GROWING UP IN an Anglo-American household in rural Ohio, Andrea Murdoch found herself far, geographically and culturally, from her Indigenous roots. In fact, it wasn’t until she was around 28 years old that the Andean native of Venezuela, who was adopted and brought to the United States as a young child, embarked on a life-changing mission to explore Native heritages—both her own and those of other original inhabitants of the Americas.
Already a chef trained in fine-dining techniques by the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, Murdoch first turned to members of the Oneida Indian Nation to learn about Indigenous culinary traditions. Their ancestral homelands include the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area where she was living in 2015. “The generosity in sharing knowledge, their creation story, and so much more was so impactful and healing for me,” Murdoch says, “that I dove headfirst into this work of Indigenous foods, sovereignty, and etymology and haven’t looked back since.”
Six years ago, after moving to Denver to be close to the mountains that remind her of her brief time in the Andes, Murdoch launched Four Directions Cuisine, a catering company that fuses Native North, South, and Central American ingredients and techniques to produce dishes such as bison-stuffed arepas and Ute corn cakes. “As a displaced Indigenous person living on land originally stewarded by other Indigenous nations, I am responsible for learning their history as if it were my own,” Murdoch says, “and then sharing that knowledge in appropriate educational ways.”
That side dish of
