Under a tent at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Nico Albert Williams recalled eating watermelon on her front porch as a little girl and spitting out the seeds. Green sprouts would pierce through the soil beneath her and stretch into vines, and the vines would bud with flowers and fruit. With time and her mother’s care, they would have more melons to eat next year. It was magical, Williams told me—“the coolest thing ever.”

Williams, who is Cherokee, is one of several chefs who demonstrated recipes at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which celebrated Indigenous Voices of the Americas and the twentieth anniversary of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. It was her second time at the Festival, after sharing traditional Cherokee foodways in the 2023 Ozarks program.

Twice, at this year’s event, Williams made grape dumplings, a dish Cherokee cooks have transformed across generations and circumstances. In front of her audience, she combined a flour mixture with butter and grape juice to form a soft dough, which she then cut into pieces and dropped into simmering grape juice. The liquid thickens and coats the dumplings in a sweet, purple sauce. The dessert can be eaten by itself, but Williams thinks it pairs well with vanilla ice cream.

As the dumplings bobbed in the saucepan, she told the audience about the first time she tried the dish at the Cherokee gatherings she attended as a young adult. “There were never any grape dumplings left because they were always the first thing to go. I had to learn to get out of bed early and get there in time to actually try them. It was just a beautiful moment for me that had been built up for so long.”

They were amazing, she told me later, but way too sweet. “After all that time, I finally got a cup of grape dumplings, and I could only eat maybe one or two of them. I couldn’t even finish the cup.” The recipe she uses today was born from countless sessions of testing and tasting, from inviting friends over and saying, “OK, try this. What do you think? Are these right?”

As the founder and executive director of Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness, she works to reconnect members of the Indigenous community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to their traditional foodways.

“The main barrier for urban Natives is access to land,” she explained. “You live in an environment where there are green spaces, but they’re all privately owned or owned by the city. We’re not really allowed to forage there.” Burning Cedar visitors connect with native plants and watch them transform throughout the seasons. The intertribal nonprofit strengthens people’s relationship to land and food—one that’s neglected when producers concentrate more on growing vegetables to be sold rather than eaten.

On the Festival’s final day, an audience gathered on the grass to listen to Williams talk about this relationship. “Everybody has tasted a tomato from the grocery store that’s perfectly round and red and tastes like absolutely nothing, right?” She continued, “That tomato is a product on the shelf for sale. It’s not food. It’s not nutrition. It’s not meant to feed us and to fill our bodies with nutrients. It’s meant to make a profit.”

After the discussion, we met in a tent by the demonstration kitchen. There, she spoke of her childhood, one flush with appreciation for where food comes from. She told me about her own journey through Cherokee foodways and her path to becoming a chef.

“I think I had a very fortunate upbringing—I never had that disconnection from my food sources,” Williams says. “It was always completely understood that food grows out of the ground, it comes from seeds, you plant it, you care for it, you water it, and this is what you get. I was surrounded and immersed in it.”

When her family moved to Northern California, her mother filled their yard with corn, peppers, carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes. Raised with a love for cooking together and an appreciation for food as a catalyst for community, Williams said gathering every day in that space and in the kitchen was formative. She remembers early mornings watching cooking shows with her dad and admiring chefs like Jacques Pépin, Martin Yan, and Julia Child.

A “twist of fate” when she was twenty brought Williams to Oklahoma, the post-removal homeland of the Cherokee Nation. At community gatherings and dinners, she could connect to Cherokee people and culture in ways that weren’t available to her in California. “Some of the first events that I went to were specifically around food,” Williams says, like the wild onion dinners hosted throughout Oklahoma in the springtime.

The first dinner she went to was at the Tulsa Indian Methodist Church. She remembers feeling uncertain at first and bringing a friend along for moral support. Afterwards, she knew she wanted to go to more. “I branched out and started to go to more adventurous ones that would be really off the beaten path. You would be going down a dirt road, and there’s a little yard sale sign basically saying, ‘wild onion dinner this way,’ and again it would usually be at a community’s church.”

Met each time with open arms, she began to feel at ease. “Sometimes it takes other people to tell you, ‘You belong here, and we want you here.’”

This was all before Williams became a chef but just as she was beginning to shape a career around food. “I kind of stumbled into the restaurant industry in my late teens and early twenties. I was waiting tables and things like that, and it took me a long time to really get into the kitchen. And then it was just working with a lot of different chefs that pushed me to explore different techniques and cuisines of different cultures.”

Williams has always navigated the culinary world with creativity and curiosity. “I love to dig down into a rabbit hole about the details and history of a dish. Every challenge I was presented with, whether it was coming up with the week’s specials or a menu for an event, I would go all in on the research part of it. It was natural to apply that to my own food history and journey to reconnect with Cherokee foods.”

After regularly attending community dinners, she noticed a pattern. “At these different Cherokee gatherings, there’s really only a handful of dishes that they prepare”—fried hominy, salt pork, wild onions, and grape dumplings for dessert. Williams remembered thinking, “This can’t be all of it. What else is there?”

As she sought answers, she discovered more Indigenous cuisines and likeminded activists. “I was introduced to the whole world of the food sovereignty movement where there are chefs from nations all over Turtle Island doing the same work. They’re recovering and preserving these foodways and using it as a tool to improve the health and wellness of their communities.”

For the pre-contact, ancestral foods, Williams consulted books, websites, and experts. But the recipes she found were often vague and left her needing to find her own way. She would leave the kitchen to ask her mentors, “Is this how we would have done this? What would we have called this?”

Outside of community dinners, Williams often learned about traditional Cherokee foods from friends and community members who welcomed her into their homes. “My friend Danita invited me one weekend. She was like, ‘My mom’s going to be making Indian tacos because my sisters are in town, and you can make fry bread with her.’ So that’s where I learned to make fry bread. And I’ve been making it her way ever since, because it’s the best I’ve ever had, and I can’t ever think of any way to improve on exactly what Danita’s mom taught me.”

These traditions are sown like seeds—when tended to, they’ll grow and prosper. They thrive when shared with care and intention.

At last month’s Festival, the Kitchen Garden teemed with all kinds of native, culturally meaningful plants. In a corner, a smooth, orange squash hid from the summer sun under its own leaves. When Williams spotted it, it reminded her of the first time she received one at a gathering years ago. The Cherokee National Holiday in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, is an annual celebration of Cherokee heritage and culture, and it’s common for people to share their harvest with others.

That year, a man had parked by the site to give out Cherokee Georgia candy roaster squash. Williams took one home and cooked it, saving the seeds. “My mother and I grew squash from those seeds we saved,” she says. “We’ve been growing squash from that interaction ever since.”

In defiance of urbanization and asphalt streets, native seeds like those find refuge at Williams’s nonprofit in Tulsa. On the outside, Burning Cedar looks like a house. “People come in and they say, ‘Do you live here? Who lives here?’” she said. “And that’s an opportunity for me to say, ‘This is our home.’ No one person lives here. We all live here, and this is a space where we can all feel at home—to be able to access things that we haven’t had space to before.”

Reactions to Burning Cedar, Williams said, “have just been overwhelming encouragement and gratitude. People come into the space and tell me it’s beautiful, that it makes them feel safe.” They’re immediately energized and inspired. “I couldn’t ask for a better reaction than that.”

Back in D.C., closing day at the Festival was bittersweet for Williams. She told me about her favorite memories from the previous few days but confessed that she missed the garden at Burning Cedar. Her assistant sent her daily photos of the peppers, tomatoes, squash, and everything else as they grew, but, according to Williams, in peak growing season, it’s hard not to have “serious FOMO.”

Sweetness comes from moments like one at the end of her last Festival presentation. She left time for questions, and every raised hand belonged to a child.

“It was a really hopeful note to end this on,” she told me afterward. “The real change comes from all those kids. That makes me feel like it’s worth it.”

Ella Ryan is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a senior at William & Mary, studying history and creative writing.