As the founder of Wadulisi’s Indigenous Foods, Melissa Garrett is preserving Native culture through food, education and storytelling.
Garrett is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a Haskell alum who offers programming throughout the Kansas City area, ranging from cooking classes to demonstrations at public schools. She’s inspired to share Native traditions with the next generation, built on her rich family history in food and beyond.
Her family is full of culture protectors, including many fluent Cherokee speakers; her grandfather, a Carlisle Indian School survivor; and her great-grandfather, one of the last remaining members of the Cherokee Keetoowah Nighthawks. So when the pandemic brought about immeasurable loss in her family, Garrett was devastated.
From 2019 to 2021, Garrett mourned the loss of her sister, father, grandma, and two uncles. But this also inspired her to take action.
“I just felt those libraries of loss, like there was so much I still wanted to learn from them,” Garrett says. “My dad always wanted to save our stories for reporting, but he didn’t make it to be able to do that. Right before he passed, he was like, ‘Don’t let them lose their culture. There’s so much they have yet to learn.’ So I wanted to help fill that gap.”
Garrett is especially passionate about helping people with Native heritage connect with their people’s traditions. About 87% of Native Americans live in urban areas, while 13% live on reservations or tribal lands, per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. So when the Heart of America Indian Center asked her to prepare traditional Native foods for their Thanksgiving boxes, in addition to her other volunteering duties there, it just made sense for Garrett to transition into Indigenous cuisine. From there, her passion for food and cultural preservation flourished.
As she’s built Wadulisi’s from the ground up, Garrett has been inspired by traditional teachings and the way her grandma trained her to cook.
“My grandma would take us foraging and show us how to do gardening and cooking,” she says. “So I’m taking those lessons, like how to make grape dumplings and a lot of our traditional foods, but make them more contemporary. I want to find a way to start taking our base ingredients, mix things up for modern-day palates, and teach people about how we do things.”
Wadulisi is Garrett’s Native name.
“My grandmother used to say I was a busy little bee constantly moving from flower to flower,” she said. “I felt like that was perfect for my business because it represented the exchange of knowledge and culture.”
Wadulisi’s offers cooking classes at the Kansas City Museum and Outsider Folk School. During these sessions, Garrett teaches how to make foods inspired by traditions like the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — which are common ingredients in Indigenous cultures because of the way the plants benefit each other and the soil as they grow. Garrett’s baked goods include black bean brownies, honey corn cookies, and maple pumpkin butternut squash cookies.
Garrett’s other recipes include chilis, soups, dips, and more innovative creations like Indigenous-themed charcuterie cups. Through her cooking classes, Garrett not only teaches culinary skills but also shares the stories and significance behind each ingredient.
“One of the things I always talk about is our Three Sisters,” Garrett explains. “Being Cherokee, the things we did to survive the Trail of Tears are really important to me. We hid seeds in our ribbon skirts so that when we got to the next place, we would have a way to plant and provide for our family.”
She loves sharing these foods with others, but also walks the fine line of protecting the traditions that are still tightly guarded within Native communities and ceremonies. Family members like her aunt have been pivotal in helping her identify which ingredients should be included in contemporary contexts. But she says it’s important to be careful with gatekeeping when preserving Native culture.
“We need to protect our traditions, but we also need to make them more accessible, especially in urban areas where so many Native people are disconnected from their ancestral lands, traditional foods and cultural practices,” Garrett says. “I think we should focus on unity instead of exclusivity.”
Another branch of the Wadulisi’s business is education. The catering and cooking classes fund Garrett’s ability to present on Native history and general education about once a week to public schools around Kansas City, for free. She believes the way to promote acceptance and diversity is through education, especially for young students.
Garrett is a student herself. She’s on track to graduate with a culinary arts degree from the Auguste Escoffier School this July. And as she continues her work as a Native woman entrepreneur, she keeps learning every day and finding new ways to amplify her impact. It’s all aligning to form one single path.
“I’m working to register my business as a nonprofit, so I can create opportunities for other Indigenous chefs, artists and educators,” Garrett says. “Our collective will be rooted in the Seven Sacred Teachings — love, respect, honesty, courage, truth, wisdom, and humility — as values that shape every story we tell, every meal we prepare, and every space we create.”
Through her food and storytelling, Garrett is not only keeping her ancestors’ traditions alive but also nourishing a new generation with identity and pride.
Keep up to date with Wadulisi’s by following its Facebook and Instagram pages.
If our local journalism matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
Jordan Winter (she/her), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since August 2021, is a 2019 KU grad with degrees in journalism and political science.
Check out her work at jrdnwntr.com. See more of her work for the Times here.
