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Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef - Hardcover

Craig, Nephi

 
9780593831908: Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059383190X ISBN 13: 9780593831908
Verlag: Penguin LLC US, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Named a nonfiction book “Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer” by the New York Times

From Indigenous chef Nephi Craig, a searing personal and cultural reckoning that demonstrates the power of food to heal intergenerational wounds

At just eighteen years old, Nephi Craig was facing a felony charge that could have put him in prison for years. Having struggled with substance abuse throughout his teens, his life had come to a dizzying halt. So when a judge ordered three years of probation instead—on the condition he attend work or school—Craig took it as an opportunity for a new lease on life. Not long after, he enrolled in a culinary arts program a few hours from Whiteriver, Arizona, where he had grown up on the White Mountain Apache Tribe Reservation. Expecting little more than a means to an end, Craig quickly discovered a talent and passion for cooking. He also experienced a profound dissonance as the only Indigenous person in the kitchen, preparing European recipes that—disguised by their French and Italian names—relied on ingredients native to the Americas.

Craig untangled the buried histories of Indigenous cultivars such as tomato, cacao, and amaranth, each one a portal into possibility as well as a marker of the violent legacy of colonization. As he did so, he found new ways to honor his Apache and Navajo roots and build Indigenous food sovereignty. His journey led him around the world, from top fine-dining restaurants in the United States to high-profile banquets in Brazil, England, Germany, and Japan. All the while, Craig wrestled with addiction, entering one treatment center after another in the hopes that he could get—and remain—sober.

In the heat, frenzy, and collaborative energy of restaurant kitchens, Craig found a lifeline. But when he was faced with the difficult decision of choosing between a career-defining executive chef job and an opportunity to serve his community back on the Rez, he realized his true vocation. Interweaving personal reflection with illuminating cultural insight, Our Knives Will Save Us offers a vision of hope: one where food is decolonized and cooking is a pathway to healing for all of us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nephi Craig is the executive chef of Café Gozhóó in Whiteriver, Arizona, on the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and an advanced certified relapse prevention specialist (ACRPS) and behavioral health technician (BHT) currently serving as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the Rainbow Treatment Center. Craig is the founder of the Native American Culinary Association (NACA), an organization that is dedicated to the research, refinement, and development of Native American cuisine. His work has been recognized in national and international publications such as Newsweek, Forbes, Food & Wine, and The Guardian.

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ONE

Sumac Berries, Acorn Stew, and the Force

I was born in the northeastern part of Arizona, the ancestral homeland of the White Mountain Apache people. Nestled along the foothills of our sacred mountains, my hometown of Whiteriver is the largest community on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, with several thousand residents spread out across dozens of small housing tracts.

Like every other Indigenous community in the United States, Whiteriver is a place steeped in tragedy, violence, and hardship. It's situated just down the road from the remnants of the fort where the U.S. military launched its campaign to stamp out the Native American renegades of the so-called Apache Wars. At the same time, Whiteriver is also a beautiful and magical place, encompassing the wettest watershed in Arizona, where blue spruce, pine, cedar, and oak color our world, giving us all four seasons.

To a kid, it was paradise.

Our family of five-Mom, Dad, my older brother Dustinn, baby brother Shiloh, and I-lived in a neighborhood called Whiskey Flats, which got its name from Old Man Whiskey, who had once owned the surrounding land and now lived alone next door. I didn't know much about him, apart from the fact that he kept his house lit with an old kerosene lantern and only spoke Apache. My parents both grew up speaking their Native tongues-Apache and Navajo-but they never formally taught us their language. As teenagers, both of my parents had been sent away from the Rez to Utah as part of the Mormon placement program, finishing high school in predominantly white schools. I know they watched their own parents struggle to learn English and communicate with white people, and they wanted to equip their sons to succeed in a changing world.

The brick houses on our street were all built in the 1970s, so when I was born, in February of 1980, they were still pretty new, with tidy yards, recently planted trees, and perfectly smooth sidewalks. From the outside, our house, where my mom still lives, looked just like all the others on the street, but inside it was different. My dad built a beautiful glass-front cabinet in our dining nook and replaced the linoleum flooring in the living room with soft, forest green carpet. Our house was cozy and welcoming, a gathering place for birthday celebrations, graduation parties, and holidays.

During the eighties, the neighborhood was bursting with little Apache kids, and we all traveled as a pack. Floyd and Lloyd, the twin brothers who lived directly across the street, became my best friends, and this tall, smiley kid named Delmore, who was two years older than me, became like an older brother once Dustinn got too cool for us.

Delmore's mom worked at Whiteriver's only movie theater, and she'd sneak us in and hook us up with free popcorn. The movies we watched in that little theater-everything from Gremlins to The Breakfast Club-offered a window into the American world, teaching us that the nuclear family was the most important social unit and exposing us to suburban neighborhoods with big, fancy houses and shiny, new cars. We were ingesting the fantasy of the American dream long before we understood that that dream wasn't meant for us, that it had been built on our people's destruction.

I remember watching Red Dawn-about a group of teenagers who fight to defend their town from a Russian invasion-and then pretending the same thing was going to happen to us, training in the woods with my buddies. Of course, none of us were old enough to pick up on the irony of the film's tagline-"No foreign army has ever occupied American soil . . . until now."

Most days after school, my friends and I would run around in the hills behind our houses, but in summertime, our favorite activity was sneaking down to the river where our people had camped for centuries. We called it Down Below, pronounced as one word-Downbelow.

Everyone would tell their parents they were going to someone else's house to hang out, and, when my mom wasn't looking, I'd stuff my backpack with a towel, a military-issue canteen, and a can of Beanee Weenees or sardines. I always carried my pocketknife and a lighter with me just in case, like my father had taught me.

We'd run down to the cattle guard next to the two-lane county road that cut through the reservation, and, when the coast was clear, we'd duck into the bushes and clamber through the drainage ditch to the other side. After maneuvering through clumps of jumping cactuses and cholla, yucca, juniper, and oak, we'd scoot down these huge lava rocks on our butts before turning around and climbing down backward, feeling into the foot holes. Once we were all down, we'd stash our bags under a bush and make our way barefoot across slippery basalt. We spent hours Downbelow splashing around in the cold water, the orange sun pouring through the towering ponderosas.

The river taught us how to be White Mountain Apache: strong and self-sufficient. Once we were done swimming, we dried off and collected kindling, making a fire so we could warm up the tinned rations we'd packed. On the way back home, we'd look for a stand of skunkbush to pluck tsínk'ózhé. The sour pop of the native red sumac berries made our lips pucker just like they probably did to our ancestors when they went foraging. My mom loved tsínk'ózhé, so I always made sure to carry an empty Ziploc in my pack so I could bring some home. The fruit reminded her of her childhood, she'd told me once, when she and her sister used to collect berries, which the "older ladies" would use to make refreshing Apache Kool-Aid.


My mother, Mariddie Johnson Craig, was my first cooking instructor and so much more. From a young age, I saw the impact she had on other people in our community and how much they respected her. She treated our neighbors and the people in our community with love, generosity, and kindness, delivering food to Old Man Whiskey-who was crazy about her pineapple upside-down cake-and organizing a caroling group during Christmas, where she’d hand out small paper sacks containing fruit, hard candy, and hazelnuts and almonds still in their shells.

My mother is someone who chooses her words carefully; people have always leaned in to hear what she had to say. She bought me my first journal, encouraging me to record events and feelings and emphasizing that memories and thoughts were very important. I'd see her at the kitchen table, filling her own journal with her beautiful handwriting. She had volumes and volumes of stories from her life written down.

A nurturing presence to everyone around her, my mother was the oldest of five children. She grew up in a home impacted by crushing poverty and hardship; even before her parents died from complications related to alcoholism when she was in her early twenties, she held the family together, acting as the matriarch and helping raise her two younger siblings who had fetal alcohol syndrome. She taught herself to cook, and by the time she became a mother herself, she knew how to make a delicious meal-even when there was very little in our fridge or pantry.

Some of my happiest early memories involve baking with my mom, leafing through her copy of The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, with its glossy, golden-brown soufflé on the cover, looking for a recipe to make with whatever we had on hand. During one of these kitchen sessions, she told me how she'd discovered her love of baking when she lived with her foster family in Utah. Some of the recipes we prepared, like my favorite chocolate chip cookies, actually came from her foster mother, a friendly, soft-spoken white woman with crinkled eyes whom we kids called Grandma Bush. I imagine that, for my mother, who grew up in a chaotic environment, Grandma Bush's home would have...

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Verlag
Penguin LLC US
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059383190X
ISBN 13 
9780593831908
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Libri GmbH
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
Hessen
Deutschland