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Throughout my life,
seeing Native Americans in any sort of spotlight was kind of rare.
You can go to a Mexican spot down the street
and get tacos
pretty much every day of the week.
But you don't get that same chance to enjoy
a fry bread or a Navajo taco.
One of my goals is to change that.
I want more people to enjoy Native American cuisine.
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This is what we use as our taco shell.
But it's Native American fry bread.
First time I went to and they were sold out.
Like within an hour.
I've heard the story of like
the origins of fry bread and where it would have come from.
And so that was always really interesting to me,
And it's something that I've known about for a long time,
but I've just never been in an environment
to be able to have it.
No we feel really lucky that we here.
You know, go to that long house.
Yeah, that's where we had fry bread before.
And, you know, get fry bread just in our own neighborhood here, too.
Recently started following Native Soul Cuisine on Instagram.
Wanted to stop by and support.
And also, I love
fry bread tacos.
Thank you.
Here you guys you're welcome,
have a good week.
My name is Jeremy Thunderbird.
I'm the owner, Head Chef of Native Soul Cuisine.
We started off doing private chef work.
We do a lot of catering
and now we just got into doing pop ups.
Native soul cuisine at its roots.
Every one of our dishes that we offer
has some sort of Native American basis.
We also like to involve some other cultures that,
you know, as a chef influenced me.
My mom's tribe is from California, so she's Ohlone and Chumash.
My father is First Nations.
I have a family full of cooks.
My grandfather was a chef.
Then I was always watching my family cook growing up.
I was working at AT&T, ended up losing my job there.
And while I was looking for another job,
I was already cooking and stuff
and kind of just, you know, posting stuff
on my Instagram.
People would say, Hey,
I would actually buy that from you.
I don't know if they're joking or not.
We kind of turned
our kitchen window into a little drive thru.
And that's really how I started my company.
I was like the very early roots of it.
( Sounds of corn being cut)
But Native Soul Cuisine.
We focus on indigenous ingredients
and we don't just do one type of, you know, regional cuisine.
I try and include stuff that comes from all over,
like Three Sisters Stew
traditionally was a Iroquois recipe.
I also like to incorporate blue corn
things like, it's called blue corn mush,
and that's mainly the Southwestern ingredients.
My heritage comes from the West Coast.
We do a lot of fishing,
so that's like a staple in our diet and we make a smoked salmon mac and cheese.
So that's kind of combining, you know, different elements
like a soul food with a Native American staple.
Food is a history book.
I say that a lot because it's so true.
And you can learn a lot about a society by what their diet looks like.
Natives were forced on to these reservations
and reservation is a nice way to put it.
They're really prisoner of war camps.
And how fry bread came to be,
Story goes that
the government gave us these commodity ingredients
flour, sugar, salt and lard.
And that's basically what we used
to kind of sustain ourselves.
(Sounds of dough frying)
Normally the only place that you can get fry bread
is when you go to a pow wow.
( Drums and Singing )
Pow wows have always that.
That was a huge part of my upbringing.
It's just one of the places where you get to see people that
look like you.
And you know that
they also struggle with a lot of the things that you struggle with.
There's a there's a spiritual, like lift.
(Drums and Singing)
People see us as just, like, kind of mythical
and almost fairy tale that we don't exist and
with Native Soul Cuisine it kind of proves
that wrong
pow wows.
The biggest influence it had on
how I cook and what I cook is that
I wanted to give other people that same experience of,
you know, this is, this is a rare chance where you get to enjoy
Native American culture.
Food's a universal language.
So you know, what better way to share my culture
than, you know, through food?
Here you go hun.
(Laughter)