Walking Raven Woman aka Maria Gladstone, is a Climate Engineer, TEDX Speaker, Entrepreneur, Artist, Educator and passionate advocate for Indiginous Peoples’ rights and ancestral knowledge. Mariah’s heritage is Blackfeet and Navajo, and is currently living and working in Babb, Montana on the Blackfeet Nation after receiving a B.S. in Climate Engineering Columbia University and a M.S. from SUNY. She founded Indigikitchen.tv. Part cooking show, part history lesson, part Food Systems education. Mariah is the founder of IndigiKitchen, an online cooking show dedicated to revitalizing Indigenous food systems. Recognized as a Champion for Change by the Center for Native American Youth and a Culture of Health Leader by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Here, she speaks about her work reeducating people about the history of indigenous foods by telling the history of westward expansion and the intentional targeting of the food sovereignty of the tribes through United States Presidential orders to destroy not just the ‘Indians’, but their fields, crops, seed banks, corn bushels, etc so “that they would not be able to plant again.” The next step was a campaign to kill over 30 million buffalo over the course of several years under the same Governmental orders. (Destroy the food source, destroy the Indian) It’s important that the reeducation includes understanding the history, connecting to the land we live on, how we restore it through regenerative management, and continued education.