Take, for instance, corn, beans, squash, chilies, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, manioc, peanuts, avocados, pineapples, vanilla and chocolate: These are all foods native to the Americas that didn't exist in European cultures pre-contact. Contemporary American cuisine is actually a combination of the traditional native foods that existed here before contact with Europeans and the foods that European immigrants brought with them to America.

I started Red Mesa Cuisine with Diné (Navajo) chef Walter Whitewater to bring Native American cuisine into contemporary kitchens, to revitalize cultural traditions that are associated with these traditional foods and practices, and to educate people about what Native American cuisine actually is. At Red Mesa, we use ancient ingredients that we purchase from a variety of Native American communities, then serve them with a modern twist. Our mission is to help sustain traditional native foods, to teach about traditional agricultural practices associated with these foods, and to revitalize culinary traditions of the past so that they will be here for future generations. We take ancestral Native American cooking techniques and ingredients that have been on this continent for many millennia and present them in a contemporary context, with an explanation of their origin and importance. Everyone who tastes the foods we prepare at Red Mesa eats a piece of Native American culture as well as its cuisine.

While we buy many of our ingredients locally, we also specialize in sourcing ingredients from Native American communities we have found all over the Americas. For example, manoomin (or wild rice) is purchased from small tribal retailers of the Ojibwe Nation of the Great Lakes region. Locally, we buy bison (buffalo) meat from Picuris Pueblo, located in northern New Mexico and a member of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, which includes 57 tribal members nationally and has a collective herd of over 15,000 bison. By buying our bison from Picuris, we help support the Bison Agricultural Project, whose goal is to restore the bison population in a manner that is focused on preserving the historical, cultural, traditional and spiritual relationship with bison for future generations while also supplying meat to Pueblo tribal members.

We also prepare many dishes that feature the "three sisters": cultivated ancient heirloom varieties of corn, beans and squash. Even the way these vegetables grow in the garden exemplifies the notion of interconnectedness, as do the complementary nutrients they provide. Chef Whitewater and I grow as much produce as we can every year, purchase what we don't grow from local farmers and Native American communities, and preserve many of these foods by canning and freezing them at the peak of the growing season so we can use them in our catering throughout the year.

In addition, we source and hand-gather many wild foods from this region, including piñon pine nuts, wild berries, cactus fruits, wild greens, a variety of teas, wild vegetables and more. We buy locally raised organic bison meat, Navajo-Churro lamb, quail, Rio Grande turkeys and other naturally raised poultry products. What's so wonderful about using traditional Native American foods is that everyone can participate in this process by buying and sourcing ingredients from tribal retailers that provide Native American food ingredients and products. It's that simple. When you purchase Native American-sourced ingredients you become a part of something so important and so vital to the future of traditional native foods and all the cultural traditions associated with them. You become a steward in perpetuating Native American foods, culture and cuisine. How wonderful is that?