Nephi Craig’s mother is White Mountain Apache and his father is Dene Navajo. He grew up on both reservations.
Ari Carter Craig/Penguin Random House
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Ari Carter Craig/Penguin Random House
Nephi Craig, founder of Native American Culinary AssociationHe credits teaching him about eating, cooking and indigenous food with saving his life.
Craig became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After her first DUI, the judge gave her the option of three months’ probation if she agreed to get a job or go to college. That’s when he enrolled in cooking classes at Scottsdale Community College.
Craig says he initially felt like an “odd” in the classes because he was unfamiliar with terms like “bistro” and “vichyssoise.” But he also credits the classes with sparking his interest in cooking and teaching him more about native foods, including tomatoes.
“(When) I got the information that (tomatoes) were native to America, it brought a big smile to my face,” says Craig. “As a Native American in Arizona, you don’t really see yourself represented in anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So it was a nice point of validation for me that developed into a lot of other interests.”
Craig finally got a job at one of Phoenix’s top fine dining restaurants, a goal he had been working toward for years. But after exercising restraint for some time, another mistake ultimately cost him his job. He ended up in jail, where he Worked in the kitchen and learned to cook with whatever food was at hand.
He says, “I banded together with other Native Americans. And in prison, we called ourselves ‘Chiefs.’ “I think coming together to feed 7,800 prisoners in one day was really eye-opening. It showed me that I wasn’t above or below any style of cooking.”
Over the years, Craig completed nine rehabs and walked away from five others. Now sober, he works as a nutrition recovery program coordinator at the Rainbow Treatment Center, owned by the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Whiteriver, Arizona, which serves people recovering from substance abuse. In 2021, they opened Café Gozhou, a restaurant on the reservation, which is a place for the community to eat and interact. he has a new memoir Our Knives Will Save Us: The Dispatches of a White Mountain Apache Chef.
Highlights of the interview
On the ubiquity of Native American food
From major American holidays like Thanksgiving, to everyday staples like turkey, corn, squash and cranberries – all important indigenous foods. And when people ask me what dishes we make or what ways we prepare native foods differently, or the question comes up, how come I haven’t heard of Native American restaurants, or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I would usually say, “Well, you’ve been eating Native American food and dishes for as long as you can remember. It’s just that the stories aren’t told.”
All American cuisine, each region of the United States, is built on the landscape or ancestral locality of Native American cuisine and food traditions. So you might call Boston baked beans, barbecue in the American Southwest. …The bounty of hunting and fishing and agriculture of the Northwest. All of these scenarios inform our diets as everyday Americans. So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it’s pretty straightforward and simple. We love to roast them, boil them, and sometimes turn them into pies like the rest. But native foods have been around throughout time.
Why isn’t frybread indigenous?
This is not indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy that we have and when you study how food was distributed after people were put in prison, and the food that was distributed required a ration card, and you could get flour, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar. Ration lists vary from place to place, but they always contain flour and fat, and hence frybread emerges, as some call it in the southwest. And there’s great debate about where and who did it first, but if you look across Native America from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has frybread as a result of military food rations and it evolves into these food traditions that are part of our reality today. I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility and food choices, not to push it away, but to be aware of.
On working at Marie Ellen, an upscale French restaurant in Phoenix
That place really made me a very strong, young chef. I was an entremeteur at the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and do all the garnishes. And I became a plate maker and a meat cook at the meat station. And being in Arizona, a very meat-and-potatoes state, it was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was beautiful, the best of everything. …So it really means a lot to me. And when I lost that opportunity because it suddenly came and overpowered me again, it was heartbreaking. I didn’t have the words to say it at the time, but it was a debilitating loss. It probably took me five, 10, 15 years to process it.
On selling your prized Japanese knife for wine
Addiction gradually takes away everything. It is a terrible, terrible pain that makes you devalue yourself and all your possessions. …These knives were special because I received them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven-course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel in Osaka. So I treasured these knives because they were like samurai swords. These were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai. And I brought them back to America with me and I still have one of them, but I sold the rest and it was horrible.
On experiencing sexual abuse as a child
I included this part of my life not as the sole cause of addiction and dependence but as a contributing factor. …I never told anyone about the sexual assault that happened to me when I was 10 years old. I was just a small child. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview is that no one will believe me. So I just kept it with me. And when I put it away, it rotted and turned into anger, rage and embarrassment. And so when I talk about sexual abuse in my story, it’s not meant to point a finger at it, but it took me a long time to really accept that I was a victim of it, and that it didn’t determine who I was.
A lot of alcohol addiction was seen on the Native Reservation
As indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism and colonialism in different ways. The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed and built by us. And as Native American people, we have inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it’s not that we’re biologically different, it’s that we have a different legacy in confronting colonial violence in America. I think this is one of the root causes of this multifaceted monster that is addiction.
Why is his Mormon name (Nephi)
Throughout my life, I have always been faced with these big, complex webs of American history and our lifelines as Native American people. So how my family encountered organized religion and the LDS Church when they were young, my father is in the Navajo Nation, there were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and the Navajo Nation, and it was the same thing in Whiteriver on the Apache Ridge. And so both of my parents were placed in the placement program, where in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, young Native American children were taken from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, wherever the population of Mormon families was high. And my parents were raised essentially in the Mormon church until they graduated high school. And it is a big part of our lives. And so when the three of us, me and my brother, come into the picture, they decide to name me Nephi. …There are a lot of complex elements to how identity is formed and for me that’s a dimension of how that contributes to substance use, but also freeing oneself from it.
Anna Baumann and Joel Wolfram Produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper, and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
