Notes from The Kitchen Sisterhood – Spring 2017

Dear Friends,

The last time we sent you Notes From The Kitchen Sisterhood we were urging you to vote. It’s a whole new ballgame now with arts, culture, climate, healthcare, immigrants all threatened and the mother of all bombs bursting in air. All around us storytellers, artists, organizers, teachers, librarians, athletes, scientists are stepping up, rising to this moment. We wanted to share a few things from our world and the world of those we admire.

On the homefront, The Kitchen Sisters have a bit of a Trifecta at the moment and now we need to ask for your vote.

Our podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present (until recently known as Fugitive Waves), was just nominated for a Webby Award for best documentary podcast. Please help us claim the title. Vote here, vote now!

We are also thrilled to say that we have been nominated for a 2017 James Beard Award for our latest season of NPR stories, Hidden Kitchens: Kimchi Diplomacy: War and Peace and Food.

And our TED Talk about Wall Street, the self-schooled San Quentin inmate and stock market savant is now online. Take a look.

Forward ever,

The Kitchen Sisters
Davia & Nikki

Events we are going to / wish we were going to:

The Unplugged Soul: A Conference on the Podcast. The Kitchen Sisters, Benjamen Walker, Christopher Lydon, Jeff Emtman and a slew of other podcasters. April 14-15, Heyman Center, Columbia University.

Here and Home: A retrospective of the work of California photographer Larry Sultan. April 15-July 23, SFMOMA

Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to summit of Mount Everest and kayak the Grand Canyon, in conversation with Davia about his book, No Barriers, May 2, Lighthouse for the Blind, SF

Fake News Room: A response to Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s 1983 exhibition “Newsroom.” Artists include Jason Fulford, Jim Goldberg and Dru Donovan, as well as The Kitchen Sisters. Open now through April 29 at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco

What we’re watching:

Mifune, directed by Stephen Okazaki

I Called Him Morgan, directed by Kasper Collin. The jazz tragedy of Lee Morgan, exquisitely rendered.

An Inconvenient Sequel. Al Gore’s climate change sequel. Truth to Power.

Century of Self, Adam Curtis’ 2002 BBC documentary.

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party

What we’re making:

This year, we are embarking on a new NPR/podcast series called The Keepers–activist archivists, rogue librarians, collectors, curators, historians–keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections that they keep. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of ideas and information. People afflicted with what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “Archive Fever.”

We welcome your tips and suggestions for who and what needs chronicling.

What we’re reading:

Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman

True South by Jon Else

Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin

Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

What we’re cooking:

Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge. A people’s history of the modern South set on farms, in kitchens and at tables.

King Solomon’s Table by Joan Nathan.

The President’s Kitchen Cabinet by Adrian Miller. African Americans who fed the First Families, from Washington to Obama.

Tartine All Day: Modern Recipes for the Home Cook by Elisabeth Prueitt

Music we’re spinning:

Save the Country by Laura Nyro.

We recently attended the SF Symphony Pride concert, a staggering night of LGBTQ music from Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Stephen Sondheim and more. What got us most was was when conductor Michael Tilson Thomas accompanied Audra McDonald singing Laura Nyro’s barnburner Save the Country. It is our new national anthem.

Podcasts we’re pumping:

RadioPublic podcast app. Free podcasts!

S-Town from Serial and This American Life. You know you wanna hear it.

The many splendored podcasts from the Radiotopia collective

Citizens we’re admiring:

Russ Kick, investigative archivist from Arizona and founder of the Memory Hole. Russ finds and preserves documents the government tries to keep hidden. A keeper.

Magnus Toren runs the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur that has been closed since mid-February after Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge into Big Sur was damaged due to relentless winter rains. They’re now raising funds to open The Henry Miller Library in the Barnyard in Carmel, bringing Big Sur to “town.” They could use your support.

Years ago we recorded Brian Eno talking about the weekly Tuesday “Sing” he holds with his friends–not professional musicians, just pals, gathered standing around a table, singing a capella for a few hours. Times like these call for communal singing. As Brian says, “Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call ‘civilizational benefits.’ When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community.”

Graffiti artists in Ho Chi Minh City Pushing Back Against Official Censorship. “For many in Vietnam, the spray can is a tool of rebellion—illicit spray-painting is a way of defying restrictions in an authoritarian country where artists must have their work approved before exhibitions, shows are routinely shut down, and works deemed controversial are replaced by a black ‘X’ on gallery walls.”

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The Kitchen Sisters Present Ep #68 – Tony Schwartz 30,000 Recordings Later

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Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century. An audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound.

It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood. He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary.

The Kitchen Sisters visited Tony in his midtown basement studio in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone — Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards — and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes.

Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress — 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items — some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world.

The Kitchen Sisters Present Episode #66 – Sugar in the Milk: A Parsi Hidden Kitchen

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Niloufer Ichaporia King lives in a house with three kitchens. She prowls through six farmer’s markets a week, at least, in search of unusual greens, roots and seeds, and traditional food plants from every immigrant culture. She is an anthropologist, a kitchen botanist, a one-of-a-kind cook, a Parsi from Bombay living in San Francisco, and the author of My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking.

Niloufer is known for her ritual celebrations of Parsi New Year on the first day of Spring, when she creates an elaborate ceremonial meal based on the auspicious foods and traditions of her vanishing culture. The Parsi culture is some 3,000 years old and goes back from India to Persia. It’s estimated that there are now only 75,000 Parsis in the world. The prediction is that by 2020 the numbers will have dropped to 25,000.

This story also features writer Bharati Mukherjee, who passed away this last year, sharing her memories of the forbidden Bengali kitchen of her girlhood, with its four cooks and intricate rules of food preparation. And Harvard Professor Homi Bhabha, born in Mumbai to a Parsi family, who talks about auspicious lentils and the birth of his son.

RECIPES:

New Year’s Milk Shake (Falooda)

Niloufer Ichaporia King’s falooda, featuring basil seeds, rosewater, milk and vanilla ice cream.

Faludeh in Iran is a frozen dessert of wheat-starch noodles in a pre-scented syrup. Falooda in northern India is a dish of kulfi (rich ice cream) and wheat-starch noodles. Falooda in Bombay is a glorious milk-shakey affair in a tall glass. At the bottom, there’s a layer of soaked basil (Ocimum basilicum) seeds, tukhmuriya ni biya, with a slippery-crunchy texture that’s like nothing else. On top of the tukhmuriya ni biya is a layer of translucent noodles made of wheat starch. Both of these layers are seen through intense pink rose syrup, although amber-colored saffron syrup is an option. Milk appears to float over this foundation without disturbing it. For extra luxury, there might be a scoop of vanilla ice cream or kulfi. To eat the Falooda, you stir everything up with a long spoon.

Falooda is supposed to be eaten on March 21, Navroz, the old Persian New Year’s Day, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find it or eat it for the remaining 364 days.

The best places to find Falooda outside someone’s house is in Bombay’s beloved Irani-run restaurants, often named after British or Iranian royals. Rustom Jeejeebhoy, fountainhead of Parsi lore, used to tantalize me by describing the delights of his favorite Irani restaurant, the King Victoria, hidden away on the edges of the mill district, but he never found himself able to take me there or even come up with the address.

To make Falooda in the United States you need two common things, milk and ice cream, and two slightly more esoteric items, rose syrup and basil seeds. Rose syrup can be found in Indian or Middle Eastern groceries. I suggest the Middle Eastern brands, for a truer rose flavor. For total extravagance, look for exquisite organic rose syrup from Italy. Read the labels to make sure you’re not getting an entirely synthetic product. The basil seeds come from Indian or Southeast Asian markets. Buy the Southeast Asian ones; the Indian basil seeds are often sandy.

At Chez Panisse March 21 dinners, we serve Falooda in small glasses as a dessert drink. Instead of ice cream we use ice milk, which keeps things refreshing. Serves 6.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon basil seeds

2 cups (or more) water

3 cups (about) chilled whole milk or half-and-half

1/2 cup (about) rose syrup

1/2 cup (about) vanilla ice cream or ice milk

• Soak the seeds in the water for 1 to 3 hours. A tablespoon doesn’t seem like much, but the seeds swell up enormously.

• Line up your glasses, tall or short. First put a spoonful of soaked seeds in the bottom of each glass, 2 teaspoons or so for small glasses, 1 to 2 tablespoons for tall glasses. Then pour in the milk to within an inch of the top of the glass. Follow that with 2 teaspoons to 2 tablespoons of rose syrup, depending on the sweetness of the rose syrup, the size of the glass, and your taste. It doesn’t seem likely, but specific gravity will cause the syrup to sink below the milk in a neat band. If you do it the other way around, the syrup and milk get mixed and the dramatic banded effect is lost. Last, put a little ice cream in every glass.

Excerpted from My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking by Niloufer Ichaporia King.

Eggs on Potato Chips (Wafer Par Ida)

“For years I thought that putting eggs on wafers, as we call potato chips in India, was a joke recipe, a loony fantasy or a way of lampooning our Parsi love affair with eggs. Then I tried it. In an ideal universe, your potato chips are homemade or fresh from one of Bombay’s several potato-chips works, where a vat of oil is always on the bubble or use the best of the commercial ones available to you. They shouldn’t be too brown or the dish will taste burnt.” — Niloufer Ichaporia King

Ingredients

1 tablespoon ghee, clarified butter, or mixture of vegetable oil and butter

1 small onion, finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon Ginger-Garlic paste (optional)

2 to 3 hot green chiles, finely chopped

1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh coriander (cilantro) leaves

4 good handfuls of plain potato chips from a just-opened bag

4 large eggs

1 tablespoon (about) water

• Heat the ghee over medium heat in a sturdy medium skillet, preferably cast iron. Add the onion and let it soften, stirring occasionally, a few minutes. Before it browns, add the paste if you like and the green chiles, and as soon as the mixture looks cooked, add the fresh coriander. Crumble in the potato chips, tossing the contents of the pan to combine them thoroughly. Make nests in the surface of the mixture—they won’t be perfect hollows—and crack an egg into each. Pour a tablespoon or so of water around the edges of the pan to generate some steam, cover the skillet tightly, and let the eggs cook just long enough to set the whites without turning the chips soggy.

• Turn out onto waiting plates.

Serves 2 to 4.

Note: One of my authorities on Parsi food, Firoza Kanga, says, “Oh yes, wafer par ida. Delicious. Next time, try it with a little bit of cream poured over the chips before the eggs go on.”

Excerpted from My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking by Niloufer Ichaporia King.

Episode #65: Sam Phillips, Sun Records and the Acoustics of Life

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Recording sound pioneer Sam Phillips — the father of Sun Records, the man who discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash…, the creator of WHER, The First All Girl Radio Station in the World — talks about his journey, his adventures and “the acoustics of life.” With stories from his son Knox Phillips, his wife Becky, his biographer Peter Guralnick, and one of his first artists, Ike Turner.

Hear recordings from the archive of interviews we did with Sam beginning in 1998—personal stories told by the man himself and his family and friends.

Interest in Sam Phillips is running high right now –not that it was ever running low. There’s a new TV series out and there’s Peter Guralnick’s epic biography “Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll.” And there’s a film in the works based on the book — one of the producers is Mick Jagger and Leonardo DiCaprio is playing Sam. Sam has had a monumental impact on the world of music and sound. And he’s had a monumental impact on The Kitchen Sisters.

The Kitchen Sisters Present Episode #64: Kimchi Diplomacy

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Kimchi in space. The Kimchi Bus. Government-sponsored chefs and restaurants spreading the word of Kimchi around the globe. South Korea is one of the nations most involved in branding itself through its food, using food as a part of it’s “soft power.” It’s called “Gastrodiplomacy” — the use of food as a diplomatic tool to help resolve conflicts and foster connections between nations.

“Kimchi is like air in Korea,” says Hyunjoo Albrecht, a San Francisco-based chef and owner of Sinto Gourmet who grew up near the DMZ border between South and North Korea. 1.5 million tons of kimchi are eaten each year in Korea and there are hundreds of different varieties. “The government gave financial support to some of the Korean restaurants in US,” says Hyunjoo. “They want more people outside Korea to eat more Korean food.”

Si-Hyeon Ryu is a chef and writer from South Korea who, with support from the government, has traveled in The Kimchi Bus to more than 34 countries cooking traditional Korean food and spreading his love of kimchi. “People on the street they know just about North and South Korea,” he says, but not much about Korean cuisine. “If I explain about kimchi they will understand about Korea.”

Astronaut Soyeon Yi, Korea’s first astronaut, describes the Korean government’s efforts to invent kimchi for space travel — not an easy task. Soyeon Yi prepared a special Korean meal for her Russian comrades in space. “Having kimchi in space, you are far from your home planet,” she says. “When you eat your own traditional food it makes you feel emotionally supported. I can feel my home.”

Read more.

The Kitchen Sisters Present #63 – War and Food and Manga

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Manga, the ubiquitous Japanese comic books written on just about every subject—sports, music, sex, shooting pool—represent about 40% of all books published in Japan. In recent decades ‘food manga’ has exploded. Stories of food and conflict and competition abound in mangas like Soldier of Food, Food Wars, Cooking Papa…The Kitchen Sisters Present—Hidden Kitchens: War and Food and Manga.

“Manga is a cradle to grave phenomenon,” says Deb Aoki, writer for Anime network and Publisher’s Weekly. It’s a visual storytelling medium that people enjoy from the day they first start reading or enjoying pictures to the day they die.

“There’s this Japanese concept, Otaku,” says Sylvan Mishima Brackett, chef and owner of Rintaro Restaurant in San Francisco. “Otaku is a deep, passionate enthusiasm about some obscure part of the universe. Manga tend to cluster around very specific Otaku. It’s a place where people can brush up on the hyper-specifics of their enthusiasms.”

“Food manga, gurume manga, gourmet manga, is one of the major genres within manga that’s just been growing exponentially,” says Nancy Stalker, Professor of Japanese History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She wrote a paper called Gourmet Samurai: Changing Gender Norms in Japanese Food TV.

FOOD WARS, DETECTIVE GLUTTON, SOLDIER OF FOOD

Food manga first appeared in the 1980’s when the Japanese economy was very strong. One of the first, Oishinbo, ran for over 20 years and became the basis for an animated series, as have many manga since.

“There always has to be conflict in manga, especially in food manga,” says Zhong. “There is not any real peace in manga. If there is peace it’s really short, maybe one or two chapters, then back to war right afterwards. War produces content.”

Since Japan opened to the West in the nineteenth century, food has been an element of its international identity. “Traditionally the eating of four-legged creatures was proscribed by Buddhist belief,” says Stalker. “The Emperor first publicly ate meat in 1873. Eating beef was seen as something that would help build the national physique and make the Japanese more like westerners.” In order to compete with western soldiers, the Japanese military began to introduce more beef, more meat and fat, into the diet of the soldier to help build a strong army.

The modern manga industry came into being after World War II. It started with Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, who was influenced by Walt Disney. “That American content was brought over by the American Occupation,” says Leyla Aker, Senior Vice President of Publishing at Viz Media, a company that specializes in Japanese graphic novels and anime. “During the American occupation of Japan a large portion of the Japanese population was subsisting on hand-outs given by the American forces.”

There were severe shortages of food during the Occupation and all foods were strictly rationed. When the circumstances of the war became dire many people resorted to eating bark from trees and replacing sawdust and wood dust in recipes for flour. Many Japanese died of starvation.
Miles Thomas, Brand Manager at CrunchyRoll, remembers an anime called Grave of the Fireflies. “One of the most evocative films I’ve seen, about two orphans during World War II who are starving, hungry. They steal food, trying their hardest to survive.

“It really makes you think about the darker side of food when people don’t have enough of it to survive,” adds Tiffany Chen who is also a Brand Manager with Crunchy Roll. “For a long time, World War II was just a history you studied in class. I never really felt connected to it personally. A lot of young people actually don’t even know about the atomic bomb. After watching this film, it was a pretty sobering moment.”

OISHINBO: JAPAN AND CULINARY NATIONALISM

Oishinbo, one of the oldest of the food manga is very popular with adult men, Aoki tells us. “The main character is this scrappy reporter. His father is this snooty gourmet who sets up this ritzy gourmet club for only rich people. They have dueling palette battles.” Oishinbo is written by Tetsu Kariya who is very opinionated about food. The manga creates drama about different food issues – about growing it and cooking it. “It’s kind of controversial,” says Aoki. “He defends eating whale meat, the history of it, how delicious, how dare anyone tell us not to.”

“Tetsu Kariya has a very progressive, political stance,” adds Lorie Brau, Associate Professor of Japanese Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of New Mexico, “He embeds these social messages inside his manga.” One of Oishinbo’s chief concerns is foreign influences. How do you maintain the important aspects of your culture while still engaging with the world at large? The manga uses food as a lens to address Japan’s place in the world.

YAWEH: MANGA FOR YOUNG WOMEN

There is a different subset of manga targeted at young Japanese women called Yaweh about homosexual love affairs. “Boys love” is one of the most popular sub-genres of manga. “Antique Bakery features a cast of tall, thin elegant beautiful young men. They all work in a western style bakery,” Aoki tells us. “Women fall in love with them because they are so handsome. But they’re not available,” says Brau. “But the cakes are available so they make many young women happy.”

What Did You Eat Yesterday? has become a very popular manga for recipes. The manga tells the story of a gay couple, one of whom is a lawyer, the other a hairdresser and the lawyer is very intent on creating economical, delicious meals for the two of them.
THE HERBIVORE MAN: MANGA AND GENDER NORMS

“In the last 10 years Japanese demographics have been shifting,” says Nancy. “Fewer and fewer people are getting married. The rate of unmarried men ages 30 to 34 climbed from 21% to 47%. For women it jumped from 9% to 34% in a decade. The media has come up with this term “herbivore men” Urban men in their 20 and 30’s who are more into fashion and culture than women. Rejecting flesh, therefore they are herbivores. Other conservative pundits say “well, it’s the increase of carnivorous women, women who are too aggressive and focused on their career and refuse to become a full time housewife they create the herbivore man. This is changing men’s relationship with food. They have to increasingly be responsible for their own meals. That is being reflected in these dramas that show a kind of everyman develop a sense of culinary confidence.”

Aoki tells us that Manga like Oishinbo and Food Wars in a way represent a war within people to be their best. “There’s honor in fighting to be the best you can be. That if you’re going to do it you’re going to be the best damn one doing it. The way of the sword, the way of the chef.”

Fugitive Waves Episode #61 – Rattlesden

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For five years Davia’s father, Lenny Nelson, asked her to go to Rattlesden, England, to visit the Air Force base where he was stationed during WWII and to find an old photograph hanging in the town pub honoring his 8th Air Force squadron. It was still there, over 50 years later, he told her. Finally, one fine Sunday, Davia headed out in search of the pub and a piece of her father’s past—the piece he was proudest of.

Lenny died on Christmas Eve last year. In his honor, we share the journey with you.

Samuel Shelton Robinson helped produce this story with The Kitchen Sisters. He’s from London. It seemed only right.

Fugitive Waves Episode #60 – Milk Cow Blues

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A journey into the mysterious and controversial world of raw milk.

Tucked away in the vanishing farm land on the outskirts of Indianapolis, the Apple Family and their neighbors created a kind of fellowship of milking. Milk Cow Blues tells the story of the Apples’ effort to bring raw milk to their community.

Jo Apple and her husband owned the Apple Family Farm in McCordsville Indiana for over 50 years. It was originally a dairy farm, but it became too much for the couple. It wasn’t financially feasible so they gave up the cows and planted corn and soy beans. Their son, Mark told to his father about a vision he had — farming naturally, without chemicals, hormones or unnecessary antibiotics. Just before he died, Mark’s dad agreed.

They started with sheep and chickens and cattle then bought a milk cow for themselves. They quickly found that there was a demand for unpasteurized milk. Women started showing up at their farm with glass jars to buy milk. The Apples had no idea it was illegal. But Indiana, like most states has very strict rules about buying and selling raw milk.

The Indiana State Veterinarian became aware that the Apple family was selling raw milk. He felt there was the possibility of harmful pathogens in these raw milk products and with pressure from other farmers in the area the Apples were served a cease and desist order.

The Apples were ready to give up. But their community encouraged them — they were selling milk, not cocaine or crack. The Apples checked the laws.

They could not trade raw milk, sell it, or deliver it. The only way people could legally obtain fresh milk in Indiana was to own a cow. So they decided, if people want raw milk they will have to buy the cow. The Apples set up the Indiana Cow Share Association and charged people $50. It worked.

A year-and-a-half after the cease and desist order there was a knock on the Apples’ door. A man they had never met before said that he was the one that had turned them in. He talked about how he was furious that they were selling milk for three times more than he was getting for his milk.

He couldn’t make it farming anymore and as a last resort had come to talk to them. His son was bagging groceries — but his heart was to farm. The man wanted to know if they thought he could do the same thing with pasteurized milk — sell directly to the public. He needed to make a change.

It’s a story that is happening all over the country, “All the farmers that are throwing in the towel saying, ‘OK, I can’t afford a $60,000 combine. I have to do something else. Maybe I’ll get some cattle and see if I can just sell them to my neighbors. That’s how it starts.”

Since we produced this Hidden Kitchens story The Apple Family Farm has closed down. In 2014 the Fortville Town Council tried to annex their farmland for development. It was a long, grueling fight. That combined with tax increases and the rising cost of farming became too much for this third generation family farm.

So Many Stories in Store

In 2017 we all move into unknown territory. It’s times like these that call for strong stories. Bruce Springsteen said it best, “People need stories in hard times. People go to storytellers when times are like that.” People go to storytellers when it’s hard to decipher the world, when they need to feel hope and possibilities, when they just want a good tale. Here at The Kitchen Sisters we are getting ready to tell some of the deepest stories we’ve done yet. Stories that keep the spirit moving and light the path. Stories that reveal new ideas and new community leaders.

Today we ask for your support, and for your ongoing collaboration. It is our community that makes these stories possible. Our stories, our internship and mentoring program, and our many community visions. To those of you who have supported and collaborated with us over the years, thank you. To those of you who have recently discovered us, welcome to The Kitchen Sisterhood.

In 2016 your contribution helped spawn so much new work. Our series, Hidden Kitchens: War and Peace and Food aired to much acclaim on NPR’s Morning Edition. Some 14 million people around the world heard these stories of the transformative power of food. There are more in store in 2017.

2017 also has many other projects in store — our new series about archivists as activists — about librarians and historical society curators who are keepers of the history and embroiled in battles and deeply committed to preservation, a free press and the truth. We’re also deep in the weeds on our second book, Show the Girls the Snakes, and working still on our Broadway musical and more. And we are gearing up for a new year of interns, mentoring and workshops.

We have also been asked to create an installation for Prospect.4,the International New Orleans Triennial (sort of the Venice Biennale of New Orleans that was created in the wake of Katrina to help revive the city through culture) where we’ll be collaborating with the Houston-based art collective, Otabenga Jones and Associates. Prospect.4 opens at the end of 2017 and goes for three months. Perhaps we’ll see you there.

Deep thanks for your support, your ideas, your music, your stories, all the things you share with us.

Keep the faith,
Davia & Nikki

Giving Tuesday / So Many Untold Stories to Tell

Dear Friends,

On #GivingTuesday, we’d like to give you a story.

Some fifty years ago, Guy Tyler, an amateur ethnographer from Los Angeles drove out to the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Parker, Arizona with his portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and began recording Emmett Van Fleet, the last of the Mojave Creation Song Singers. Over the course of several years, Tyler spent his weekends and holidays meticulously recording the 525 song cycle that recounts the legend of the creation and origin of the Mojave people. Lost for decades, these recordings became the key for the Mojave to be able to map the boundaries of their tribal lands and fight the building of a nuclear waste site on their sacred sites.

With Standing Rock in our hearts and the events of 2016 on our minds, we are committed now more than ever to telling stories from the margins, stories from voices that might otherwise not be heard.

Listen to “House of Night: The Lost Creation Songs of the Mojave People”

Your support keeps the stories turning. Thank you so much for giving.

Our best,

Davia & Nikki
The Kitchen Sisters