Mariah Gladstone pulls a butternut squash out of her bag and places it on a cutting board in a classroom at Flathead Valley Community College. 

The keynote speaker for the annual Earth Day expo, Gladstone owns Indigikitchen, an online cooking show dedicated to re-indigenizing diets by providing knowledge on how to find and prepare foods for health, but in the case of Natives also for the added benefit of cultural revitalization. The name comes from combining Indigenous, digital and kitchen.  

For a cooking demonstration, Gladstone chose to make a classic: Three Sisters soup. 

The Three Sisters of Indigenous American agriculture — corn, beans and squash — are crops planted together in a shared space to benefit one another's growth. 

The beans bring nitrogen into the soil, a key ingredient for plant growth and development. The corn provides a stalk for the beans to climb and the squash acts as a ground cover, preventing weeds and retaining moisture.  

The plants work in harmony to support each other, Gladstone said. It is a classic story of cultural significance and food security that can still be used today. 

For the Northwest Montana native, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet and Cherokee tribes, it's all about reigniting the culture, passion and skills when it comes to food that has been utilized for hundreds of years.  

“We’re looking at a time where there’s really an interest in restoring a lot of these food systems,” Gladstone said at the event. “Let's start looking at our communities, whether it be reservation or non-reservation communities, as places of abundance rather than places of scarcity.” 

Gladstone, with a knife and using an electric pressure cooker due to lack of a kitchen, chopped up a few bulbs of garlic and a whole white onion. Everything used in the soup can be harvested or bought from a local store, depending on availability.  

In the pressure cooker, she sautés the garlic and onion together until the classroom fills with the smell of cooking hinting at the beginnings of the flavor soup. She adds white beans and hominy corn. The butternut squash goes in with vegetable broth and it's time to stir and let it cook.  

It’s an easy recipe, Gladstone said, utilizing traditional foods.  

After a few minutes, the sound of boiling and the smell of a warm, rich meal floods the room. Gladstone creates a bowl with the shell of the butternut squash scooping the soup into it for serving.  

While cooking, Gladstone worked through her extensive knowledge of natural foods in Northwest Montana. Growing up in Kalispell and spending her summers on the Blackfeet Reservation, homelife was always hands-on, from picking raspberries in her grandma’s backyard to cooking with produce from her great uncle’s garden. 

“I really had that understanding of food coming from the land and not just the grocery store,” she said ahead of the Earth Day event.  

Gladstone moved to New York City after graduating high school to attend Columbia University and major in environmental engineering. She also earned a graduate degree from SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry. 

“When I moved away to go to college in NYC, I found myself missing so many of those things,” Gladstone said. “Even with its world cuisines, it didn't have my local Montana foods or these indigenous foods.” 

When she returned home after college, the idea of starting Indigikitchen took off, shifting her mindset and learning about the things right outside her front door.  

Wild greens, yarrow, fireweed, bee balm, dandelions, stinging nettles and other consumption-safe plants grow everywhere. Part of Gladstone’s goal is to not only let people know that there is a world of nutrition that has lost its claim in culture but also give people the tools and methods to work with natural food.  

Gladstone hoped to share both tangible knowledge, such as plant identification or how to process corn for nutritional gain, as well as an overall sense of responsibility for the land.  

“We have food all around us if we know how to take care of it,” Gladstone said. 

Gladstone’s most recent endeavor is a children's cookbook called “Mountains to Oceans,” a collection of recipes from Native land. Learn more at indigikitchen.com.  

Reporter Kate Heston may be reached at 758-4459 or [email protected].