Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef
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Growing up on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, Nephi Craig was surrounded by Indigenous food traditions, from gathering wild sumac berries to preparing acorn stew. Yet when he enrolled in culinary school at eighteen, following an arrest and a court order to pursue work or education, he found little acknowledgment of Native American ingredients or cooking traditions.
Studying European cuisine, he began questioning why foods indigenous to the Americas, including tomatoes, cacao, and amaranth, were so rarely recognized for their origins. That discovery would shape both his career as a chef and his understanding of food as a means of cultural recovery.
In Our Knives Will Save Us, Craig traces his journey through professional kitchens in the United States and abroad while confronting his own struggles with addiction. The son of a Navajo father and White Mountain Apache mother, he examines the effects of colonization on Indigenous foodways, the complicated relationship between traditional knowledge and European culinary institutions, and the importance of reclaiming the ingredients and practices that have sustained Native communities for generations.
His work eventually brought him back to Whiteriver, where he established Café Gozhoo in a former gas station in partnership with a local treatment center. There, cooking and culinary training have become part of addiction recovery, providing practical skills while reconnecting participants with Indigenous foods and traditions. Combining personal memoir with culinary history and reflections on food sovereignty, Craig makes a compelling case for the kitchen as a place not only of nourishment and employment, but of cultural renewal and healing.
Hardcover.
Published on July 14, 2026
