Craig worked as a chef in the kitchens of high-end restaurants and hotels across the world and even founded the Native American Culinary Association (NACA) back in 2003. But his substance abuse issues followed him, and several rehab stints didn’t make a difference.

Returning to the White Mountain Apache reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona, in late 2008 saved Craig’s life. There he got sober and became a behavioral health technician as well as the Nutritional Recovery program coordinator at the tribe-owned Rainbow Treatment Center, which serves people recovering from substance abuse.

In 2021, he opened Café Gozhóó, a restaurant on the reservation that doubles as one of the center’s vocational training programs. There, participants reconnect with traditional foods, hone kitchen skills, and learn to work alongside their fellow enrollees. Craig credits cooking with Indigenous foods such as tomatoes, chiles, and corn—mainstays on the café’s menu—in recent decades for helping heal his own intergenerational trauma.

Now 46, Craig recounts all of this in his memoir, Our Knives Will Save Us (out July 14), an unapologetically honest telling of how his long-time addictions led to his life’s work in restorative Indigenous food practices. Civil Eats recently spoke with Craig about his new book, kitchen skills as therapy, and the importance of culturally relevant foods.

In Our Knives Will Save Us, you write, “All of us, Native or not, are in recovery from the disease of colonialism, a system built on a set of beliefs that erode our humanity and harm the earth.” Can you elaborate on that?

With addiction and recovery, we always look at symptomology and environmental factors, from trauma to family dynamics. Early on in my sobriety, it became apparent to me that the principles of recovery run parallel to the principles of decolonization—meaning we’re detaching from something that has historically hurt us. So from that standpoint, colonialism can be considered a disorder.

Looking back, I can see how trying to fit a mold in the chef world was damaging. Trying to fit into circles that weren’t built for me as a Native person caused emotional and spiritual strife that I didn’t realize or have the skills to manage at the time. So if you consider colonialism a disorder for just one person, then what does that do to a family? Or a small clan system? Or a larger community or nation?

A lot of recovery work is about determining root causes, working on emotional connections, and building relationships. We know that as Indigenous people, colonialism detaches, separates, minimizes, and dehumanizes. If you look at the roots of colonialism and its partners, imperialism and capitalism, they’re very much violent entities that have invaded our world and shattered identities. Food and cooking can act as connectors and help with the relationship building that’s necessary for healing.

How have traditional Indigenous foods played a role in your own addiction recovery?

Colonialism and historical trauma are root causes for my own addiction. I know this because intergenerational grief is passed down. It shapes how we interact with food and how we recognize food as “Native” or not.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to question where these foods—tomatoes, cacao, amaranth—come from. Discovering that the tomato is Native, like me, gave me a sense of strength and possibility. I feel like foods were always carrying these messages for me, but I wasn’t ready to hear them because of my chemical dependency and internalized depression. It took studying and investigating to have these “aha” moments.

In my classes and talks now, I say all the time that when we reclaim this epistemology, we’re healing this culinary diaspora of ancestral knowledge that floats atomically through the strands of DNA in our bodies and in the foods.

Can you talk about the cultural significance of Emory oak acorns—a foundational food that also plays an important role in ceremony—to the Apache people and how this staple is under threat?

If you look at our ancestral territory—what we call Western Apacheria—it’s the same geographic area where Emory oak acorns grow. So we’ve got this long-standing relationship with this food. It’s part of our Apache creation story; the Changing Woman survived a flood by floating in an abalone shell and carrying foods like grass, corn seeds, nuts, and acorns. Acorns are considered sacred for that reason.

The biggest threats are climate change and our ability to harvest acorns. Our land base has shrunk because of colonization, which has put our relationship [with acorns] in a delicate balance.

One big lesson we can take from the acorn that can be applied to other Indigenous foods is this simple question: Why did this food survive colonization? It’s because of the strong value systems, kinships, and communal gathering. When you look at all those values connected to this food, it provides a lot of ancestral strength. So that in itself is the relationship I hope we can maintain so that we can keep those values alive.