects coordinator for Cultural Connections, is a leader of the weekday summer camp program for youth from the local and regional Omaha, Ho-Chunk, Santee Sioux and other tribal nation communities.
The camp is designed to “provide awareness and access to culturally relevant student opportunities,” Stogdill said.
Warrior was asked to prepare and discuss the noon meals during camp, and to provide a food sovereignty workshop that was held the week after the summer camp to provide staff and students an opportunity to learn about the history and traditions of Native American food and preparation.
“He is passionate about sharing his knowledge and skills with the next generation of students,” Stogdill said. “His stories and skills provide insight and inspiration about learning traditional ways.”
Warrior told ICT that it’s important to reach the younger generations.
“We are attempting to provide a tribal connection to youth that live away from their homelands, or are not connected to the tribal communities on a daily basis,” he said. “The program has included an educational platform on teaching the youth about our food offerings to the world, healthy eating behaviors, and food and medicine benefits of our native growing and harvesting practices.”
He continued, “My overall mission is to promote growers and seed keepers to produce our sacred seeds for healthy lifestyle offerings while establishing the spiritual respect for our foods.”
Learning from the ancestors
The message that Warrior hopes to send is in the stories he shares wholeheartedly with his words and spirit.
“The stories I like to share with the youth campers, is my personal struggle of being diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 18,” Warrior said. “I also share how my future was shaped by understanding that the disease was incurable and was most likely linked to genetics and that by being Native I was at a higher risk of living with it for the rest of my life.”
But his learning didn’t stop there.
“I learned later in life that I was believing a lie that was not true, and that, in fact, the foods we should be eating with the eating behaviors of our ancestors was actually the cure for many diseases,” he said.
“Food is medicine if eaten and sourced properly,” he said. “I also share that we as a society are fighting addiction not only with alcohol and drugs, which are behavior derivative of years of improper nutrition, but with substance abuse in the form of sugar, salt, and fat.”
He continued, “We are fighting the craving each and every day from the time we wake up to the time we rest. Our bodies are constantly fighting to rid itself of the hyper-processed chemicals in our preserved foods. The final product is a lifetime of depressed mental and immune systems.”
Warrior is a self-taught cook who benefited from mentors in and out of the kitchen.
“I have had too many mentors to count,” he said. “Unfortunately, most of them have passed, from Mvskoke grandmothers, making sofke, sour cornbread, to Zuni relatives explaining how the food has evolved…
“Most recently, our Six Nations people are revitalizing their food even against the will of the USDA,” he said. “My travels across Turtle Island have brought many into my path. I celebrate many of our newer chefs who are bringing our efforts to the forefront.”
Native people are also learning to accept the ways of their ancestors, he said.
“In the Great Plains, I hear that a lot of our community members are hesitant to eat bison or game meats,” Warrior said. “With my extensive ability to season and flavor the dishes, it’s exciting to see them try the food and watch their faces as they enjoy the cultural foods.”
But he also shared an uneasiness that some tribal leaders may not be following the right road.
“Unfortunately we are seeing these leaders implement practices that may not be Native to their people but what seems to fit at the time,” he said. “We will always evolve as a population, but balancing spiritual with modern ways can get scary and may be uninformed and damaging to our future generations. Words like decolonize, sovereignty, and Indigenize are driving words but may lead to unfavorable consequences.”
‘Culturally empowering’
Some of Warrior’s travels in Haudenosaunee, which translates to mean “people of the longhouse,” took him to Wisconsin among the Oneida. Steve and Becky Webster, Oneida citizens and the owners of the nonprofit Ukwakhwa, which translates to “our foods,” are among two leaders of Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives.
Becky Webster recalls meeting Warrior more than a few times.
“We met him when we went to Iowa State University to consult with them on their Three Sisters Soil Study,” she said. “We went down there a couple times. He cooked for us both times, using Indigenous ingredients. It was phenomenal! He also came down to our farmstead to visit once. We’re looking forward to more opportunities to collaborate with him.”
Another fan is the legendary athlete Billy Mills, an Olympic gold medalist and co-founder of the nonprofit Running Strong for American Indian Youth. Mills was featured at a recent event that Warrior catered for the Society of American Indian Dentistry in Omaha.
Warrior said he prepared bison-stuffed sweet peppers, smoked walleye salad on blue corn fritters, wild rice with charred corn and roasted tomato salad in a berry maple vinaigrette, hen of the woods mushrooms, turtle bean and toasted quinoa pilaf, and dried berry and quinoa chocolate bark.
Mills took notice.
“His presentation and dinner was awesome,” Mills told ICT. “He presented himself so professionally and culturally empowering.”
Warrior said the highlight of the dinner, however, was perhaps that his mother was able to talk with Mills.
“The best thing about it, besides the meal, was my mother, who was my inspiration to cook, got to visit with Billy Mills after 47 years from when they first met,” he said.
Looking ahead
Warrior said he is continuing to set goals as he moves on his empowered journey with Indigenous foods. His goals include continued research in tribal food systems, developing an updated reference guide for tribal historians to document and preserve foraging, medicinal, and recipe analysis.
He is also working to share his knowledge.
“The cookbook is a first-ever of me recording any of my recipes and cultural connections,” he said. “For the future I hope to build off of the recipes and food guides for many of the tribal unique foods.”
He is also working to source local products in a three-state area to meet the demand.
“This is proving to be a challenge as production rates cannot fully meet my demand of producing enough food for about 1,200 people a month,” he said.
“My future hopes are to have enough growers and producers to supply the demands of many of our community schools for a proper addition to the farm-to-school table push. But these efforts will be all for nothing if we cannot change the eating behaviors that our current legislation and beliefs adhere to,” he said.
“We need to eat more nutrient-rich foods and less highly processed foods, in turn leading to less consumption of nutrient-lacking foods.”
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