After high school, thanks to the influence of a culinary instructor and out of a yearning to make something of himself beyond his home state, Kinneen traded Anchorage for upstate New York, to attend the Culinary Institute of America. “For me, the biggest culture shocks were the sheer mass of population and the disconnect from land,” he says.

In New York, he was exposed to foods he’d never tasted before. He also encountered myriad misconceptions that people held about Alaska—that it was a food “desert,” for instance. Kinneen had never experienced that, nor had his Tlingit ancestors, who lived off the land and sea for millennia. He decided his path would be to set the record straight about Alaska Native foodways, by sharing stories about his lived experiences alongside the rich flavors of his culture, in restaurants, at special events, and through recipes online.

“All the Indigenous communities across Alaska were thriving pre-colonialization,” he says. “There are petroglyphs and remnants of fish traps that show that we were not just surviving, but thriving. That even goes for places with a harsh climate, like Utqiagvik, where it could be 30 degrees below zero and you don’t see the sun for three months.”

After culinary school, Kinneen cut his teeth in restaurant kitchens from Louisiana to North Carolina before returning to Alaska for a 15-year stint, eager to better connect with his Tlingit ancestry and showcase the state’s culinary bounty. That took shape as multiple high-profile chef gigs in restaurants, his Fresh Alaska Cookbook, and a web video series designed to demystify life in the Far North. The series documents Kinneen’s travels across the state to meet with knowledge keepers and prepare contemporary takes on traditional foods.

For instance, his posole recipe swaps pork with richly flavorful seal meat in this classic Mexican stew, bringing together food traditions from across Turtle Island, as many tribal communities call North America. His rockfish fumet infuses a favorite French soup with important Southeast Alaska ingredients, including black seaweed, yarrow greens, and wild parsley—all topped with clarified seal oil, which Kinneen says is similar, when freshly rendered, to a heady extra-virgin olive oil.

Tlingit chef Rob Kinneen, left, with Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman. (Photo courtesy of Rob Kinneen)

Those dishes reflect a harmony between past and present, and are an acknowledgment of modern Alaska Native communities where traditional ecological knowledge is alive and well.

Kinneen’s approach and expertise made him a natural fit as outreach director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman’s nonprofit, NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), which aims to promote Indigenous food knowledge and access. Kinneen’s role is very much a continuation of his lifelong efforts, but on a larger scale. He travels often to visit tribal nations across the country, learning about and uplifting their food sovereignty efforts and helping preserve longstanding culinary traditions.

That work, both through the nonprofit and on his own, has led him to the White House for the annual Tribal Summit, which brings together leaders from the federal government and tribal nations to strengthen nation-to-nation relationships and support tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

For the past two years at the summit, he has organized Indigenous-focused feasts for hundreds of attendees, featuring dishes like turkey tamales, ahi poke, and three sisters salad with corn, beans, and squash. Last year, he traveled to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, tapped by the Wilderness Society to spend a week cooking with ingredients that existed before colonization—blue corn, wild rice, and cranberry pancakes for breakfast and maple-braised bison with roasted hearty vegetables and quinoa for dinner—for a group of 20 people in the remote Brooks Range. His setup wasn’t much more than a transportable Coleman camping stove, a double propane burner, and a water filtration system.

All these efforts have left a lasting impression on his contemporaries, including Penobscot chef Joe Robbins, who worked with Kinneen at the 2023 Tribal Summit and also teamed up with him to develop recipe videos employing both government commodity foods and traditional, culturally significant ingredients. That’s especially important because many tribal communities still depend on food rations from the U.S. government, which historically have not been particularly nutritious.

“As I look at the work Rob has done with constant dedication to not just to his tribe in Alaska but to all Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and beyond, it strengthens the work that all Indigenous chefs, farmers, and producers are doing every day,” Robbins says. “When it comes to Indigenous representation in the culinary world, we are still lacking, though the tides are shifting quickly. Perspective of our cultures has always come from the outside, but the work NATIFS is doing is coming from tribal communities, giving us all a much louder voice.”

Amy Foote, an Alaska-based chef who is striving to introduce traditional foods into healthcare facilities and other institutions there, echoes that sentiment. “Rob’s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring,” says Foote, who is not Indigenous but has focused much of her career on the deeply Indigenous notion of food as medicine. “By working alongside global Indigenous communities, he is reviving lost or endangered food knowledge and providing a means for communities to reclaim and reconnect with their food heritage. Rob is a grounding presence to a sovereign food future.”

Indeed, Kinneen embodies a reverence for the past with a vision for the future—a juxtaposition many Alaska Native communities are currently navigating. “Although ancestral knowledge is rooted in tradition, that doesn’t mean it can’t be adapted,” he says. “We should be mapping today’s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.”

As prime examples of non-extractive Indigenous ingenuity, he points to the resurgence of Zuni waffle gardens for vegetable growing, which help conserve water in the Southwest, and the kelp farming that Dune Lankard of the Native Conservancy is spearheading along Alaska’s south-central coast, simultaneously bolstering the local economy with a nutritious traditional food and helping mitigate climate change impacts like ocean acidification.

For Kinneen, his childhood lessons from Alaska, about community and resilience, apply to the wider environmental and climate crises the planet is facing. “We should be asking ourselves, ‘How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?’” he says. “I realize that approach would likely cut down on profitability, but the flip side is that we have a place to live.”