The women of the i-Collective
Kristina Stanley
Kristina Stanley ( Red Cliff, Lake Superior Chippewa) began her food journey at a very young age growing up in a family that was very involved in the community and assisted in providing various community meals each year. Having experienced health issues involving very specific dietary needs at a young age, she began to examine her relationship with food on a much deeper level. She attended Northland College and studied Ecopsychology – with a focus on Horticulture Therapy. Her studies focused around food ecosystems, food access, and how an individual’s relationship with food and the natural environment affects both physical and mental health.
Kristina has worked in the food service industry for almost 20 years, working as a line cook, pastry chef, catering director, and other various management roles. Kristina also holds an Associate’s Degree in Meeting and Event Management, and works as an independent contractor planning events and conferences. She has also worked as a chef and marketing assistant with the Intertribal Agriculture Council and has assisted in planning various food sovereignty focused summits, conferences, and pop-up events.
For the past 5 years she has been operating a small, award winning, wholesale and catering company Brown Rice and Honey, located in Madison, WI. She is currently working on launching a new business, Abaaso Foods, which will service the Fox Valley and Madison areas. Utilizing Kristina’s unique viewpoint and experience, Abaaso will be an all plant-based deli and market featuring indigenous ingredients, and tribally sourced products. You can follow Abaasofoods on Instagram or support this endeavor and follow updates at gofundme.com/abasso
Source: https://www.icollectiveinc.org/chefs-cooks
Listen to Kristina on the Toasted Sister Podcast!!
https://toastedsisterpodcast.com/2018/05/08/e32-kristina-stanley-our-diet-is-so-personal/
Tashia Hart
Tashia Hart is Anishinaabe from Red Lake, MN. She studies and teaches about wild foods in a variety of ways, is also a freelance writer, and makes birch bark and beaded jewelry. She has a biology degree from Bemidji State University, and has worked for the Red Lake Traditional Foods Program, as well as The Sioux Chef catering company, and is currently combining her loves of food, wilderness, and culture in a middle grade novel that has themes of food sovereignty, animal rights, and is set in the forests and waterways she grew up with. She currently lives in Duluth, MN with her husband, their two cats and a turtle.
Check out Tashia’s cooking show!
Source: http://www.pbs.org/food/chefs/tashia-hart/
https://www.pbs.org/video/tashia-hart-tciqxk/
Hillel Echo-Hawk
Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times
Hillel Echo-Hawk (Pawnee and Athabaskan) was born and raised in the interior of Alaska, around the Athabaskan village of Mentasta-home to the matriarchal chief and subsistence rights activist, Katie John. Watching John and other Indigenous Peoples fight for food sovereignty, as well as seeing her mother strive to make healthy, home-cooked meals for her and her six siblings has given Hillel a unique and important perspective on diet and wellness.
Hillel has a passion for local, ethically sourced and sustainable foods, all through an Indigenous lens and perspective. Echo-Hawk is dedicated to the food sovereignty of Native peoples and is committed to empowering all Indigenous Peoples by increasing knowledge of an access to traditional diets and foods. Hillel believes that food should feed not only the body, but the spirit and midshipmen's of the community. Her unique positioning and experience as an Indigenous person is making Chef Echo-Hawk a bright and rising voice in the culinary landscape.
After receiving her Bachelor's degree in Culinary Arts from Seattle Central College, Echo-Hawk has been working as a chef in some of Seattle's most innovated and popular restaurants for several years. She has also worked as a private chef, catering various events form the local Native non-profits and Native community events with pre-colonial, Indigenous meals. Hillel is a sister, aunt, daughter, and active member of her community.
Souce: https://www.icollectiveinc.org/chefs-cooks
At her new private-chef/catering company, ‘It’s no eggs, it’s no milk, it’s no beef, it’s no chicken, it’s no wheat.’ But any ingredient indigenous to North America is fair game.
By Bethany Jean Clement The Seattle Times food writer
HILLEL ECHO-HAWK wants to answer your questions, no matter what they might be — and she’s gotten some dumbfounding ones. She’s the force behind Birch Basket, a Seattle private-chef and catering company focused on indigenous-based, pre-colonization foods.
A chef and an educator, Echo-Hawk possesses the gift of patience. She speaks of the ignorance she encounters with a remarkable gentleness. “Even here in Seattle, people are like, ‘Native people are still alive?’ ” she says quietly. “Oh my God, yes.” She’s had people ask her, “So, you get a check every month, right?” Some tribes’ members do get per diem payments, she’ll explain, but not all, and not hers. She’s Pawnee, and, she says, “My tribe, we’re poor — real poor.” She’s been asked to confirm, multiple times, that she “just automatically gets into college for free?” “No. No,” she says, calmly. Even when impassioned, Echo-Hawk remains remarkably soft-spoken. (In the restaurant kitchens she’s worked in, “It’s a problem,” she notes. “They’re always like, ‘Hillel, we can’t hear you!’ ”)
Her patience, understandably, reached its end when someone once said, “Oh, wow; so you’re sober now?!” “I almost punched that person in the face,” Echo-Hawk says, still softly.
“What is Native food?” is a more tenable inquiry. Still, it’s more complicated than most people think, the question itself a reductive one. “Well, there are 562 federally recognized tribes,” Echo-Hawk notes. “So you would have to ask one of those tribes what Native food is for them.” And even for her — one person — it’s complex. “I grew up in Alaska, and I’m Pawnee, which is traditionally from the Kansas/Nebraska area. And so my Native food goes two places.”
She grew up 100 miles inland of Fairbanks, in tiny Delta Junction (“You blink and you miss it”), in a huge family. “We were always cooking,” Echo-Hawk says. She didn’t feel much connection to any culture until neighbors from Mentasta Lake village got her family spending weekends there, where matriarch Katie John was fighting for Native hunting and fishing rights. In the mid-1980s, Echo-Hawk relates, the state government was requiring licenses for Native people, whereas, “Before, it was like, you can hunt and fish whenevs.
“Katie John was like, ‘Nooooo — you guys have taken too much from us. You’ve taken my children; you’ve taken my land. You’re not going to take this away from me.”’ As a part of her effort, John held subsistence camps, “where she would teach the old ways.”
“I would kind of say that’s how I learned how to be Indian,” Echo-Hawk says. She remembers a camp where they caught hundreds of pounds of salmon from the Copper River. The smokehouses were built, and the fish was filleted. Then the Department of Fish and Game showed up, first in a helicopter and then on land. Children weren’t required to have fishing licenses. Echo-Hawk was 8. The cry went up: “Give the fish to the kids!” Her father told her to say some was hers and, incredulous to be told to lie, she did.
“That’s when I started to understand, no matter what, I will always be different,” Echo-Hawk says.
Echo-Hawk’s family was adopted into the tribe in a potlatch with “a huge ceremony — it was official, Athabascan-way.” Katie John took the cause of Native subsistence all the way. She “fought the state of Alaska for 25 years and won in U.S. Supreme Court to get those rights,” Echo-Hawk says, “and basically gave the middle finger to the state of Alaska.”
Also raised Christian, Echo-Hawk became a missionary, traveling to New Zealand, then realizing she was engaging in a form of the colonization to which her people had been subjected. She felt “disgusting.” She quit. Eventually, she landed in Seattle, where her brother-in-law encouraged her to go to culinary school, as she’d wanted to do since she was 14. She calls enrolling in the program at Seattle Central College “the best decision of my life.” Since graduating four years ago, she’s cooked at Seattle restaurants including Damn the Weather, Local 360 and the vaunted Altura.
Her company, Birch Basket, is still very new. “It’s just me, really,” she says. Indigenous-based, pre-colonization foods — “People are like, ‘What is that?’ ” she says. “It’s no eggs, it’s no milk, it’s no beef, it’s no chicken, it’s no wheat.” People ask her, “What do you make?!” “You’d be surprised,” she says. It’s healthy, it’s sustainable; any ingredient indigenous to North America is fair game. Start her talking about it, and she’ll tell you of the trade routes that brought corn from the south, how the oldest stories she knows of the Three Sisters — the nutritionally brilliant, environmentally beautiful teaming of corn with beans and squash — go back 2,000 years.
She’ll speak, softly but seriously, of the present-day debate about fry bread, how she won’t condemn its proponents — “I can’t tell you what’s good for your soul” — but that she won’t ever make it. “It came out of being forced,” she says, “because we were not allowed to go hunt and not allowed to go fish, and we were forced onto a piece of land that we didn’t want to go onto.” A pause — a long one. “And it came out of starvation,” she says. “That’s what fry bread is. That’s what it represents to me. So why do I want to feed that to my people.” It is not a question.