E39: A food sovereignty activist & self-trained chef leaves NYC and returns to her Native community to help build a digital platform to re-indiginize our diets | Mariah Gladstone of Indigikitchen in Northern MT

I’m so excited to share my thoughtful and powerful conversation with Mariah Gladstone, the founder of Indigikitchen. Mariah is a community leader, food sovereignty activist, self-trained chef, digital entrepreneur, aerialist teacher and performer and so much more. She grew up on and off the Blackfeet Nation Reservation, located near Glacier National Park in Northern Montana. She moved to New York City to get a degree in Environmental Engineering from Columbia University and moved back to New York to attend the masters program at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at Suny Syracuse. When the pandemic hit in the middle of her program, Mariah and her partner decided to return to the Blackfeet Nation and plant permanent roots.Indigikitchen is an online cooking platform where Mariah shares both traditional and modern preparations of Indigenous foods. In her cooking presentations Mariah weaves history lessons and ancestral knowledge into the episodes - offering so much more than just cooking demos. Through this work she hopes to build community, help reestablish Native food sovereignty, and provide a library of recipes using traditional Indigenous ingredients that are easily accessible, searchable, and shareable online. The idea came one week when she took some time off to attend a food sovereignty conference. The experience awoke a passion  in her, and she recognized the tremendous need for Native people to rebuild their local food systems and regain access to and knowledge of traditional foods. It didn't matter to her that she she didn’t have any professional media or cooking experience. Instead, she was guided by her desire to do good for her community, and share rare and lost recipes. Mariah had a DSLR that she duct taped to a broken tripod and just got started. Even though the early videos had low production quality, she  was energized by the fact that people responded really positively to her work. In our conversation we speak about her work as an advocate for her community, how she built Indigikitchen with no prior media experience, moving from engineering to activism, her food and self-sufficiency practices on her homestead, and what it means for us to truly re-indiginize our diets. We also dive deep into the historical consequences of colonization on native foodways in the US, and what food sovereignty truly means to her. We speak about the effects of climate change on access to wild foods, climate adaptation strategies, and Mariah's incredibly valuable work in preserving and sharing ancient indigenous recipes from all over the world.This is a story about reconnecting with cultural and ancestral wisdom, using art and food as a catalyst for positive change and the importance of building strong local communities. To read her full feature visit: www.urbanexodus.com/blogSupport the showSign up for  Apple Podcasts premium or our Patreon Membership for ad-free listening, rapid-fire guest interviews & our new mini-pod Ditch the City. urbanexodus.com | @theurbanexodus | buy the book