Kickapoo Chef Crystal Wahpepah Showcases Oakland’s Native American Side
March 02, 2026 | Source: Civil Eats | by Kate Nelson
Chef Crystal Wahpepah’s story is one of intertwining threads, as is her cuisine. The food she serves at her eponymous Oakland restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, reflects her mixed-raced Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and African-American heritage. Dishes like wild rice fritters, three-bean bison chili, and blue corn mush take their influences from the two places she calls home: her San Francisco Bay Area hometown of Oakland and Shawnee, Oklahoma, where her Indigenous ancestors were relocated in the 1800s and where she spent childhood summers with extended family.
It’s fitting, then, that Wahpepah’s first cookbook, A Feather and a Fork, publishing on March 17, centers on intertribal foods. While the 125 recipes are largely informed by her Kickapoo heritage, there are also clear nods to other Indigenous communities, including the Ohlone people, who stewarded the place now known as Oakland for millennia before European arrival and are increasingly reclaiming their relationship to the land.