Apache Chef Brings Truth to the Table

Cooking was an enthusiasm that had underpinned all of Craig’s interests and activities. He had long cooked for family and friends and was fascinated by TV cooking shows, like Great Chefs of the World, and the celebrity chefs they showcased. Maybe, he thought, eyeing the chef’s uniform, this could work.

Craig had been continually in and out of trouble—starting with beer-drinking as a young child, progressing though drug use and culminating in the car wreck. Every disaster had, however, propelled him to a dazzling moment of discovery. In Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef (Penguin Press, 2026), Craig and co-writer Hagar Sher show us how catastrophe and the powerful Apache culture converge repeatedly to change Craig’s life and reveal a deeper understanding of his family and his people.

Craig’s memoir recounts the extreme racism, casual insults and horrifying violence to which Native people were, and still are, subjected in the United States. At the same time, the book confirms that neither colonization nor oppression have suppressed them. Rather, it shows that Native people have relied on their cultures to transform these experiences in ways that sustain and heal themselves and their communities.

After beginning cooking school in 1998, Craig landed jobs in a succession of restaurants. His most essential chef’s tools—his knives—are a leitmotif throughout the book. Craig buys them, is given them as gifts, learns the exquisitely specialized skills involved in using them and teaches younger chefs how to employ them adeptly and with care. He sells off some when he’s desperate for food, booze or drugs. Sometimes, he’s down to one knife. At one low point, he tells himself, “It’s just me and my knives now.”

Rehab, relapses, prison and hospital stints—including plenty of near-death experiences—alternate with restaurant jobs and sudden realizations. “Take the tomato,” he writes. When he learned of its origins in the mountains of Mesoamerica, he was shocked: “The poster child of Italian cuisine was indigenous to the Americas—a Native like me.”

He once asked himself, “Who stole this shit from us first? After the Spanish took it from us and brought it to Spain, did they hand it over to their Italian homies? Did the French then just prance over and take credit for it?”

Craig has cooked in top restaurants and demonstrated the best of Native cuisine in the U.S. and abroad. In 2003, he founded the Native American Culinary Foundation, dedicated to researching and refining Indigenous cuisine. The organization is also a public-health service, he says, and reminds Native people of the wholesome foods that traditionally made up their diets. Now 46, Craig is the executive chef of Café Gozhóó, on his home reservation in Arizona.

Over the years, amidst the heat and noise and hard work, Craig has felt Indigenous ingredients—bison, salmon, corn, beans, squash, chiles, chocolate and more—spurring him on. “Yeah, we’re here, the beans and corn were telling me. Just go for it.”

Craig saw that the story of Native food had been erased from the country’s collective memory, just as legal, geographical and social isolation had segregated tribal nations and peoples from the U.S. mainstream. “I committed myself to piecing it back together as best I could. I was determined to bring the truth back to the table.”

He looked for information in every place he could think of—encyclopedias, books, magazines, newspapers and the Library of Congress website. He scoured libraries and thrift shop book sales. Early on in cooking school, he writes, “we had been taught how to temper chocolate and make ganache, and later, in pastry class, we were instructed on how to prepare éclairs, profiteroles, mousse au chocolate and soufflé. What no one ever taught us about was the history of cacao, which, it turns out, is much more bitter than sweet.”

Originally a spiritual drink of Mayans, Aztecs and others, he learned, cacao, which is the basis of chocolate, became an exclusive, gourmet ingredient. It was grown in quantity and imported at great cost for the European wealthy. “A food once revered for opening hearts now broke Indigenous people’s spirits and backs.”

The death of Craig’s father in 2010, when Craig was 30, was a staggering blow. For Craig, it meant more rehab and more restaurants. At one, he was hired as head chef then fired for going on a bender that caused him to miss three shifts in a row.

“I had forged a path that didn’t exist for brown, Indigenous chefs like me, but I didn’t know how to be sober,” Craig writes. A doctor agreed, warning him, “You’re going to drink yourself to death if you don’t stop.”

Then Craig found a rehab center in Tucson he thought might actually work. “This place seemed different,” he writes, “or maybe it was me. I was finally done with the chaos.” Cultivating a garden at the center proved to be his salvation. The work put him in touch with his culture’s roots—“an intimate and strategic relationship to land, water and food.”

That connection supported his decision to turn down an offer that seemed to be exactly what he’d been working toward his whole professional life: becoming the executive chef of the Smithsonian Museum’s nationally prominent Indigenous restaurant, Mitsitam, in Washington, D.C.

Instead of chasing fame, Craig went for a very different opportunity. He decided to renovate an abandoned gas station on the White Mountain Apache reservation and make it into a stylish open-plan kitchen and dining room. Here, he would repair the destruction of his people’s ancient food systems and, as a consequence, their health. He would do something meaningful for the Apache people.

About this decision, he writes, “I had taken a giant leap of faith in us and not the system.”

While waiting for the permits that would allow construction to begin, Craig became an addiction-recovery counselor and developed a cooking-skills and nutrition-oriented recovery program that serves as the umbrella organization for the now-acclaimed eatery, Café Gozhóó.

In the Apache language, Craig explains, the word gozhóó means “balance, harmony, and beauty.” This indicates the breadth and depth of the café’s mission, according to Craig. The priority, he writes in the memoir, is “serving clean, delicious and affordable food to our community … simple dishes executed beautifully.”

Café Gozhóó is an expression of Craig’s firm belief in his culture and the enduring strength of his people: “We are the seeds our ancestors planted.”

Stephanie WoodardMore by this author →

Stephanie Woodard is an award-winning reporter who covers human rights and the rights of nature. She is the author of American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion.