Knowing your ingredients goes further than familiarity, says Crystal Wahpepah. The Three Sisters Cake she’s teaching Cal Poly Humboldt students to bake in the stainless-steel kitchen of the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab today makes a solid example. The Three Sisters, as the North American Indigenous staples corn, beans and squash are called, are all included in the recipe, along with their attending histories and cultural weight.
“Squash is like the mother’s belly that holds the babies,” Wahpepah says smiling, her curly hair smoothed back in a ponytail. The corn, she explains, bears the history of traveling northward from Mexico and Central America, and the beans that have been a staple for so many Indigenous peoples, are bound to their cultures. “The Three Sisters came together and fed communities,” she says, “and they’ve been doing it for thousands of years and they still are.”
As the 2025-2026 chef in residence at the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute, Wahpepah seems in the right place to nurture her interlocked missions of promoting Indigenous food sovereignty, sharing the health benefits of Indigenous ingredients and making connections between Native people, culture and issues through food.
A member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, Wahpepah notes it’s a tribe with a history of pre-Columbian migration, moving from the Chicago area and splitting in Kansas and Oklahoma, and south into Mexico. “I grew up intertribal,” she says, and later returned home to study traditional foodways with her grandmother and elders.
Her Oakland restaurant Wahpepah’s Kitchen is Northern California’s first Native woman-owned restaurant. The day it opened, she was overwhelmed by the line out the door and the demand it indicated for Indigenous cultural foods. “Some people haven’t had that connection,” she says. Since then, she’s made appearances on TV shows Beat Bobby Flay and Chopped. She’s also among only a handful of Indigenous chefs to be a finalist for a prestigious James Beard Award, in her case, for Emerging Chef.
Her first cookbook A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior has just hit shelves, and it includes extensive sourcing notes for readers to track down ingredients and producers. Supporting those cultivating heirloom plants is part of her goal of helping preserve Indigenous cultural foods. During government-enforced relocations, she says, “We hadda hide a lot of those squash seeds.” Now, finding those that are rare or even believed lost requires going into Native communities and connecting with seed-keepers. “It’s my duty to give it back to my tribe and it’s my duty to give it to the next generation.”
Adding ingredient sources also makes Indigenous cooking more accessible to everyone. “I want you to go home and then make the cake. And then tag me,” she adds with a giggle.
Wahpepah tells the origin story of the Three Sisters Cake, which she created for Willie Nelson and more than 500 guests at an event in Texas where she was selected to be one of three “sister” chefs. Corn is represented in both the cornmeal and fresh kernels, firm heirloom beans are pureed and mixed with the batter, and cubes of roasted squash. She uses maple sugar in place of refined cane sugar for both its flavor and its North American origins. Even that she holds back on to let the sweetness of the corn and squash take center stage, and “so you can taste the mother’s love” in the squash. She recommends making the cake during corn season, noting her tribe holds corn-related ceremonies and dances in July at the peak of Oklahoma’s season. “I really love highlighting each indigenous ingredient in each recipe,” she says.
The demonstration is a cooking show and lecture in one, punctuated by Wahpepah’s mischievous smiles. At one point she shrugs and mimes tossing flour into a greased baking dish when she can’t find it on the counter, shooting a sly look across the room. She’s forgiving on skipping steps like roasting the squash if time is short, more interested in everyone making the cake at all than doing it perfectly.
“When you think of decolonizing, you think you’re removing. But no, you’re putting back in things your ancestors have enjoyed.”
Credit: Photo by Jennifer Fumiko Cahill
Wahpepah doesn’t eschew all European ingredients, like butter, but she’s big on substitutions. Duck eggs, for example, are a rich pre-Colonial swap for those of imported chickens, and she chooses Mexican vanilla over farther-flung options. She explains how to add cornmeal to “Indigenize” a recipe, taking into account its heaviness compared to wheat flour.
Student assistants cut up squares of the yellow cake for sampling, “So you can taste and see what this woman’s talking about,” Wahpepah says. Each cube comes with a pale dollop of a simple maple frosting. The cake is dense and moist, the beans giving it body. The corn kernels and squash add nutty sweetness and one can imagine how it would be heightened with fresh summer corn.
“Our palates really need to be decolonized,” Wahpepah says, from refined sugars and salts to “really enjoy these flavors from the earth and from this land.” The same goes for appreciating their less processed textures. In both home and professional kitchens, “We have a lot of flavors … for example, I love sugar. But I’m going to remove myself from that. You can choose to remove yourself from that,” in favor of other kinds of sweetness.
Wehpepah has also worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on recipes incorporating commodity foods alongside traditional ingredients indigenous to North America that connect to tribal cultures. “Because at the end of the day, that is a lot of people’s reality and they have no choice,” she says. In one recipe, canned vegetables and chicken are stir-fried with foraged manzanita leaves. In another, frozen salmon and canned vegetables join wild plantains and wild onions in a chowder.
Indigenous foods and flavors, like her favorite dried sweet corn, a reminder of her grandmother, reinforce vital familial and community connections, especially in a sometimes isolating world. “If you close your eyes, the ancestors are with you when you eat it.” Her work preserving and creating with Native cultural ingredients is largely about fostering those connections.
“When you think of decolonizing,” she says, “you think you’re removing. But no, you’re putting back in things your ancestors have enjoyed.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106 or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in A Wing and A Prayer.
