A conversation with Mariah Gladstone

Interviewing food sovereignty leader Mariah Gladstone as part of the inaugural Montana Free Press Festival was a real highlight for me this year.

Blackfeet and Cherokee from Northwest Montana, Mariah is the founder of Indigikitchen, an online cooking show dedicated to re-indigenizing our diets using digital media.

Over the course of 90 minutes, we talked about her work to promote Indigenous ingredients in Montana schools, her forthcoming cookbook (also for kids!), and her own education.

Mariah told stories of sowing a garden and cooking with her mother as a young girl in Kalispell, and of flying to New York City with frozen elk meat in a carry-on to tide her over during undergrad at Columbia University.

She spoke of that crux moment at her dad’s house in Babb, 40 miles from a grocery store, when she realized there was food everywhere. She just had to walk outside.

And she shared what reciprocity — that most elemental of values — means in the context of her work:

“When you start to recognize the gifts from the landscape, you then begin to feel an inherent obligation to help share gifts back to the landscape.”

In that vein of reciprocity, we invited the audience to write down and share ways that they might "become naturalized to place" in the words of botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, who Mariah studied under while earning her master's at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

The audience walked away with a new perspective on food and food systems, and with actionable things they could do next.

Here's mine: I'll be buying Mariah's cookbook, "Mountains To Oceans — Kids' Recipes from Native Lands."

Learn more about Mariah's work and grab your copy at Indigikitchen.

Photos by Tailyr Irvine