{"id":61384,"date":"2025-02-19T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/civileats.com\/?p=61384"},"modified":"2025-02-18T16:11:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T00:11:42","slug":"an-alaska-native-chef-builds-foodways-for-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/civileats.com\/2025\/02\/19\/an-alaska-native-chef-builds-foodways-for-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"An Alaska Native Chef Builds Foodways for the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/div>

As Hurricane Helene made its way up the East Coast last October, Rob Kinneen tracked the storm from his home in Durham, North Carolina. When lashing winds and heavy rains began battering the state and reports started coming in of disastrous flooding throughout Appalachia, Kinneen knew he needed to act.<\/p><\/div>

\n

\u201cI drove up to this small town, Swannanoa, with my apron and my knife,\u201d he says, \u201cand within minutes of arriving at the commissary kitchen that had been set up, I was cutting up vegetables.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kinneen, an innovative Tlingit chef, has dedicated much of his professional life to sharing his knowledge of Alaska foodways, focusing on local, sustainable ingredients and helping the public understand the benefits of those foods. It was second nature for him to jump in to help.<\/p>\n

“Rob\u2019s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to food relief efforts, healthy, culturally relevant foods are so important,\u201d says Kinneen, whose jovial nature is reflected in the easygoing smile he\u2019s donning more often than not.<\/p>\n

He put his culinary skills to use that day and for many afterward, helping prep big batches of roasted squash and cabbage-apple slaw to be distributed alongside braised beef and pork. He was heartened to see that visitors to the makeshift pantry\u2014many of whom had lost everything and were living in tents or cars\u2014maintained a positive mood.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though we were just weeks out from a catastrophic event that washed away people\u2019s homes, there was still this uplifting sense of community and camaraderie,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt\u2019s a good reminder that food relief, which has become increasingly political and bureaucratic, is really about basic humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Kinneen<\/a>, food insecurity isn\u2019t just a worst-case scenario\u2014it\u2019s a reality he witnessed while growing up in Alaska. Then, as now, Indigenous communities depend heavily on subsistence hunting and fishing<\/a>, maintaining traditional lifeways while blunting the exorbitant cost of groceries<\/a> in the state, particularly for fresh foods. This can mean the gathering of land and sea plants such as berries, beach asparagus, kelp, and black seaweed as well as hunting for whales, seals, and walruses.<\/p>\n<\/div>

\"A<\/a>

Tlingit Chef Robert Kinneen’s bison flank steak with tepary bean salad and juniper-epazote sauce. (Photo credit: Grace Bowie, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

\n

Many of the state\u2019s isolated, rural villages are reachable only by plane and are hit hard when disaster strikes, even if the catastrophes are far away. Sept. 11, the 2016 Old Iliamna earthquake<\/a> south of Anchorage, and the pandemic all created food shortages and demonstrated the fragility of the food system in Alaska, where an estimated 95 percent of food is imported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery decade, something has disrupted the [Alaska] ecosystem, and people have been stuck without access to food,\u201d says Kinneen, highlighting the importance of subsistence hunting and fishing. \u201cAlaska also has limited emergency rations, so if people don\u2019t have the resources to [meet their own needs], it can be really debilitating.\u201d Early on, he learned the value of gathering and sharing local food within the community, and of developing the skills that enabled people to feed themselves and others.<\/p>\n

Kinneen was born in the 3,000-person town of Petersburg, on an island in Southeast Alaska. His connection to community, food, land, and water grew from family outings to dig clams and gather wild blueberries, which sparked an early interest in cooking. As a teen, he moved with his family to Anchorage, Alaska\u2019s most populous city, with some 287,000 residents.<\/p>\n

There, he got his first experiences in professional kitchens, though admittedly in \u201clackluster\u201d cafes and nondescript restaurants. \u201cI\u2019ve wanted to be a chef for as long as I can remember,\u201d Kinneen says, adding that he \u201cbarely graduated high school\u201d but that a culinary program teaching classic French techniques solidified his passion for cooking.<\/p>\n

After high school, thanks to the influence of a culinary instructor and out of a yearning to make something of himself beyond his home state, Kinneen traded Anchorage for upstate New York, to attend the Culinary Institute of America. \u201cFor me, the biggest culture shocks were the sheer mass of population and the disconnect from land,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In New York, he was exposed to foods he\u2019d never tasted before. He also encountered myriad misconceptions that people held about Alaska\u2014that it was a food \u201cdesert,\u201d for instance. Kinneen had never experienced that, nor had his Tlingit ancestors, who lived off the land and sea for millennia. He decided his path would be to set the record straight about Alaska Native foodways, by sharing stories about his lived experiences alongside the rich flavors of his culture, in restaurants, at special events, and through recipes online.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should be mapping today\u2019s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cAll the Indigenous communities across Alaska were thriving pre-colonialization,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are petroglyphs and remnants of fish traps that show that we were not just surviving, but thriving. That even goes for places with a harsh climate, like Utqiagvik, where it could be 30 degrees below zero and you don\u2019t see the sun for three months.\u201d<\/p>\n

After culinary school, Kinneen cut his teeth in restaurant kitchens from Louisiana to North Carolina before returning to Alaska for a 15-year stint, eager to better connect with his Tlingit ancestry and showcase the state\u2019s culinary bounty. That took shape as multiple high-profile chef gigs in restaurants, his Fresh Alaska Cookbook<\/a>, and a web video series<\/a> designed to demystify life in the Far North. The series documents Kinneen\u2019s travels across the state to meet with knowledge keepers and prepare contemporary takes on traditional foods.<\/p>\n

For instance, his posole<\/a> recipe swaps pork with richly flavorful seal meat in this classic Mexican stew, bringing together food traditions from across Turtle Island, as many tribal communities call North America. His rockfish fumet<\/a> infuses a favorite French soup with important Southeast Alaska ingredients, including black seaweed, yarrow greens, and wild parsley\u2014all topped with clarified seal oil, which Kinneen says is similar, when freshly rendered, to a heady extra-virgin olive oil.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a>

Tlingit chef Rob Kinneen, left, with Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman. (Photo courtesy of Rob Kinneen)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

Those dishes reflect a harmony between past and present, and are an acknowledgment of modern Alaska Native communities where traditional ecological knowledge<\/a> is alive and well.<\/p>\n

Kinneen\u2019s approach and expertise made him a natural fit as outreach director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman<\/a>\u2019s nonprofit, NATIFS<\/a> (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), which aims to promote Indigenous food knowledge and access. Kinneen\u2019s role is very much a continuation of his lifelong efforts, but on a larger scale. He travels often to visit tribal nations across the country, learning about and uplifting their food sovereignty efforts and helping preserve longstanding culinary traditions.<\/p>\n

That work, both through the nonprofit and on his own, has led him to the White House for the annual Tribal Summit<\/a>, which brings together leaders from the federal government and tribal nations to strengthen nation-to-nation relationships and support tribal sovereignty and self-determination.<\/p>\n

For the past two years at the summit, he has organized Indigenous-focused feasts for hundreds of attendees, featuring dishes like turkey tamales, ahi poke, and three sisters<\/a> salad with corn, beans, and squash. Last year, he traveled to Alaska\u2019s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge<\/a>, tapped by the Wilderness Society<\/a> to spend a week cooking with ingredients that existed before colonization\u2014blue corn, wild rice, and cranberry pancakes for breakfast and maple-braised bison with roasted hearty vegetables and quinoa for dinner\u2014for a group of 20 people in the remote Brooks Range<\/a>. His setup wasn\u2019t much more than a transportable Coleman camping stove, a double propane burner, and a water filtration system.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

All these efforts have left a lasting impression on his contemporaries, including Penobscot chef Joe Robbins<\/a>, who worked with Kinneen at the 2023 Tribal Summit and also teamed up with him to develop recipe videos employing both government commodity foods and traditional, culturally significant ingredients. That\u2019s especially important because many tribal communities still depend on food rations from the U.S. government, which historically have not been particularly nutritious.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I look at the work Rob has done with constant dedication to not just to his tribe in Alaska but to all Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and beyond, it strengthens the work that all Indigenous chefs, farmers, and producers are doing every day,\u201d Robbins says. \u201cWhen it comes to Indigenous representation in the culinary world, we are still lacking, though the tides are shifting quickly. Perspective of our cultures has always come from the outside, but the work NATIFS is doing is coming from tribal communities, giving us all a much louder voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amy Foote<\/a>, an Alaska-based chef who is striving to introduce traditional foods into healthcare facilities and other institutions there, echoes that sentiment. \u201cRob\u2019s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring,\u201d says Foote, who is not Indigenous but has focused much of her career on the deeply Indigenous notion of food as medicine. \u201cBy working alongside global Indigenous communities, he is reviving lost or endangered food knowledge and providing a means for communities to reclaim and reconnect with their food heritage. Rob is a grounding presence to a sovereign food future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Kinneen embodies a reverence for the past with a vision for the future\u2014a juxtaposition many Alaska Native communities are currently navigating. \u201cAlthough ancestral knowledge is rooted in tradition, that doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be adapted,\u201d he says. \u201cWe should be mapping today\u2019s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

As prime examples of non-extractive Indigenous ingenuity, he points to the resurgence of Zuni waffle gardens<\/a> for vegetable growing, which help conserve water in the Southwest, and the kelp farming that Dune Lankard<\/a> of the Native Conservancy<\/a> is spearheading along Alaska\u2019s south-central coast, simultaneously bolstering the local economy with a nutritious traditional food and helping mitigate climate change impacts like ocean acidification.<\/p>\n

For Kinneen, his childhood lessons from Alaska, about community and resilience, apply to the wider environmental and climate crises the planet is facing. \u201cWe should be asking ourselves, \u2018How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI realize that approach would likely cut down on profitability, but the flip side is that we have a place to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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