Brian Yazzie, known as Yazzie the Chef is a Navajo chef. He celebrates and promotes Indigenous American foods.
He was born in the Navajo Nation in Dennehotso, Arizona. [1] He moved to Minnesota in 2013. [2]
In 2014, he became the chef de cuisine at Sean Sherman's the Sioux Chef. [3]
In 2016, Yazzie and his wife Danielle Yazzie-Polk founded Intertribal Foodways, a catering company in St. Paul. [1] The company prepares Indigenous meals and leads demonstrations for Native American communities. [3] In 2020, he started working at Gatherings Cafe, but it shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. [1] [4]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he partnered with the Minneapolis American Indian Center to prepare hundreds of meals for elderly people and delivering them for free. [5] [4]
Yazzie is a member of I-Collective, a group of indigenous chefs, farmers, foragers, hunters, and food historians. [6] He is also involved with Slow Food and was a delegate to Terra Madre Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy and to Indigenous Terra Madre in Japan. [6]
PBS's Independent Lens made an episode of their series of shorts "alter-NATIVE: Kitchen" about Yazzie. [7]
Slow Food is an organization that promotes local food and traditional cooking. It was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986 and has since spread worldwide. Promoted as an alternative to fast food, it strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourages farming of plants, seeds, and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem. It promotes local small businesses and sustainable foods. It also focuses on food quality, rather than quantity. It was the first established part of the broader slow movement. It speaks out against overproduction and food waste. It sees globalization as a process in which small and local farmers and food producers should be simultaneously protected from and included in the global food system.
Frybread is a dish of the indigenous people of North America that is a flat dough bread, fried or deep-fried in oil, shortening, or lard.
Indigenous cuisine of the Americas includes all cuisines and food practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Contemporary Native peoples retain a varied culture of traditional foods, along with the addition of some post-contact foods that have become customary and even iconic of present-day Indigenous American social gatherings. Foods like cornbread, turkey, cranberry, blueberry, hominy, and mush have been adopted into the cuisine of the broader United States population from Native American cultures.
Terra Madre is a network of food communities. Terra Madre network was launched by the Slow Food grass roots organization, and the intent is to provide small-scale farmers, breeders, fishers and food artisans whose approach to food production protects the environment and communities. The network brings them together with academics, cooks, consumers and youth groups so that they can join forces in working to improve the food system.
Gavin Kaysen is executive chef and owner of Spoon and Stable, Bellecour Bakery, Demi, Socca, and Mara all in Minneapolis. He received the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2018. Previous to his move to Minneapolis, he served as Executive Chef and Director of Culinary Operations for Daniel Boulud in New York City, over seeing Café Boulud in Palm Beach, Toronto and New York City.
Miss Navajo Nation is a pageant that has been held annually on the Navajo Nation, United States, since 1952.
Melanie A. Yazzie is a Navajo sculptor, painter, printmaker, and professor. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Turquoise Rose is a 2007 independent drama film co-written and directed by Holt Hamilton that takes place on the Navajo Nation. Turquoise Rose was filmed primarily on the Navajo Nation in Fort Defiance, Arizona, as well as in Phoenix, Arizona. The film is one of the only American films to feature an indigenous Native American lead role for an actress, played by Navajo actress Johnson.
Two-spirit is a contemporary pan-Indian umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional third-gender social role in their communities.
Billy Luther is a Native American independent film writer, producer and director. He has made several documentaries and short films. He belongs to the Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo tribes. He is known for his movies Frybread Face and Me (2023) and Miss Navajo (2007), and the 2022 television series Dark Winds. Luther identifies as gay.
Tamara Murphy was an American chef who owned and ran the restaurant Terra Plata in Seattle. In 1994, Food & Wine named her Best New Chef. In 1995, she won the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii.
Rhiana Yazzie is a Navajo playwright, actor, and filmmaker. She is based in the Twin Cities where she founded New Native Theater in 2009.
Vincent Medina is an Indigenous rights, Indigenous language, and food activist from California. He co-founded Cafe Ohlone, an Ohlone restaurant in Berkeley, California which serves Indigenous cuisine made with Native ingredients sourced from the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas. As of 2019 he was serving on the Muwekma council, and he is Capitán, or cultural leader, of the ‘Itmay Cultural Association.
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the United States restaurant industry via government closures, resulting in layoffs of workers and loss of income for restaurants and owners and threatening the survival of independent restaurants as a category. Within a week after the first closures, industry groups representing independent restaurateurs were asking for immediate relief measures from local, state, and federal governments, saying that as many as 75 percent of independent restaurants could not survive closures of more than a few weeks. By late July, nearly 16,000 restaurants had permanently closed.
Aaron Yazzie is a Diné (Navajo) mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His work involves planetary sample acquisition and handling. He has worked on the Mars Science Laboratory, InSight, and Mars 2020 missions.
Rethink Food NYC Inc, commonly called Rethink Food or just Rethink, is a non-profit organization based in New York City. The organization was founded to address hunger in the United States by contributing to a sustainable and equitable food system. Rethink collects excess food from restaurants, grocery stores, and corporate kitchens to provide nutritious meals for people living without food security at low or no-cost. The organization expanded its operations in March 2020 to meet growing food demands amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Native American tribes and tribal communities has been severe and has emphasized underlying inequalities in Native American communities compared to the majority of the American population. The pandemic exacerbated existing healthcare and other economic and social disparities between Native Americans and other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Along with black Americans, Latinos, and Pacific Islanders, the death rate in Native Americans due to COVID-19 was twice that of white and Asian Americans, with Native Americans having the highest mortality rate of all racial and ethnic groups nationwide. As of January 5, 2021, the mortality impact in Native American populations from COVID-19 was 1 in 595 or 168.4 deaths in 100,000, compared to 1 in 1,030 for white Americans and 1 in 1,670 for Asian Americans. Prior to the pandemic, Native Americans were already at a higher risk for infectious disease and mortality than any other group in the United States.
Meals 4 Heels is a food delivery service and restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Nikeisah Newton founded the food delivery service catering to sex workers and strippers in 2019, and Meals 4 Heels began operating from Redd on Salmon Street in 2021. The company's tagline is "Pro Black, pro Brown, pro trans, pro science, pro hoe." The menu includes vegan noodle bowls. Beth Nakamura of The Oregonian described the food as "health-minded". It is a lesbian-owned business.
Louis Trevino is an American Rumsen Ohlone chef and co-founder of Cafe Ohlone. Trevino was raised in the Los Angeles area and attended UC Berkeley. He met his future partner Vincent Medina at an Indigenous languages conference in 2014.
Hacking at Leaves is a 2024 Austrian documentary film directed and written by Johannes Grenzfurthner. It explores various themes including the United States' colonial past, Navajo tribal history, and the hacker movement, through the lens of the story of a hackerspace in Durango, Colorado, during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The film was produced by monochrom.