The Cultural Connections summer youth camp at the Neihardt Center seemed like any other camp on a late June morning.
Native girls and boys from elementary to high school were hustling and bustling with activities from Indigenous games to arrow-making to listening to a presenter talk about the parts and uses of a buffalo.
When lunch time arrived, the campers gathered outside to Native foods and learn more from the towering Indigenous chef wearing traditional clothing, including a gustoweh on his head.
It’s one of the things chef Anthony L. Warrior loves to do — to educate and promote Native American food revitalization and traditional food ways with Native communities.
“I was raised in kitchens with my mother,” Warrior told ICT. “My own health issues helped to motivate me to learn what we as Natives once had for health and wellness. I have always been inspired by history, so learning about how we as Natives sustained ourselves and our ways of life drives me to learn more about behaviors and customs linked to our ways of life…
“During my younger years, I witnessed many tribes that celebrated the food through dances, feasts, and spiritual connection,” he said. “In the last 20 years, I see the absences of that connectivity coming to a critical point of losing our attachment to our Mother Earth.”
Warrior, or Ma-te-yi-ma-pe-to, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and also Absentee Shawnee of Oklahoma and Sicangu Lakota, is a celebrated chef and owner of Warrior’s Palate Catering and Consultation.
He also serves as the human resources director at Nebraska Indian Community College in Macy, Nebraska, in the heart of the Omaha Nation, and has worked as a chef for the Seneca Nation and for the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino Resort.
He is also author of a cookbook, “Warriors Palate Catering Recipes,” which includes such recipes as wildberry dumplings, bison meatloaf, breakfast blue corn mush, and Three Sisters soup.
This year marked Warrior’s second to attend the Cultural Connections camp at the Neihardt Center on the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site, which was established in Bancroft, Nebraska, at the former home of Neihardt, Nebraska’s Poet Laureate in Perpetuity. Neihardt was author of “Black Elk Speaks, Cycle of the West,” and other works of poetry and prose.
Rediscovering lifeways
The camp lunch was set up as an outdoor picnic, with bowls of food stretched along the middle of a string of picnic tables.
Among the foods presented were sage-roasted leg of bison with sweet potato, spring squash with Ukwakhwe white corn, smoked turkey with maple and blueberry wild rice, pickled hominy in maple-berry vinaigrette, fire-roasted mushrooms, Cherokee yellow rice pilaf, Kohnastole white corn, and wood-fired bison sliders with charred corn and red bean salad. Desserts included chocolate corn pudding with fresh berries, Kohnastole white corn and honey cake with berries, and dark chocolate, peanut butter and toasted quinoa bark.
Warrior has been a regular at the Neihardt Center the past few summers. He prepares, cooks and serves Indigenous foods at lunch time to the summer camp youth, but he also shares stories about the significance of eating, being Indigenous and using Indigenous languages.
He could be mistaken for a member of one of the Six Nations, since he wears the gustoweh, a traditional headdress often worn by men during the longhouse ceremonies. He was gifted it by a Mohawk friend and it has been one of his trademarks in attire while on the job.
“The gustoweh was a blessing from Mohawk artist Toteks Thomas,” Warrior said. “I was employed by the Seneca Nation of New York and the Akwesasne Mohawk of New York and I was treated like family. I also would frequent the longhouse ceremonies throughout the years along with singing practice to learn and share songs.”
He believes strongly that Native communities should return to their traditional foods and lifeways.
“I have seen many feast-tables, funeral observances, and naming ceremonies that are not utilizing our cultural foods, and instead are being replaced with processed and fast foods,” Warrior said. “We have to return to our tribal food pathways.”
Chris Stogdill, special projects coordinator for Cultural Connections, is a leader of the weekday summer camp program for youth from the local and regional Omaha, Ho-Chunk, Santee Sioux and other tribal nation communities.
The camp is designed to “provide awareness and access to culturally relevant student opportunities,” Stogdill said.
Warrior was asked to prepare and discuss the noon meals during camp, and to provide a food sovereignty workshop that was held the week after the summer camp to provide staff and students an opportunity to learn about the history and traditions of Native American food and preparation.
“He is passionate about sharing his knowledge and skills with the next generation of students,” Stogdill said. “His stories and skills provide insight and inspiration about learning traditional ways.”
Warrior told ICT that it’s important to reach the younger generations.
“We are attempting to provide a tribal connection to youth that live away from their homelands, or are not connected to the tribal communities on a daily basis,” he said. “The program has included an educational platform on teaching the youth about our food offerings to the world, healthy eating behaviors, and food and medicine benefits of our native growing and harvesting practices.”
He continued, “My overall mission is to promote growers and seed keepers to produce our sacred seeds for healthy lifestyle offerings while establishing the spiritual respect for our foods.”
Learning from the ancestors
The message that Warrior hopes to send is in the stories he shares wholeheartedly with his words and spirit.
