OUR KNIVES WILL SAVE US

A White Mountain Apache chef looks back at his career and longtime substance abuse.

Craig’s memoir opens in 2011, with the broke, hung-over author walking the streets of Whiteriver, Arizona, trying to sell his chef’s knives for drinking money. The book then circles back to his childhood on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, the son of an Apache mother and a Navajo father: an idyllic boyhood spent splashing in a river the kids called “Down Below” and gathering at a family table rich with ceremony and food. A sexual assault by a stranger splinters that world, and Craig keeps this secret for decades, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. He lands in Phoenix, enrolling in a community college culinary program while on felony probation after a drunk-driving accident. The kitchen is where he finally belongs. Despite impostor syndrome and instructors who treat “all things French” as the only legitimate tradition, he rises to his dream job at the celebrated Mary Elaine’s. All the while, a separate hunger grows: to understand the Indigenous foodways of his community, foods like Nadá łeeshbízh, an “involved, hands-on process of transformation,” in which fresh corn is cooked over days in a pit dug in the earth. He founds an organization to share these traditions, but relapse dogs every step. His marriage and dream job collapse. Stints in rehab fail to hold. What rescues Craig is not willpower alone but a deepening relationship with Indigenous cultivars. Working with acorns, amaranth, and wild tea becomes both culinary practice and spiritual discipline. The book weaves personal recovery into the broader history of colonial food violence, like the destruction of Native crops and the starvation of Plains nations. Craig’s voice is appealing and unsentimental; he writes candidly about his own self-destructive behaviors.

A chef’s story, a community history, and an argument for reclaiming Indigenous foodways.