Meet the Native American Farmer Promoting Northern New Mexico’s Indigenous Foodways

The aroma of cedar smoke fills the early autumn air, punctuated by the crackle of wood as Norma Naranjo rakes out hot ashes from the horno, a beehive-shaped adobe oven, with a long wooden paddle. She piles the ashes on the ground and tops them with glossy green chiles from her garden; the heat will concentrate their flavor for later use in a stew.

Naranjo is the founder of The Feasting Place, a culinary and cultural program based out of her home on the Ohkay Owingeh (“Place of Strong People”) Pueblo in Española, New Mexico, thirty minutes north of Santa Fe. A pueblo refers to Native Americans of the Southwest who live in permanent settlements. The Pueblo peoples are largely agrarian in nature.

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A Vietnam War veteran and former social worker, Naranjo established The Feasting Place in 2000, motivated by her desire to educate the public about traditional Ohkay foodways and culture. Many of her students are children from local schools and her own and other pueblos, but she also works with tour groups, local hotels, and universities.

“Historically, we were a farming culture,” says Naranjo. “We grew our own food, we were active. As kids, we’d plant, hoe, and harvest, and go out to irrigate the garden after dinner. What do our kids do now? They’re on their phone or watching TV, and their parents work and get fast food because they have no time to cook.”

Corn grown at The Feasting Place. Photos by Laurel Miller.

Naranjo and her husband Hutch cultivate chicos (a type of corn that is dried, steamed, and rehydrated for stews or as a side dish), tomatoes, watermelon, and the three sisters (the Native American trinity of squash, corn, and beans, which are grown as symbiotic companion plants; chiles are often referred to as the little sister, as they were introduced with the arrival of the Spaniards). Hutch, who is from the nearby Santa Clara Pueblo, builds hornos for local clients and businesses and raises grassfed Angus beef.

On this day, a group of nine students from Colgate University, a prestigious liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York, are taking the first of three cooking classes from Naranjo. The classes are part of the curriculum for an immersive, semester-long off-campus scholar’s program based in Santa Fe. Most are first- or second-generation immigrants and one student is Native American, of Onondaga heritage.

“The participants are first-generation college students who have overcome historical, structural, or personal obstacles in their lives and were able to find their way to Colgate,” says Mark Stern, the program’s academic director. “Santa Fe is unique for our off-campus study options because we’ve cultivated relationships of reciprocity with local pueblos, which allows our students to learn with and from Native American scholars who offer perspectives and cosmologies about ideas that challenge the core of, for lack of a better term, Western epistemology.”

Stern learned about the Naranjos from two of the program’s instructors, who are from local pueblos. “Norma and Hutch were highly recommended when I asked who might be able to talk to us about pueblo food,” he says. “My experience suggests that students don’t want to be staring at screens all day; they want to be learning experientially, and The Feasting Place provides that.”

The first three-hour class begins with Naranjo and her sister, Tomasita Duran, providing a history of the 700-year-old Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, which has a population of 2,700 members, in addition to 5,000 non-tribal members. At one time, Ohkay was also the state capitol.

Like most of New Mexico’s pueblos, Ohkay generates revenue from its casino, gas stations and other businesses, but some, like the Pojoaque, Picuris, and Taos pueblos, raise bison as part of a federal conservation effort that also helps widen the genetic diversity of established herds and provides the pueblos with a traditional food source. When Naranjo teaches youth classes at Pojoaque, she barters classes in exchange for bison meat.

Naranjo wants The Feasting Place to encourage younger generations on the pueblos to make healthier food choices by returning to a more traditional diet in favor of processed foods; she has even authored a cookbook, The Four Sisters: Keeping Family Traditions Alive.

“At one point in time, we were ashamed of who we were as native people,” she says. “But now, you see more of our young people participating in dance and other cultural activities and learning our ways including a return to planting and preparing their own food.”

New Mexico is also a tri-cultural state, a merging of Native American, Spanish, and Mexican influences that have parlayed themselves into a distinctive native cuisine that makes use of Indigenous, as well as Old and New World ingredients such as potatoes, corn, chiles, and tomatoes. The Spaniards also introduced wheat to the pueblos, and taught the native peoples to bake using hornos, which are of Moorish origin.

For today’s class, the students are making empanadas filled with peaches and apples from the Naranjo’s trees and Indian tacos made with fry bread. As an appetizer, Norma shows the students how to make and knead dough for what she calls, “pizzas, res-style,” which are cooked in the horno. “You’re not in New York anymore; this is Indian Country!” she says, eliciting laughs.

After prepping their dough and topping their thin-crusted pizzas with tomatoes, herbs, and other produce from the garden, the group moves outside for an horno demonstration from Hutch. “You’re learning to bake the way it’s been done for 500 years,” he says, showing them how he builds a pyre of cedar wood, which he collects from Santa Clara Canyon, in the back of the oven.

The horno needs to be 700 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure a sufficiently crisp crust; Naranjo uses a rolled-up newspaper as a temperature gauge by thrusting it into the horno, counting to five, and removing it. Its toasty hue tells her the oven is hot enough, so the students take turns cooking their pizzas.

From left: Endre Cattouse, Jatziry Macedo, Rhoman Elvis. Photos by Laurel Miller.

One of them, Fausto Flores Alvarez, mentions that the horno is similar to the mud oven his grandmother uses in his native Honduras. His classmate Endré Cattouse, who is Belizean and of Garifuna heritage, compares it to a Garifuna oven, while the empanadas are nearly identical to Belizean patties.

“I’m noticing a lot of cultural similarities today,” says Cattouse. “One of the best things about this program is that we also learn from one another. When we go shopping, we start talking about our favorite snacks or dishes growing up, and then we end up trying new foods. We bond in a different way than we do at school.”

While the pizzas are cooking, some of the students harvest fruit for the empanadas, which will bake in the horno, while others explore the property, admiring the fresh chicos drying on wood-and-wire racks and visiting the resident chickens. Hutch passes around his freshly ground blue masa, which Norma will use for muffins.

Back in the dining room, the students gather to watch Naranjo make fry bread. She eschews measuring and demonstrates the method her grandmother taught her: by feel. “Norma’s hands have all of the information she needs,” says Hutch. “You lose the feel when you rely on recipes.”

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While lard is traditional for pueblo baking, Naranjo uses Crisco (“I buy it by the truckload!”) for classes because it’s suitable for vegetarians and vegans. As she shows how to knead the dough, one of the students asks why she makes Indian tacos—which today will be filled with the Naranjo’s ground beef, beans, and garden produce—due to its associations with colonialism.

Naranjo acknowledges the controversy but explains that the dish is still ubiquitous among pueblo peoples, and enables her to demonstrate a variety of culinary techniques. Also, it tastes good and is symbolic of the Native American fight for survival and freedom from oppression. “But I also believe that we shouldn’t waste our energy on things that happened in the past,” she says. “Focus on the present; that’s how pueblo people are.”

While the menu isn’t comprised of stereotypically “healthy” dishes, it’s a marked contrast to the heavily processed foods available to most Native American communities, and it is designed to utilize fresh, seasonal produce and meat and provide students with life skills as well as basic mathematics, history, and English (Naranjo often asks her younger students to submit essays describing their class experience).

After bidding farewell to the students and inviting them to return to hang out around the firepit- Norma will offer this explanation: “This isn’t just about making money or teaching a class and saying goodbye. Many of our students are far from home and I want them to feel at home while they’re in New Mexico. We’ve even had people stay with us. Food brings people together. It doesn’t matter where you’re from.”