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PHOENIX — Skoden Coffee & Tea is an Indigenous-led and queer coffee shop centering and celebrating Diné creatives in Arizona.
The business is run by a collective of Diné family and friends including Kalynn Yazzie, Diné, Jordan Manuelito, Diné, Isabel Anzures, Diné, Natasha John, Diné, and her wife Sabrina Sugimura, Japanese.
The coffee cart tucked in the front corner of a furniture and design store named, For the People has become a space to enjoy art with your coffee.
Natasha John credits her wife, Sabrina for most of the design within Skoden.
“You see these curtains, these drapes here, you see little things like coffee cups with the spackle on them … you always see people at Jinjeh drinking out of these. We have an old Folgers can here. All of this was all intentional.”
The sights and sounds are reminiscent of grandma’s kitchen where coffee is always brewing and ingredients are medicine.
The menu here is a part of a matriarchal lineage from the blue corn pastries down to the washi-taped notes on the cups such as “land back” or “skoden,” the morphology of “lets go then.”
Aside from that, it is also where people put innovation at the forefront.
“So what we like to do is follow the seasons and what’s in season, like the produce and we do that by doing some research and going back to who is growing stuff on the Navajo reservation as well and we do our research around here to see there’s small companies around us.”
The coffee shop honors the journey of reconnection, reclamation, and restoring the balance back to mother earth.
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