tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine

By Shane M. Chartrand and Jennifer Cockrall-King

tawâw [pronounced ta-WOW]:
Come in, you’re welcome, there’s room.

Acclaimed chef Shane M. Chartrand’s debut cookbook explores the reawakening of Indigenous cuisine and what it means to cook, eat, and share food in our homes and communities.

Born to Cree parents and raised by a Métis father and Mi’kmaw-Irish mother, Shane M. Chartrand has spent the past ten years learning about his history, visiting with other First Nations peoples, gathering and sharing knowledge and stories, and creating dishes that combine his interests and express his personality. The result is tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine, a book that traces Chartrand’s culinary journey from his childhood in Central Alberta, where he learned to raise livestock, hunt, and fish on his family’s acreage, to his current position as executive chef at the acclaimed SC Restaurant in the River Cree Resort & Casino in Enoch, Alberta, on Treaty 6 Territory.

Containing over seventy-five recipes — including Chartrand’s award-winning dish “War Paint” — along with personal stories, culinary influences, and interviews with family members, tawâw is part cookbook, part exploration of ingredients and techniques, and part chef’s personal journal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ambrosia
• Release date: Nov 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781487012397

Shane M. Chartrand

SHANE M. CHARTRAND, of the Enoch Cree Nation, is at the forefront of the re-emergence of Indigenous cuisine in North America. Raised in Central Alberta, where he learned to respect food through raising livestock, hunting, and fishing on his family’s acreage, Chartrand relocated to Edmonton as a young man to pursue culinary training. In 2015, Chartrand was invited to participate in the prestigious international chef contingent of Cook It Raw, and has since competed on Food Network Canada’s Iron Chef Canada and Chopped Canada. For over a decade, he has been on a personal culinary journey to figure out what it means to be of Cree ancestry and Métis upbringing and be a professional chef living and working on Treaty 6 Territory.

Book preview

Cover: Tawaw, Progressive Indigenous Cuisine by Shane M Chartrand with Jennifer Cockrail King. Best in the World Gourmand.TITLE PAGE:Tawaw, Progressive Indigenous Cuisine by Shane M Chartrand with Jennifer Cockrail King.Foreword by Marlene and Laurie Buffalo. Published by Ambrosia. Photography by Cathryn Sprague

ᑕᐋᐧᐤ

tawâw

Dried, brown leaves lay atop a grey suede strip.An old, abandoned car sits in a dry field. The sky is light and blue, and the car has grass growing around and over it.

Copyright © 2019 Shane Mederic Chartrand and Jennifer Cockrall-King

Foreword copyright © 2019 Marlene and Laurie Buffalo

Published in Canada in 2019 and the USA in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher.

The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students

and readers with print disabilities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: tawâw : progressive Indigenous cuisine / Shane Chartrand with Jennifer Cockrall-King.

Names: Chartrand, Shane, author. | Cockrall-King, Jennifer, 1971– author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190043555 | Canadiana (ebook) 2019004358X |

ISBN 9781487005122 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487006051 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487006068 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, Canadian. | CSH: Native peoples—Food—Canada | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX715.6 .C43 2019 | DDC 641.59/297—dc23

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931291

Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

Ebook design: Nicole Lambe

Front cover and interior photographs by Cathryn Sprague, with the exception of images listed here:

pages iv–v, x, 3, 4, 9, 41, 111, 178, 215, and 228 courtesy of Shane Chartrand; page xii courtesy of Ezra Buffalo-Louis; pages xvi and 304 courtesy of Hilary McDonald; page 8 courtesy of River Cree Resort & Casino; pages 16 and 157 courtesy of Laura McGowan; pages 25, 94, 129, 287, and 301 courtesy of Jennifer Cockrall-King; pages 31 and 200–203 (linen) from iStock.com/MLiberra; page 74 courtesy of Cowboy Smithx; pages 74–77 (paper texture) and 212–215 (paint texture) from rawpixel.com; page 96 (top) by permission of the Provincial Archives of Alberta, A5473; page 96 (bottom) courtesy of REDx Talks; page 97 (driftwood) from iStock.com/Akarawut Lohacharoenvanich; page 193 (crowberries and reindeer moss) from iStock.com/Edoma; and page 200 courtesy of Ryan O’Flynn.

House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

Logo: Canada Council for the ArtsLogo: Ontario Arts Council

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

For Mom and Dad

You adopted me when I was six and you got me through so much.

You both have different strengths and continue to teach me in your

own ways. I’m grateful to have you in my life.

And for my friend and co-author, Jennifer Cockrall-King

You brought the world of books and words to me, and have been part of this journey for years. No matter what life threw at us, we kept going!

herbs in a vase made out of a hollowed out piece of bone.Three men dressed in indigenous regalia turn from the camera. Their regalia consists of ornate head dresses with many colours, feathers, beads and fur.

A Note on Language

Right now, in Canada, Indigenous is the preferred term to indicate indigeneity and that which belongs to or touches First Nations peoples and cultures. Aboriginal is also a widely used term in Canada — though we are aware of the colonial associations with this word and that our communities are moving away from it. For the purposes of this book, we’ve kept to the original words used in conversation and direction quotations.

Additionally, while it may sound like basic information, this bears repeating: The Indigenous peoples of North America are not just one cultural or ethnic group. We are made up of over 630 separate First Nations Communities, affiliated with over 50 Nations, speaking over 50 Indigenous languages in Canada alone. Indigenous peoples live in a wide range of environments, from reservations to cities, from the rainforest climates of the West Coast to the polar deserts of the high Arctic, and from the grasslands and high plains of the Prairies to the coastal communities of the Maritimes. Indigenous peoples include those of us who are First Nations, those of us who are Métis, and those of us who are Inuit. As of the 2016 Canadian census, there are 1.6 million of us here, and we make up 4.9 percent of the total population.

Marlene and Laurie Buffalo stanx in the kitchen together. Various cooking tools are neatly out on the counter.

Foreword

by Marlene and Laurie Buffalo

Samson Cree Nation, Treaty No. 6 Territory

tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine is not just another cookbook; it is a collection of healing, of nourishment, of sharing. It is a way to welcome others into our homes and our lives, to share and honour what has been carefully grown, selected, and curated with the intent to create amazing food at home.

Indigenous cuisine is tied very closely to nêhiyâwiwin: Plains Cree culture, traditions, teachings, principles, and value systems. Food is meant not only to nourish the spirit but also to heal. Animals have their own medicine lines, where they go to heal themselves by eating. Therefore, it is natural that our food should nourish us physically as well as help us to heal and to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

To preserve, maintain, and share Indigenous traditions requires self-­reflection, self-discipline, and a focussed ambition to get it right. When Shane asked us, a mother–daughter team, to contribute to this collection, we were deeply honoured — honoured to be involved with this book but also to witness and revel in the successes, hustle, and authenticity that Shane brings to all of the spaces that he occupies.

Marlene: When I first met Shane he reminded me of a shark — very tenacious, always moving and looking for innovative food preparation techniques. Where else does one get to sit with such a brilliant shark but in a setting where he has created room for meaningful, authentic, sincere moments of food consumption, intertwined with laughter and friendship? For example, Shane gives bannock a makeover, serving it as a stretched-out piece of dough. Sometimes he loads it with mushrooms, a sauce, and other ingredients and it becomes what I call nêhiyaw pahkwêsikan (You might know it as pizza).

You have to engage a foodie, and Shane has mastered that concept. He has successfully created a great team of like-minded individuals who understand that in order to adopt Indigenous traditions and food culture, to celebrate that culture, and to show it in a new way, we cannot forget to discuss how we relate to food traditionally. If you’re a willing, adventurous soul foraging for your next meal, tawâw will take you beyond the bounds of convenience cooking — so much so that we don’t immediately realize we are actually being empowered through mîciwin (food).

More than just a cookbook, this is an act of reclamation leading to the revitalization of your taste buds for Indigenous cuisine. Shane’s bold approach will teach cooks everywhere how to pay attention to the world around them for sources of ingredients and how to prepare those ingredients. It also gives readers new ideas about sustainable living — the interdependence of beings, living with the earth instead of on the earth. tawâw dispels the outdated belief that Indigenous food means fry bread or pow wow Indian tacos. The food Shane presents in these pages is boldly seasoned, vibrant, elegant, and easy, and it brings honour to Indigenous food culture.

Laurie: I first met Shane at an Indigenous entrepreneur symposium where we were both featured as keynote speakers. I presented on what my life was like as an Indigenous woman in business, and Shane presented on — you guessed it — food.

As I listened to Shane’s presentation, I was completely blown away by his passion for food and his willingness to share that passion with the world in an unbridled, nonconforming fashion. I said to myself, I need to meet this wonderful, passionate soul. From there we became not only friends but family.

Shane once said to me, I don’t really pay attention to things like sports and such. I care about food — about making a difference in the lives of others through good food that honours and highlights what Indigenous cuisine really means. Through these kinds of conversations with Shane, I started to really look at what food meant to me, what it meant to my family, and what it meant in the nêhiyaw (Cree) way of life. In the nêhiyaw way of life, we undergo various teachings at critical, sometimes uncomfortable, times. Some of these are rites of passage, life transitions, or seasonal events and ceremonies, and others are the teachings and principles we learn through conversations around the kitchen table with our families, friends, and relatives.

Food has always had a powerful energy and a powerful pull. I believe that this is tied to the nêhiyaw belief that everything has a spirit: the water, the wind, the trees, the four-legged, the two-legged, the winged, the crawlers, and those who swim — they each contain their own distinct spirit.

Even our prayers have a spirit. When we begin our prayers around food and eating, a phrase roughly translated to all my relations can be heard. This is the call to honour and acknowledge all those spirits who have been placed here for a purpose, within a system of reciprocal balance, to come and share in the blessing and positivity of the space and food.

In preparing food for our ceremonies and feasts, the cook is reminded to make sure that your head and your heart are in the right place before you start. The action required to prepare food is a transfer of energy, and everything that we are thinking and feeling is transferred directly to that food. This is why you should never cook while angry. It is an honour to share a meal with others, so it is important to share good intentions and blessings during the preparatory phases.

Food is central to how we fuel our bodies, but it is just as important that we also fuel ourselves and fill up on the nêhiyaw values of respect, love, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility, and truth. These are known as the Seven Sacred and Universal Teachings. Through the sharing of food, good intentions, and blessings, we create space to share, respect, and maintain wâhkôhtowin — kinship and interconnectedness — with one another.

Beautifully written and photographed with acute sensitivity and appreciation for Indigenous food and its preparation, chef Shane Chartrand’s tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine shall become an invaluable manual for all. We hope that you enjoy the recipes contained within this book as a medium of healing, sharing, and creating spaces and plates filled and served with the best ingredients, best intentions, and nourishing energy.

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From our family to yours,

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Marlene and Laurie

Portrait of Shane Mederic Chartrand. He has a medium skin tone. He is wearing glasses, a backwards baseball cap, a black apron and has a tattoo sleeve spanning his forearm.

Introduction

tawâw [pronounced ta-wow]:

Come in, you’re welcome, there’s room.

What does it mean to be an Indigenous person who is an executive chef in charge of his own professional kitchen and staff? What does it mean to have cooks from different Nations working for me, looking for guidance on how to express their ambitions, their dreams, and their identities through food? How do I create — one dish, one menu, one dinner at a time — a progressive Indigenous cuisine? Not an historical re-creation but a cuisine that reflects who I am and how I live with one foot in the Indigenous world and the other in the non-­Indigenous world? I’ve been asking myself these questions for the past 10 years — half of my professional cooking career. tawâw is my personal record of exploring these questions through conversations, education, and cooking with family, friends, and the culinary community I am proud to be a part of.

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My birth name is Shane St. John Gordon. But for the first three decades of my life, I didn’t know this fact. I also didn’t know the names of my birth parents or my home Nation. I was a part of a large group of Indigenous children in Canada who were taken from our biological parents, placed into foster care, and then put up for adoption from the early 1960s through to the mid-1980s — what is now known as the Sixties Scoop. I was given up when I was a year and a half old and was in foster care for five years. Though I was so young, I remember being alone, moving from place to place, and I remember being hungry. In those early years I didn’t have a lot of food. I wasn’t starving, but I remember being hungry all the time. That’s really my earliest memory.

Shane with both of his parents

With my dad, Dennis, and mom, Belinda, at REDx talks in Enoch, Alberta, in 2018.

When I was almost seven years old, I was moved to the home of Belinda and Dennis Chartrand. They fostered a lot of children over the years, but of all the kids who went through their house, they chose to adopt me. I’m one of the lucky ones because I have an incredible and loving family. My mom, Belinda, is of Irish and Mi’kmaw descent. My dad, Dennis, is Métis. I have an older sister, Rae; an older brother, Ryan; and a younger sister, Erin. It took me a while to get to know my siblings, as I was the only adopted child in the family. This is how I came to have a Métis family.

I LOVE KIDS. I came from a family of 10 children, and I knew early on that becoming a foster parent and adopting were my calling.

For the most part, Shane was a really good kid, though he threw temper tantrums for months after he first arrived in our home. He was already six and a half and he’d been passed around quite a few times. He was probably worried that he wasn’t staying, so he was really testing us. At bedtime, he’d scream and kick the walls. He didn’t want to go to bed. And after he was done with the tantrum, he’d call me to say, Mom, I need my goodnight kiss.

One night he said to me, Mom, when I first came you told me that you were so glad that I was your boy. Are you still glad I’m your boy? I told him yes, I was, and that he’d always be our boy.

Other than the tantrums, he fit right in to the family and he made friends quickly. He helped around the house, butchering, cleaning, plucking. He would work all day. And he always had a smile on his face. He was just a happy-go-lucky kid.

an old photograph of two small children standing beside a bicycle.

Me at about age seven (right) with my cousin Denny Marchand in Penhold, Alberta.

About a year after he started working at the restaurant truck stop on the highway, Dennis and I went there for lunch. We wanted to see what he was actually doing. You know those racks with all those order chits they attach to them and it spins around? Well, he was working his way through the orders, making one dish after another. He’d never been a coordinated child. He couldn’t even chew gum and tie his shoes at the same time. It was amazing to watch him doing that so efficiently.

— Belinda Chartrand

Our home was on an acreage midway between the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, in the province of Alberta. I went to River Glen School, a public school in Red Deer. I was the only Indigenous kid at the school. There was one black kid and one Mexican kid, but I was the only kid who identified as Aboriginal — the word we were using in those days.

As a family, we sat around the table and ate dinner together every night. It wasn’t what I was used to from my time in foster care. That might seem sad for some, but it wasn’t for me since I didn’t know better until I got adopted. Only then was I introduced to good food, sitting with family, and rules.

My mom’s cooking was very simple, but keep in mind there could have been 10 or 12 foster kids living with us at any time, and my dad was often on the road for work. Mom used to cook up big pots of stew, chili, and soup. I loved her goulash, cabbage rolls, and spaghetti and tomato sauce. And she made this really great pistachio pudding dessert with whipped cream and marshmallows that I absolutely adored, too. It was so of its time but pretty damn delicious. My mom likes to tell me that I always said thank you after each meal — and that I was the only kid at the table who did.

My dad went hunting a lot — so much so that we got sick of eating moose meat! Mom and Dad had about five or six acres of land. We had a barn and a long log home. There were horses, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and geese on the property. And there was a beautiful farmer’s field behind the house. Nowadays, I would build a cob oven or smokehouse there, but Mom and Dad sold the property a number of years ago. It was a lot for them to keep up.

So much happened in that back field — everything from Dad teaching me how to drive our van, to just being a kid doing ridiculous kid-things, to simple gardening. Oh, the amount of gardening we did was just incredible! We grew turnips, potatoes, carrots, onions, and rhubarb — normal stuff, nothing crazy. And we had a beautiful root cellar that my