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Before becoming a national park ranger for three summers, Linda Howard made sure to digitize photos of her daughter on her computer. One photo shows her daughter, Mariah Gladstone, in a garden with corn towering over her head, while another depicts Gladstone in the kitchen wearing a yellow smock, concocting a recipe with a ladle.

But the childhood photos are just the start of Gladstone’s cooking career that started when she was 2 years old.

After Gladstone moved into her first house, Howard gave her daughter a file folder of recipes she had written as a toddler. Every year, her mother would give her graph paper to chart out a garden for fresh vegetables such as squash and zucchinis. And during Gladstone’s time at Columbia University, Howard would ship her daughter frozen venison from Montana. Cooking started with her mom, Gladstone said. Now, she’s trying to bring it to a wider audience.

In addition to being a SUNY-ESF graduate student, Gladstone hosts the online cooking show Indigikitchen, which promotes reintroducing Indigenous foods into the diets of Indigenous people.

Diets of Indigenous people in the United States used to be full of protein and fresh produce before changing to ones filled with flour, sugar and lard, said Gladstone, who is Blackfeet and Cherokee. Indigikitchen produces recipes and short how-to videos with Indigenous foods.

“I’m not going for fancy meals. This isn’t gourmet cooking,” Gladstone said. “It takes that recipe from, ‘I could never do that’ to ‘Oh, okay, that’s easy.’”

Gladstone feels lucky that she was able to grow up in the kitchen. At first, she and her mother would bake banana bread and cookies before her mother allowed her to experiment with other recipes. Howard was fine with losing “a little” flour, eggs and milk, she said.

Jotting down recipes in marker, Gladstone created dishes ranging from desserts to stir fry. While in the kitchen, her mother would also make her practice doubling recipes and using fractions, an introduction to math even before she went to a Montessori school.

Gladstone and her mother would bake banana bread and cookies before her mother allowed her to experiment with other recipes. Courtesy of Linda Howard

Learning math in the kitchen is something that Howard attributes as a start to her daughter’s engineering career. As she grew up, cooking didn’t have a huge impact on Gladstone’s life until Columbia University when she cooked and baked as stress relief.

At Columbia, Gladstone would bake desserts like layered brownies and give them to her floormates, but she eventually started getting more involved in creating Indigenous foods while living in an Indigenous community dorm during her junior and senior years.

Gladstone first got the idea for Indigikitchen in 2016, when she took a couple of days off from her railroad engineering management job and went to an Indigenous nutrition conference. Discussions at the conference centered around health disparities within Indigenous communities caused by the limited access to traditional foods, as well as the work toward bringing healthy and affordable food into the communities.

The need to relearn information on how to prepare and grow fresh foods, and cook wild game prompted Gladstone to pitch the idea of Indigikitchen — a combination of the words Indigenous, digital and kitchen — to a room full of youth attendees. She then went home to create her first video on what she described as a “janky” camera setup. But people loved the information and kept sharing it, Gladstone said.

“I kept building on that,” she said. “Native people are resilient; we use the tools that we have access to. I’m making it for folks that didn’t grow up reading cookbooks.”

Despite the production quality of Indigikitchen improving, its mission has not changed. The program hosts one- to two-minute long videos creating dishes such as maple-glazed salmon and bison stew. Gladstone is a “Native influencer,” amassing more than 15,000 followers on Twitter, Howard said.

“Indigikitchen” has Gladstone teaching dishes like wild rice omelettes. Courtesy of Mariah Gladstone

Gladstone is now living with her boyfriend, Kenneth Cook, in a two-story house in Montana. Cook hunts, helps Gladstone film and takes film classes while Gladstone works on her graduate thesis for SUNY-ESF and creates content for Indigikitchen. Indigikitchen will eventually show animal tanning processes along with different Indigenous cooking techniques, Cook said.

“I always tell Mariah what she’s got is gold,” Cook said. “Being her own boss and stuff.”

Gladstone has also been getting constant calls and emails for gigs, said Howard, who serves as Gladstone’s booking agent. Gladstone did a TEDx Talk on Indigikitchen about the importance of an Indigenous diet. She’s also hosted virtual cooking classes.

About a month ago, Howard was participating in a food drive at the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation when a woman approached her asking if she was Gladstone’s mother. Howard responded yes, and the woman began to tell Howard how much of a fan she was of Gladstone.

“Her message is more than just cooking,” Howard said. “It’s about how we re-Indigenized our diets and how we decolonize our diets.”

Published on November 16, 2020 at 12:29 am

Contact Christopher: [email protected] | @chrisscargs