PHOENIX – Since she was 3 years old, Mariah Gladstone says, she has had a passion for food.

After graduating from high school in northwest Montana, she studied environmental engineering at Columbia University in New York. During summers, she returned to her Blackfeet Nation home where she realized how disconnected Indigenous communities were from their traditional food systems.

“After I graduated college, I would take vacation days from my real world job to go to food sovereignty conferences,” said Gladstone, who is Blackfeet and Cherokee. “At one of those conferences, I said, ‘Someone really needs to start a cooking show about Indigenous foods. I think I’m just going to do that.’”

Indigikitchen was born. The online cooking show is a combination of content on YouTube as well as recipes shared on its website. The foods contain Native ingredients like berries, corn, squash and wild rice.

Food sovereignty is a concept coined in 1996 by La Via Campesina, a global movement of farmers that recognizes the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.

On her website, Gladstone emphasizes the importance of the recipes for Indigenous people.

“I want to connect people with information about sustainable harvesting methods, planting knowledge, sustainable hunting and, of course, the recipes and the food that are ways of using our ancestral knowledge in our modern lives,” she said.

Gladstone spreads this knowledge by working with Native farmers and fishermen in the hopes that it not only restores their businesses, but the land management and traditional ecologies.

While based in Montana, Indigikitchen has made its way across the country. Gladstone is a popular speaker with groups in the Southwest and the Great Lakes region who hire her for educational lectures, cooking classes and school residencies. Gladstone also has ties to Canada, where she has formed relationships with other nations in the Blackfoot Confederacy.

These connections have motivated Gladstone to continue her work with Indigikitchen, and she said she’s grateful to use a tool like social media in order to reach the right audiences.

“Indian Country is small and Facebook is a digital telegraph, so it has a way of reaching a lot of communities very quickly where everyone shares my recipes and utilizes them,” she said. “The more people I see using those recipes, the bigger difference it makes to support Native producers as well as healthy nutrition in our communities.”

Among the recipes on her website are Three Sisters Soup, which uses corn, beans and squash; pemmican, a mixture of dry buffalo meat, dried cranberries and blueberries and grass-fed beef tallow; sunflower maple cookies; and mesquite blue cornbread.

Connecting Indigenous people with the food they ate before European foods were introduced into their diets is a movement gaining popularity. According to the National Indian Council on Aging, Native foods included seeds, nuts, corn, beans, chile, squash, wild fruits and greens, herbs, fish and game.

People like Gladstone call these “pre-contact foods,” and they emphasize the importance for Indigenous people to celebrate their food culture and improve their health by returning to a more traditional diet.

That is especially important for the Navajo Nation, which the USDA classifies as a “food desert.” There are only 14 grocery stores for a land mass of 29,000 square miles, forcing people to travel a long way to buy nutritious foods.

Another Native food and lifestyle blogger who promotes Diné, or Navajo, recipes is Alana Yazzie. On her website, thefancynavajo.com, she posts recipes for blue corn waffles, sumac berry smoothies and blue corn oatmeal from her cookbook, “The Modern Navajo Kitchen.”

On her Instagram, which has 29,000 followers, she encourages others to embrace their Indigenous culture through recipes, fashion and gardening.

She started her website in 2014 with a goal of showing easy ways to blend Indigenous ingredients into everyday dishes.

“There’s a bit of art to it because you can’t just throw things in without knowing the food science around it, but it’s not too difficult,” she said.

Yazzie, who was born in New Mexico, said she previously stocked up on ingredients like blue corn when she “went home to Navajo land.” She lives in Phoenix now and finds it easier to buy items online because of the growing number of Native small businesses that offer local ingredients.

Since her cookbook was published in October 2024, Yazzie has stayed busy with cooking events and demonstrations. “That’s really my passion,” she said. “I want people to implement these recipes into their daily life so that we can continue our traditions.”

In September, Indigikitchen’s Gladstone will be speaking at the Flagstaff Festival of Science at the invitation of Kelly Saganey, who is Diné, or Navajo, and a festival board member.

Gladstone will talk about Indigenous ecological stewardship, the cultural significance of Native foods and bridging Indigenous and Western science.

Saganey said she found Gladstone through the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance’s Instagram account and believed it would be beneficial to have a member of the Indigenous community with a science background be a featured speaker at the 10-day festival.

“Since our community in Flagstaff has a high Native American population, I just want the little kids out there to be able to see a scientist with a Native background. And I think it’s also cool that if you go for a degree in the STEM field, you don’t have to work at a big corporation. You can do what Mariah did with Indigikitchen and start your own project,” she said.

The Flagstaff Festival of Science begins September 19, and Gladstone will be the first Indigenous keynote speaker that evening.

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Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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