“I was pretty lucky that I grew up in a house that, well, where my dad and grandpa built me a garden…and I got to grow foods that came from the earth,” Mariah Gladstone said while reminiscing about her childhood on the Blackfeet Reservation. 

Northern Montana, where Gladstone calls home, is also the place where she produces her cooking show, Indigikitchen, which showcases how to make healthy dishes from traditional Indigenous ingredients. Gladstone’s love for cooking started when she was a child. 

“When I was five, six years old, I would wake up and I’d say I had a dream about how to make these cookies and my mom let me have the freedom to experiment with those things at home,” Gladstone said.

With the encouragement from her mother, Gladstone often helped out in the kitchen with baking, preparing meals and retrieving fresh vegetables from their garden. Gladstone shared that measuring out ingredients was a way for her to practice her math skills.

She enjoys using ingredients from the earth to create something delicious. These early memories were the first moments where Gladstone understood and appreciated the cooking freedoms of making and tasting.

“I got that joy and that magic of seeing seeds grow into food that I put on my table. Even as, like, a first grader, I could come in and munch carrots covered in dirt and have that feeling of tasting things right out of the ground,” she said. 

Gladstone comes from a reservation that sits by the east side of Glacier National Park where there’s an abundance of natural biodiversity.

The beautiful view located at the southern part of the Blackfeet Reservation near Glacier National Park.

There are many ways that Gladstone helps feed her community, such as organizing a buffalo hunt using tribal hunting practices. But the warming climate has changed the migratory patterns of the herd.

“… because the winter was so mild down in Yellowstone this year, the bison really never migrated out of the park. And so there wasn’t the opportunity to go down there and harvest bison by the end of March, which is when the end of our season is,” said Gladstone

The use of practicing cooking and using sustainable ingredients is especially important for tribal members because of the growing effects of climate change. Plants that rely on the nutrients from surrounding wetlands are drying up due to droughts and Gladstone is concerned that these plants will go extinct without Indigenous agricultural practices.

“There were methods of planting that were called the Three Sisters… corn grows tall and straight and provides a support system for the beans, squash spreads out on the ground and prevents weeds from coming up,” said Gladstone, “if you have a year where maybe all of your squash failed, maybe squash bugs got to it…the pests that affect one do not affect the others. And so there is resilience in that diversity.”

Whether the work is being done on the frontlines of harvesting meats, resourcing native plants, or simply learning how to cook sustainably, Gladstone and the Indigikitchen are providing resources and opportunities for their community. 

“…we recognize that we have a responsibility and a role in building food sovereignty and building our community’s ability to feed themselves.”