Walter Whitewater, Diné/Navajo is a Native American chef at Red Mesa Cuisine, LLC a catering company in Santa Fe, New Mexico specializing in Indigenous Cuisine and Cultural Education using ancestral foods with a modern twist.

He worked on the James Beard Award winning cookbook, Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations with Chef Lois Ellen Frank, Ph.D. and the cookbook Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky with Dr. Frank as a culinary advisor that won two International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) awards in 2024. Chef Whitewater and Chef Frank have traveled together as part of the U.S. State Department and Consulate General’s Culinary Diplomacy Program to Ukraine (2013), the United Kingdom (2105) and Russia (2016) where the two chefs promoted indigenous foods of the Americas through the culinary arts.

He was one of the first Native American chefs to cook at the James Beard House in New York City and won the James Lewis Award in 2008 from BCA Global for his work as a Native chef. He has worked with Native American communities for more than thirty years educating community members on how to return to an Ancestral diet for health and wellness. He and Chef Frank work with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and directly with many Native American communities and the Navajo Nation in the Southwest on using food to reverse Type II Diabetes and re-indigenize the diet and reclaim health and wellness. He teaches a Native American cooking class with Chef Frank at the Santa Fe School of Cooking.

Chef Whitewater appeared in the new PBS documentary entitled Eating History: A Taste of New Mexico 2025 a documentary made by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation (MNMF) in collaboration with DocuFilms. Chef Whitewater has appeared on numerous foods TV Network cooking shows and appeared in many cooking videos http://redmesacuisine.com/videos-1/ which can be viewed on the Red Mesa Cuisine website.

For more information or to contact Chef Whitewater:

Email: chefwalter.nativecooking@gmail.com

Web: www.redmesacuisine.com