This month (Nov. 13 to be exact) Chef Crystal Wahpepah will finally see her dream come to fruition when Wahpepah’s Kitchen has its grand opening in East Oakland, California. Born and raised in Oakland, but a registered member of the Kickapoo Tribe in Oklahoma, Wahpepah says as a little girl she wondered why among all the different restaurants in the city, none offered her food—Indigenous food.  “I knew at a young age what was wrong,” she tells Nosh. “They took away our food.”   Since the time she was a little girl, Wahpepah has been in the kitchen. Spending summers in Oklahoma with her grandmother or sharing meals with the multi-tribal urban Native community at Oakland’s Intertribal Friendship House—a place established in 1955 to serve the needs of those who’d been relocated from reservations to the San Francisco Bay area.  Read more