For Cherokee chef Nico Williams, cooking is a way to celebrate and honour her Cherokee culture.
"When we connect with these ancestral foods, it feeds parts of our our existence, like our spiritual health, our mental health, and emotional wellbeing," she told Living Black.
Nico says that food is at the heart of Cherokee culture and traditions.
It brings people together to connect, it symbolises ancient stories and lessons and it strengthens their connection to the land.
"Food comes from the land, so food ties us back to the land, and that's the most important thing: for us to recognise our place in the world and our relationship with the land and the animals and the plants that we rely on, and who also rely on us."
Native food, healthy body
Nico founded Burning Ceder Sovereign Wellness, a non-profit organisation dedicated to addressing socioeconomic disparity and cultural disconnection affecting Indigenous communities by re-establishing ancestral foodways. Credit: Supplied
She educates the public about the benefits of cultivating and using native ingredients in everyday cooking.
She wants people to know that using native foods is not only nutritionally beneficial, but is also key to looking after the land
"The way that we've been taught, the land needs us to interact with it just as much as we need it for these foods that it produces."
"It's this mutually beneficial relationship.
"We just need to learn to interact with the land in a way that we've always known, as Indigenous people, which allows us to take care of it and to make sure that it's here for future generations."
Dealing with a loss of identity
Nico didn’t always have a strong connection to her Cherokee identity.
Her grandfather was removed from his ancestral homeland in the Appalachian region during the period of the Trail of Tears.
He relocated later with his family to California, where Nico grew up. The repercussions would be felt through the generations.
"Our entire family grew up away from the Cherokee community," she said.
"There wasn't a lot of information coming directly from my family about our Cherokee heritage other than just a very deep pride and understanding that that's where we have come from."
Although Nico didn’t grow up knowing her Cherokee culture, being raised by two chefs, the main way her family showed love and connection was through food.
"I guess it would be kind of an old-fashioned type of upbringing, where every single night, we sat around the dinner table and we shared about our day.
"I treasure that time now, because I think it really brought home the importance of food as a way of connecting and keeping us close together."
Culture as a healer
Nico was 19 when she moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for a fresh start.
It was here she made her first connection with the Cherokee community.
She began attending community dinners to learn more about her culture and traditional foods.
"Being in Oklahoma was the opportunity for me to find what our heritage really means as far as language and food and just the real culture of everything.
"It was incredibly important. I really felt that I'd been brought to that space at the right time in my life.
"I felt that the closer I got with my community, the better I felt and the more whole I felt as a person."
This connection to community was a healing experience for Nico: at the time she was battling mental health issues and addiction.
"I was medicating myself for my feelings of anxiety or discomfort and feeling uncomfortable in my own identity.
"But the closer I got with my Cherokee community, the less I needed those other things, the more I felt at home. Not just in a sense of space, in a sense of location, but at home with myself and internally."
Although Nico had never been classically trained, she worked her way through the ranks working as a chef and eventually became an Executive Chef at Duet restaurant.
She saw this as an opportunity to introduce the Tulsa community to traditional Cherokee food.
"There was no Native restaurant in Tulsa, even though we had such a large Native community there.
"And I thought, 'If I have the opportunity to even just put a couple little mentions of that, I think it would be really impactful for our community to see that on menus, and see ourselves reflected."
"It was very well received. People were starting to be interested in native ingredients and Native foods.
"Especially people from our own community that recognised those ingredients, were even more excited."
Finding space for nature
Connecting to culture through food has been positive for Nico and her community. Credit: Supplied
She decided to start her own catering company, Burning Cedar Indigenous Foods, to share her knowledge and educate the public on traditionally sourced food and to show her community how to grow their own native ingredients.
"We would do catering and consulting, and when we would go into communities and, and bring a meal.
"It always had an aspect of education to it, and I just saw the need in our community to reconnect to these foods in a really meaningful way.
"That's something that we felt was really lacking in our community, was that as urban native people, we don't have as much access to land, and we wanted to show people you can live in the city with that limited access and still feel connected to heritage and to culture and find ways to heal, even with just a little apartment balcony or something like that."
She has since expanded her dream by opening Burning Cedar Wellness centre. She hopes to create a safe and inclusive space for the community to come together and to share with one another.
"We start with events like cooking classes, where we learn to make a soup like this, or storytelling events, movie nights, but those are really just catalysts for conversation.
"Once you get everyone together, that's where real conversations starts to happen.
More importantly, she hopes to help keep her community strong and connected to culture through food.
"What allows us to be truly well in our understanding of wellness, something more about balance.
"It's about being in a good relationship with the land, with one another, with everything that is around us, and being in balance in our, in our own inner lives as well.
" Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically."
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