Charity Blanchett talks Akutaq and Black Alaskan Native Foodways
Making "Eskimo" ice cream, or Akutaq, and an interview with Charity Qalutaq Blanchett, a Yup’ik and Black woman, and founder of The Dipping Spoon.
Note: There was no way I could include everything I wanted to about Alaskan Native culture or Black Indigenous Foodways in this post, so stay tuned for more of these conversations from
and I!In the past several years, the Indigenous food movement has seen a renaissance. Although Indigenous representation in the culinary community remains much lower than it should be — especially considering that we live on land stolen from Native people — Indigenous chefs, restaurants, and food experts are emerging to the forefront of culinary spaces, announcing their presence, expertise, and heritage.
However, Black Indigenous chefs and culinary experts have seen a slower rise to the forefront, partly due to a combination of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity that attempts to erase their multifaceted identity. But Indigenous Food in this country has included Black people since we were stolen away to this stolen land, and Black Native culinary experts are beginning to make their voices louder and their presence known.
Charity Qalutaq Blanchett, a Yup’ik and Black woman, founded The Dipping Spoon Foundation in 2019 to grow the next generation of Black and Indigenous culinary rockstars. She knew that exploring intersections of ethnicity, gender, race, and food would be revolutionary. “Indigenous and Black people, we have been around since time immemorial, but where is our Indigenous expertise in a textbook?,” she says. This lack of representation led her to found the Dipping Spoon, which is based on her Yup’ik name, Qalutuq, which means “Dipping Spoon.”
The nonprofit aims to provide annual scholarships for two Black or Indigenous women aged 18 to 26 to attend the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute (NOCHI), covering the $60,000 cost of the year-long program, including housing, travel, paid mentorships and externships, job placement assistance, mental health services and empowerment coaching.
The Dipping Spoon also works in rural Alaska, where access to medicine, education, and groceries is extremely limited, since, as Blanchett says, “Eighty percent of Alaska is only accessible by boat or plane.” She teamed up with the Lower Kuskokwim School District, Alaska's largest rural school district, to bring in resources.
“I piloted the after school club and week long culinary arts intensive camp in three schools, including in my mother's village, Tuntutuliak.” The afterschool program turned into a week-long culinary arts intensive camp, which Blanchett said changed her life, even though she was the teacher and not the student.
Blanchett was raised in Wasilla, Alaska, but relocated to New Orleans nine years ago, where her foundation is based. New Orleans, and all of Louisiana, is land with a rich Indigenous culture and history of its own. “New Orleans is called Bulbancha, which means ‘place of many tongues,’” Blanchett points out. This city, site of the largest slave port, the most “African” city in the U.S., and a place where countless Black, Indigenous, and brown people have built beautiful cultures but have also been subjected to state violence and abandonment, is the unceded land of the Chitimacha, the Houma, the Chahta Yakni (Choctaw), the Atakapa Ishak Chawasha, and all Indigenous peoples of the region.
And moving to New Orleans helped Blanchett make parallels between Black and Indigenous struggles, experiences, and joys.
“Back home in Alaska, we live a subsistence lifestyle,” Blanchett says. “We live off of the land, the sky, the ocean,” adding that not only is this cultural, but it is necessary as most rural and Indigenous areas in Alaska are food deserts where basic groceries are expensive For example, a 2 lb pack of chicken breasts can cost up to $60 in many areas, and Nutella can be $30 for two jars.
In New Orleans, Blanchett learned about how Black farmers, hunters, and foragers were disenfranchised intentionally to prevent them from building wealth and attaining food sovereignty and cultural autonomy, and how Black people were put on government subsidy food just like Indigenous people were, and how that food also wasn’t culturally resonant or healthy.
“At first, it was really hard for me to understand the wants and needs of the community in New Orleans and what they had access to in terms of fresh groceries,” she says. Then, as connections started forming, so did solutions and plans. “In rural Alaska, you live in a food desert. And the New Orleans Black neighborhood I live in New Orleans is also a food desert.
One mentor of Blanchett’s is Dr. Zella Palmer, a professor of food studies at Dillard University, who is Lumbee and African American, and spoke with Blanchett about Black land loss and the decimation of Black farms by the government. “Black farming used to be huge down here,” says Blanchett. “There used to be over 6,000, and now you can count them on less than one hand.”
There’s a clear parallel here to how hunting lands, fishing waters, and agriculture have also been stripped from Indigenous people, not just on this continent, but globally, including in Palestine, where at least 186,000 people (Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa has recently published a study suggesting the death toll might be as high as 500,000) have been murdered by Israel since October 7th, in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing many in our generation have never born witness to before.
Similar crimes against humanity abound in Sudan, where the UAE (United Arab Emirates) is engaged in a proxy war, killing more than 20,000 people (again, the death toll is likely much higher) and forcing over 500,000 to leave as refugees. Farmers, fishers, and hunters in both countries have seen their lands and livelihoods decimated by this violence committed against them by imperial powers.
Like me, Blanchett sees what’s happening around the world — genocide and ecocide by big businesses and corrupt governments — and believes that we can lean into our cultures to address these issues in our community. “I truly believe that the future of food is Indigenous, and I believe the future of food is Black. Both people cultivated this land. It’s important that people like us continue to share our history, especially our traditional pathways. Our traditional pathways are what has kept us alive. And if we do not share them and get them in a textbook or get them written down somewhere, where are they gonna go? How are we going to survive?”
Our traditional pathways are what has kept us alive. And if we do not share them and get them in a textbook or get them written down somewhere, where are they gonna go? How are we going to survive?” — Charity Blanchett
I repeat so often that my Substack is about food and the end of the world, because it is. It’s about a world that is violently changing due to ecocide, genocide, capitalism, and colonialism. And Blanchett knows this more than anyone. “Slowly but surely you're seeing your cultural identity stripped from you, even though your people cultivated this land. We know how to live off of this land and survive. But climate change is changing food patterns, especially with animals. I believe what I have to offer the food landscape is deep activism rooted in cultural identity.”
In Blanchett’s work, there is a clarity of purpose, a deep knowledge of who she’s fighting for. “They've already created their own mess,” Blanchett says. “My Yup’ik name is Qalutaq, and it means dipping spoon. The literal meaning of dipping spoon is you dip into the water, the water is given to everyone, it grows and keeps going. And once I harnessed that, once I dipped into my own water, once I dipped into myself, that's when I realized that I was not dipping into the water for white people.”
“I'm not here to fix their mess,” Blanchett says. “I'm here to steward this next dipping spoon into water. “
Blanchett and I have found much common ground — both multiracial, multicultural Black women in relationship with many different groups and people, trying to translate our unique food upbringings and ancestries to a white dominated world, and make those connections of solidarity and kinship across ethnicity lines. But it’s never been easy for us.
On one call, I cried to Blanchett, describing the demoralizing nature of having to beg editors to see the worth in the stories that formed the actual beat of my heart, that I had poured so much research into. “It’s like, you know how they always tell us we have to be twice as good to get half as much as white people?” I asked Blanchett, tears streaming down my face and settling into my skin. “That’s not even true. We have to be 10 times as good as them to get a quarter of what they get.”
It was something Charity identified with, but she encouraged me to fight. “When the pandemic hit, all the fundraisers went out the window. I wallowed and stewed and self-pity for a bit because I didn't know how to pivot.”
“As a little girl, I never saw the food of my Yup’ik people or Indigenous people on the rez being sold at a grocery store or being served at a restaurant. And so I started asking questions, and then I came to discover that the USDA or FDA hadn't studied Alaska Native cuisine for having any form of nutritional value, which is ridiculous because Indigenous food is very nutritious. It just comes down to racism in public policy,” she says.
Cooking Akutaq
When I asked Blachett about some of her favorite Yup’ik meals, she said caribou is a delicacy for her. “The meat is very light and sweet, because the caribou are eating tundra berries and grass. In fact, my mother’s village, Tuntutuliak, the translation of it is ‘land of the caribou.’” Blanchett loves her mothers stews as well – made of caribou, moose, and seal on special occasions. “Seal oil is a lovely delicacy. You render that fat down and then the oil appears, and you can add salt, you could add soy sauce, you could add green onions to really add flavor to it, and dip fresh or smoked fish strips in that seal oil with a bit of sugar.”
Another memory from her childhood is ayut, or tundra tea. “My mother makes a really lovely tundra tea, you harvest the leaves from the tundra in the summertime. When you get sick, the first thing you make is tundra tea. Anytime I'm sick, I always call my mom. She's like, ‘Ahana (little woman) make tundra tea.’”
“But one of my favorites is our version of Eskimo ice cream,” she says, which is also called Akutaq, a thousands year old meal for the Indigenous people of Alaska, It’s usually made from whipped animal fat, like seal, caribou, moose, or reindeer, with fresh berries and snow, and sometimes cooked fish is added to the mixture. The disappearance of the caribou and the stripping of Indigenous hunting lands and waters makes Akutaq even more difficult to create with traditional ingredients. So, modern versions, especially as many Indigenous people move to the cities and suburbs and out of the tundra and Arctic, use whipped vegetable Crisco shortening.
Traditionally, it was often eaten by travelers and hunters for protein and nourishment. Blanchett says, “When you think about Alaska, we only have summertime three months out of the year. And then you have winter the rest of the time. So during those dark cold winters, all of that fat, that protein, and then that sugar in the ice cream… it amps you up and it keeps you warm.”
“Then you fold in berries, which are grown on the tundra, salmonberries (atsalugpiak), blackberries (t’an’gerpiit), fresh blueberries (Surat), and you add sugar, some ice,” Blanchett says. “All my life I saw women, my aunties, my mom, everyone, making this. You whisk it with your hand, and your hand becomes this big appendage and it folds and you keep folding it in until it becomes big and fluffy.”
'“The akutaq is passed down from generation to generation,” says Charity’s mother, Rev. Martha Blanchett, in a video made at Dillard University, noting that akutaq is often made when people are sitting on the floor or in a chair, which is how I made it. She also didn’t use measurements, which I found to be easier. It was easier to ask Charity, to watch the video, to learn through relationships and sight rather than measurements. And condensed milk, Martha’s special addition, made it even more delicious for me.
Like so many foods, akutaq rooted in the ceremonies and traditions of women, as Blanchett points out. In Indigenous communities across Alaska, women would usually make it after the first catch of a polar bear or seal. And the grandmother or mother of the hunter would prepare the akutaq and share it with the entire community during special ceremonies. Charity recommended I eat the akutaq with Yup’ik style fry bread, which was delicious, and I got the recipe from her father David’s video.
Of course, I wanted to make Akutaq with more traditional ingredients like animal fat, but here in Chicago, it would be incredibly hard — and most likely unethical to source — so I used Crisco. But using Crisco doesn’t make it any less Indigenous, Blanchett stresses. “Indigenous folks, as innovative as we are, we figured out how to utilize Crisco, survive, and still have our Indigenous foods.”
This fighting spirit is embedded within Blanchett, and all her projects. So, The Dipping Spoon will continue growing, fighting, addressing the issue on all fronts — the culinary world, the policy world, the cultural tourism world (which is too often exploitative, and Blanchett wants to change that). It’s tiring to know that all this work is on the shoulders of Black and Indigenous women. But both Blanchett and I agreed we have no choice but to blaze these paths, to make the world listen to us even if we have to scream.
And making the world listen to us means listening to our own people, immersing ourselves in their stories, constantly learning, and seeking the advice of elders — especially for those of us like myself and Blanchett, who grew up slightly removed from ancestral land and must work harder to maintain those ties.
Although Blanchett was raised as a proud Black Yup’ik woman, she grew up in Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage. She was a bit distanced from her mother’s rural village. In that village, her mother didn’t grow up speaking English. “My mother’s first language was Yup’ik, English is her second language,” says Blanchett. “The nuances of this make translations between mother and daughter interesting.”
“My mother was born in a village of 300 people. My mother was a toddler when Alaska ‘received’ statehood. She remembers when the missionaries came to her village and stripped them of their language and their culture. And she had to go to boarding school.” — Charity Blanchett
Many Americans don’t realize that people exist in what is now the United States who were born before many of these lands, including Alaska, were occupied and absorbed into the U.S. as states. This might be one of the most successful colonies in the world, but there are many people who remember a time when the U.S. did not have a presence on their ancestral land. And is this truth, that keeps Blanchett’s work rooted in her people, in their land. “I realized that the access and representation I so seek in the world… the only way to make it happen is to go to the villages. I need to be in rural Alaska.”