Indigenous Culinary Arts

Since Paul Natrall started serving Indigenous cuisine from his Mr. Bannock food truck in Vancouver nearly a year ago, the chef has hired several employees for his in-demand fusion food business.

Chef Shane Chartrand, executive chef at the River Cree Resort and Casino was wearing traditional chef whites with a bold Coast Salish feather design on the back. I listened as he captivated the packed conference, speaking about his life and background, talking about the importance of hunting and fishing and respecting his Indigenous roots with Metis and Cree heritage from Enoch, Alberta.

"Really, I think it’s because throughout the residential school era [a brutal system of boarding schools designed to ‘assimilate’ Indigenous peoples] our culture was stripped from us.” says Christa Bruneau-Guenther of the Peguis First Nation and co-owner of Feast Café Bistro in Winnipeg, a neighborhood spot that’s rapidly become a place for the local community to reconnect and enjoy traditional dishes again.

IN CANADA, TRUE INDIGENOUS CUISINE is relatively unknown. Ask almost any Canadian to name an Indigenous dish, and their answer will almost certainly be “bannock,” a kind of dry skillet bread. Chef Rich Francis, based in Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario, refuses to serve it. “Bannock isn’t even Indigenous, in the truest sense,” he says. “It was what we made when our land was taken, our movement limited, and our provisions reduced to a sack of flour. It was taught to us—it’s Scottish traditionally—it’s colonization food.”

An Indigenous chef in Ontario says he's willing to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to fight for the right to serve country food in a restaurant setting. Chef Rich Francis, who's from Six Nations, says right now, he's prohibited from using narwhal, moose, beluga, and sea lion — all of which are traditional Indigenous country foods.

Ask a chef why they wanted to helm a kitchen and you’ll find a common thread in their stories. They were the child tugging at their mother’s or grandmother’s apron strings as she chopped, kneaded and stirred. If not, they needed a job as a teenager and took the first one they found, washing dishes at a local haunt. Or they were like Shawn Adler and signed up for cooking class in high school on a lark.