2025 President's Awards Banquet Chef - Rob Kinneen

I'm just really proud to represent Indigenous food.

My name is Rob Keneen. I am the Outreach Director for the nonprofit NATIFS, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, and I am from Petersburg, Alaska. You know, when I was 14, 15 years old, I started working at a Mexican restaurant in Anchorage. Dishwashing, like going in and being a dishwasher and then kind of, you know, weaseling my way into prep cooking so that I can learn. But I love that consistency of growth.

In my 20s, I just want to be a really good cook. In my 30s, I want to learn how to manage and start paying attention to that. In my 30s to 40s, I've done everything from a community workshop on a reservation with youth to cooking at the White House And now this last part of my journey has been for the past 3 years, the outreach director of a nonprofit. So that's 36 years of experience I'm bringing forward. 2018, I put a book together.

It was called the Fresh Alaska Cookbook. So that brought me into my journey of focusing on traditional foods and focusing on the resilience of indigeneity, which has been really powerful.

I work at, you know, Natives, and we have a restaurant called Awamni. The restaurant is award-winning, internationally renowned, and we have a pre-contact menu. That means there's no beef, pork, or chicken, no refined all-purpose flour, no refined sugar, and no dairy. What's left is what was on Turtle Island before colonialization, before explorers. You've got bison, you've got rabbit, you've got turkey, you've got the Three Sisters, you've got berries.

For me, it's like, how do we take that information and move it forward? And that's really the exciting part for me. I live in North Carolina. I work out of Minneapolis, and through my work, I get to visit Alaska. It's exciting to be valued for what I do with food, and it's exciting to see the embracement by Tlingit and Haida.

So I'll be doing a dinner for the Presidential Awards Gala. It's an eye-opening experience to do something like that and offer a pre-contact meal, you know, we set up a foundation and then we step forward and then we set up a foundation and we step forward. And now all of a sudden we look behind us and look at the progress that we've got.