- I used to be real fiery because as like, a young female line cook.

There have been times where like I have to like really get in somebody's face to get someone to like back off.

After the first indigenous dinner that we did, I went home and I cried because I was so happy that I got to do that.

I have this food knowledge now I need to share it.

Power and health comes from knowing how to cook.

Knowing how to feed yourself well is very important.

And so that's been something that we've been wanting to do with the pop-up by having these indigenous ingredients and then people being curious about them, I'm like, cool, that person's going to go tell, you know at least one person about this.

And then maybe it'll hit the ears of another native person and then maybe they'll be curious enough to come check it out.

And then maybe they'll be like, wow, I've never had wild rice before.

Then you come back to fry bread.

That's a split world fry bread Taco, Indian Taco.

Ndn taco.

Yeah.

You'll find these at a lot of Pow Wows or for fundraisers on the reservation.

It has a dark history to it, but we took it and we turned it around and we made a comfort food out of it.

Every fry bread recipe is also different based on family or even person sometimes within the family.

You know, we lost a lot of our food identity, so we want to reclaim all these indigenous ingredients, but fry bread still has like a special place in my heart and it reminds me of my grandma and one of my grandpa's who's now passed away.

Me and my husband, we had always wanted to do like a pop-up or have a restaurant of our own.

And when the pandemic started, we used to make a bunch of like mock menus because we had been given so much stuff from the restaurants that we had worked at.

So we came up with a bunch of tiny different little restaurant concepts.

But it was around the time closer to when my daughter was born that we were like, all right, if we choose one, what do we want to do?

What do we think is going to be the most successful?

What do we think can actually keep us going where we can invest ourselves into it?

And we kind of broke it down to like, I think it's Javelina.

If we can get food out at a good pace and we have a full dining room, and if I can go out and talk to guests, that makes me feel like it's a successful pop-up.

It's been awesome seeing tables of Native folks at our pop-ups.

I'm like, whoa, this is amazing.

You're here and you're checking out our food.

This is beautiful.