That work, each by way of the nonprofit and on his personal, has led him to the White Home for the annual Tribal Summit, which brings collectively leaders from the federal authorities and tribal nations to strengthen nation-to-nation relationships and assist tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
For the previous two years on the summit, he has organized Indigenous-focused feasts for lots of of attendees, that includes dishes like turkey tamales, ahi poke, and three sisters salad with corn, beans, and squash. Final 12 months, he traveled to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, tapped by the Wilderness Society to spend per week cooking with components that existed earlier than colonization—blue corn, wild rice, and cranberry pancakes for breakfast and maple-braised bison with roasted hearty greens and quinoa for dinner—for a gaggle of 20 folks within the distant Brooks Range. His setup wasn’t way more than a transportable Coleman tenting range, a double propane burner, and a water filtration system.
“How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth in terms of meals manufacturing?”
All these efforts have left an enduring impression on his contemporaries, together with Penobscot chef Joe Robbins, who labored with Kinneen on the 2023 Tribal Summit and likewise teamed up with him to develop recipe movies using each authorities commodity meals and conventional, culturally vital components. That’s particularly vital as a result of many tribal communities nonetheless rely upon meals rations from the U.S. authorities, which traditionally haven’t been notably nutritious.
“As I have a look at the work Rob has executed with fixed dedication to not simply to his tribe in Alaska however to all Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and past, it strengthens the work that each one Indigenous cooks, farmers, and producers are doing day by day,” Robbins says. “In the case of Indigenous illustration within the culinary world, we’re nonetheless missing, although the tides are shifting rapidly. Perspective of our cultures has at all times come from the surface, however the work NATIFS is doing is coming from tribal communities, giving us all a a lot louder voice.”
Amy Foote, an Alaska-based chef who’s striving to introduce conventional meals into healthcare amenities and different establishments there, echoes that sentiment. “Rob’s skill to create a bridge between Alaska Native tradition and the broader meals world is inspiring,” says Foote, who is just not Indigenous however has centered a lot of her profession on the deeply Indigenous notion of meals as drugs. “By working alongside world Indigenous communities, he’s reviving misplaced or endangered meals information and offering a method for communities to reclaim and reconnect with their meals heritage. Rob is a grounding presence to a sovereign meals future.”
Certainly, Kinneen embodies a reverence for the previous with a imaginative and prescient for the longer term—a juxtaposition many Alaska Native communities are at present navigating. “Though ancestral information is rooted in custom, that doesn’t imply it will possibly’t be tailored,” he says. “We must be mapping in the present day’s thought processes and know-how onto Indigenous stewardship fashions to assist promote meals information.”
As prime examples of non-extractive Indigenous ingenuity, he factors to the resurgence of Zuni waffle gardens for vegetable rising, which assist preserve water within the Southwest, and the kelp farming that Dune Lankard of the Native Conservancy is spearheading alongside Alaska’s south-central coast, concurrently bolstering the native economic system with a nutritious conventional meals and serving to mitigate local weather change impacts like ocean acidification.
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