Chef dishes out education on healthy eating along with Native American-‘inspired’ cuisine

The body doesn’t need three meals a day, seven days a week, he said, and when we eat today, we eat too much.

“The more sugar-based food we pump into our bodies, we create a still of alcohol,” Warrior said. “We’re creating that craving for a sugar high, and that is abuse of our bodies.” 

He calls his dishes Native inspired because it’s so hard to find ingredients, produced by Native producers, to match. He uses ingredients used by indigenous people across the continent and into Central and South America.

“I only use ingredients that were known in the Americas,” Warrior said.

 At a recent catered meal at the John Neihardt State Historic Site in Bancroft, Warrior dished up bison ribeyes, with charred onions and sweet pepper butter, corn hominy with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, maple encrusted pecans and dried fruit, and dried berries in chocolate wedges.

Became healthy via Native foods

He relies mostly on a small network of growers and foragers for ingredients. He has purchased corn grown by the Omaha and Kickapoo tribes, bison from a grower near Niobrara and wild rice harvested from the lakes of Canada and Minnesota.

Warrior’s personal story is dramatic — he once weighed more than 500 pounds and was diagnosed as diabetic.

But by avoiding processed foods and using intermittent fasting — as Native Americans would have done — he now weighs below 300 pounds and is looking to slim down more.

“Now my biggest drive is my children, to break them from the curse of unhealthy foods,” Warrior said. “I show them that if they eat better, they can feel better.”

For the past two summers, he has cooked and taught at a “Cultural Connections” youth camp at the Neihardt Center for Native American students. He regularly presents programs at schools and universities and teaches a cooking class in Santee.

Food can drive health

“You’ve got to keep yourself healthy,” he said. “Food can drive that.”

Warrior, however, said his catering customers are most often non-Native.

“(Natives) say ‘We’ve been eating that for thousands of years, we don’t want that any anymore,’ ” he said. “It’s really tough to sell the food back to the Natives.”

But he won some converts three years ago in Sioux City, Iowa, after the request for fry bread.

“Just trust me,” he told the catering customer, who was holding a family reunion.

So he prepared a meal of hominy corn grits, beans, squash, braised bison, some smoked duck with wild rice and fish.

His client loved it.

“She said ‘I never knew this was Native food,’” Warrior said.