“Like every other Indigenous community in the United States, Whiteriver is a place steeped in tragedy, violence, and hardship,” author and chef Nephi Craig writes of his home on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona. Upriver are the remains of a U.S. military fort, the base of operations for those who tried to erase Native Americans from the landscape during the 19th-century Apache Wars. The impact of colonization still echoes in the reservation’s struggles with poverty and addiction, yet “Whiteriver is also a beautiful and magical place,” writes Craig. “To a kid, it was paradise.”
In his debut memoir, Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches From a White Mountain Apache Chef, Craig fully explores this dissonance, and he does so through the gateway of food. In culinary school, Craig would be taught that “food separated people—by nationality and class, by gourmand discernment.” But in his community, he “saw how it drew people together. Even when it was hard to come by, food was something that was meant to be shared.”
Through conversational, intimate prose, Craig invites readers to explore both his own history and that of his people. These parallel stories include immense challenges and hardships, but—as he establishes early in the book and consistently reminds us—strength and beauty run right alongside. He battles addiction for most of the memoir, attaining fleeting success as a chef only to relapse again and again. Readers will hear the older version of Craig speaking to his younger self with a voice full of compassion, even when it scolds.
Craig asks us to interrogate systems of oppression while simultaneously appreciating Native foodways, and the food in his book takes on symbolic meanings beyond the culinary. Like land and people, food has been stolen, appropriated and destroyed. Recovery takes concerted effort and time, as Craig eloquently shows, but even as he relapses, food is always there, both as a reminder of his past and a promise of the future he could have.
Inspired by innumerable other people, ranging from grandmothers to children to professional chefs, comics and Wu-Tang Clan (all given a nod in the acknowledgments), Craig’s story stretches beyond itself. Our Knives Will Save Us is a story of recovery and resilience, but even more, it is a testament to seeking out and protecting the people and things worth saving.
Read our interview with Nephi Craig, author of ‘Our Knives Will Save Us.’