Apache Chef Nephi Craig says cooking saved his life

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Nephi Craig

Edu.

Terry Gross

This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is a leader in the movement of Native American cuisine. Eating, cooking and teaching about that food saved his life. He he became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After his first dui, the judge gave him the option of three months probation if he agreed to get and keep a job or go to college. He opted for attending Scottsdale Community College, where he took cooking classes. He eventually got a job, learned about restaurant kitchens and eventually became a chef at the finest fine dining restaurant in Phoenix. But he also kept getting fired from jobs for being drunk, hungover, not showing up or being in jail. During time in jail, he was lucky to get work in the kitchen, where he learned how to design meals with whatever food they were given. When he got out, he kept relapsing. He completed nine rehabs and ran away from five others. Now he's drawing on the more hellish parts of his life as well as his expertise to be the nutritional cover program coordinator at the tribe owned Rainbow Treatment center, working with people recovering from substance abuse. As a behavioral health technician, he collaborates on treatment plans for the Center's clients. In 2021, he opened Cafe Gojo, a restaurant on the reservation that's a place for the community to eat and talk. For members of the staff, it functions as a vocational training program for the treatment center. He also founded the Native American Culinary association naca, and now he's written a memoir called Our Knives Will Save Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef. His mother is White Mountain Apache. His father is Dinna Navajo. Nephi grew up on both reservations. Nephi, Craig, welcome to FRESH AIR. And congratulations on your 15 years of sobriety. That is really great. So before we get into your personal story, which is pretty interesting, let's talk a little bit about food, the foods that are indigenous to native people and to America and to the Americas. Let's start with tomato, because I know learning that tomato was an indigenous food really meant a lot to you.

Nephi Craig

Yeah, it did. I had no idea that the tomato was an indigenous cultivar growing up. I think it's pretty common for a lot of people to feel that way. For me, as a young kid, I was studying in culinary school and I came across this info that it was native to the Americas and it just brought this really big smile to my face. I was like, wow, this tomato is not Italian. It's native like me. And that was empowering, because as you're in cooking school, you're being taught all of these other world cuisines. And as a Native American in Arizona, you don't really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests.

Terry Gross

I want to hear about acorns, because that's a real staple, and I don't think about acorns and eating them. I see squirrels eating them all the time.

Nephi Craig

And Apaches.

Terry Gross

And Apaches.

Nephi Craig

Well, acorns are very special because they can be eaten all over North America, on the west coast and on the east coast and across the United States. They have to be leached, of course, which is a process to pull out the real tannic bitterness from the acorns. What makes our acorns special is that they don't necessarily have to be leached. They suppose they could be, but they've always been harvested by our people along the Mogollon Rim in Arizona for thousands of years. And they can be eaten right out of the shell. They're ground up into powders into, like, a yellow acorn flour, and it's added to a lot of different things from, like, sprinkled on roasted meats or especially cooked in stews. It's really, really good like that.

Terry Gross

What about acorn soup?

Nephi Craig

We refer to as acorn stew? So it's usually a lot of bones, whether it's beef or elk or deer chunks of meat. And it's simmered for a long time till it's really soft. And then the acorn flour is sprinkled in towards the end. And sometimes squash is added. And a lot of times there'll be, like, flour dumplings or corn dumplings added in. It's real, real simple, real homey, but really distinct Apache flavors.

Terry Gross

You often make that with racket bread. What is that?

Nephi Craig

It's a traditional Apache bread. It's called racket bread because it's cooked on a tool that looks like a tennis racket. So it has this, like, long metal handle, and there's this wire circle at the end of it. And there's, like, steel grates or wire strands woven to make it look like a long tennis racket. And that is placed directly on top of hot coals. And Apache ladies usually just stretch out the dough and put it right on the coals, and it puffs up really quick. So it's really delicious.

Terry Gross

A lot of people associate fry bread with indigenous culture, and you associate fry bread with colonialism. Can you explain?

Nephi Craig

Well, it's not an indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy with us. And when you study how foods were distributed once people were imprisoned, and foods that were distributed required a ration card, and you might get flour, some beef, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar. Ration lists varied from place to place, but they were pretty much always going to contain flour and lard. And so fry bread emerges, some say, in the Southwest. And there's big debates about where and who did it first. But if you look across all of Native America, from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has fry bread as a result of military food rations. And that grows into these food traditions that are a part of our reality today. So as I teach it, I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility in food choices. Not to take it away, but to be aware.

Terry Gross

I loved reading about popped amaranth. Can you describe that?

Nephi Craig

Oh, yeah. Amaranth for me is one of those indigenous cultivars that I encountered later in my career. My encounters with colonization and colonialism kind of only encapsulate maybe about 300 years in the United States and the American Southwest. But as I studied amaranth, it opened up this portal that took it back 5, 6, 7, 800 years. In Mexico and South America, there's two colors. There's white amaranth and there's red amaranth. And it's one of the staple foods that's been grown all over Mexico and South America. Very high in protein, very good for you. You can eat the stems and the greens when it's small, and you can use the fibers. And the seeds are what are cultivated and popped and used in porridges, flatbreads, just for the popped seeds themselves. But then learning that it's a sacred food and then learning that you could pop it, it just really blew my mind. So you get a dry saute pan or a pan nice and hot, you know, probably about 470 degrees, put a little. Few amaranth seeds in the pot and it'll pop and it'll look like popcorn. And you can, you got. It takes a lot of practice because at first you're gonna. You might burn it, but when you pop it, it looks and smells just like teeny, tiny popcorn. It's really delicious.

Terry Gross

I think most people who aren't Native in America associate indigenous food with Thanksgiving, which means turkey and pumpkin and corn. So squash, I know, is really important to indigenous cuisine. Are there ways that you use it that other American cultures don't?

Nephi Craig

Well, I'll put it this way. For major American holidays like Thanksgiving, everyday staples like turkey, corn, and squash, and cranberries, those are all important indigenous foods. And when people ask me, what recipes or what ways do we prepare native foods differently? Or the question comes up, how come I haven't heard of a Native American restaurant? Or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I usually will say, well, you've been eating Native American foods and cuisine since as long as you can remember. It's just that the stories are not told. All of American cuisine, every region in the United States is built on the landscapes or the ancestral terroir of Native American foods and food traditions. So you can say Boston baked beans, barbecue. In the American Southwest, there's companion planting and dry farming, the hunting and fishing and agricultural bounty of the Northwest. All of these landscapes inform our diets as everyday Americans. So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it's pretty straightforward and simple. We like to roast them, simmer them, turn them into pies, just like everyone else sometimes. But native foods have been there the whole time.

Terry Gross

So you became fascinated with cooking because your mother was a good cook and a great baker.

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Terry Gross

But you first studied cooking after your first DUI arrest when you were age 18 and the judge gave you the option of three years probation if you got a job or went to school. So you went to Scottsdale Community College and studied cooking there. And even though I think the school was located on reservation land. Do I have that right?

Nephi Craig

Yeah, the Salt River Indian Reservation.

Terry Gross

But none of the students that you encountered were Native?

Nephi Craig

There were a lot of natives on campus, just none in the culinary program.

Terry Gross

Oh, okay. And you'd never heard of most of the dishes. What were some of the dishes that you'd never heard of? You had no idea what they were?

Nephi Craig

Things like risotto. The weirdest one was vichyssoise. Hearing all the terms like mirepoix, hearing like, I didn't know what a bistro meant. And when I would ask these questions, like, what does that mean? It was like everyday language to the other students. And it was just kind of. I felt like an oddball. You know what I mean? So it was definitely a form of a culture shock. But it was intriguing for me, and I liked it. I didn't let it shut me down too much. But I Was definitely aware that I was different culturally from a food standpoint.

Terry Gross

So you write that in school because your teacher was a chef, that you were taught that your reply should be, yes chef or no, chef. And were you uncomfortable with that kind of hierarchical structure in kitchens or in school where it was like, yes, chef, no, chef. You write it reminded you of an abusive sergeant in the movie Full Metal Jacket. What reminded you of that?

Nephi Craig

No, it didn't really throw me off. I actually liked it because it reminded me of when one of our favorite movies, and I think he says, like, the only thing out of your filthy sewers is, sir, yes, sir, and everyone laughs when we watch it at home. So. And I knew that I needed structure. I wanted something tough. And when I got into cooking, it turned out that it could be very tough. It wasn't always very tough, but depending on what kitchen you got into, it could be like that.

Terry Gross

And your father was in the military, right?

Nephi Craig

Yeah, my father was a United States Marine. He was a sergeant and a sharpshooter.

Terry Gross

And your grandfather was a code talker. This was a group of Native Americans who used Native American languages and codes to share things that the military and intelligence needed to keep secret.

Nephi Craig

Yeah. So I come from a family of United States Marines. My dad's dad, Bob, at City Craig, was a Navajo code talker. He served on Guam, Guadalcanal, and was wounded on Iwo Jima. The Navajo code talkers created a code to send transmissions that helped to win the war. And so I grew up in that tradition, and all the great men in my life were that. And so I kind of looked up to the discipline and the rigor of

Terry Gross

that lifestyle after your, I don't know, second or third dui. Well, during that dui, someone was seriously injured. The passenger of the car that you crashed into was seriously injured. So you did time for that. You spent a few months in jail and you got to work in the kitchen. So I'm really interested in hearing about cooking in prison. What exactly was your position?

Nephi Craig

Well, I was just one of the cooks. It was in county jail, in. It was nothing glamorous, but it was industrial style cooking. What made it stand out is that I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail, we call ourselves chiefs, or somehow we didn't get that name, but the group of chiefs and getting to meet some of the people that were cooking there, all of their different varied stories and the things that they were in for, but also banding together to feed, I think it was like 7,800 inmates a day was really eye opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking. And it was a cultural moment where I was reminded that no matter what, we bless our food as natives. That no matter what, we pray and offer gratitude as natives. Coming from, from a time and a place that didn't seem like that would be where it came from, I guess. You know what I mean?

Terry Gross

You cook for 7,800 people a day because the facility you were in, I think supplied the food for all the other jails in the county, am I right?

Nephi Craig

Yeah, it was, I think they called it, they nicknamed it the food factory. There was literally probably about 200 inmates on a chain gang walking to work every day to do that.

Terry Gross

How big was the kitchen? Was that a whole facility?

Nephi Craig

Yeah, it was a little tiny. That's why they called it the food factory. It was this little freestanding big operation where they had a big cold room you could probably fit two diesel trucks in. And there was another cold room and then there was a meat cutting room and then a hot cook room and a big warehouse. So it was a factory.

Terry Gross

How big were the pots?

Nephi Craig

Oh, well, they had these like huge, probably like 150 gallon steamed kettles, a dozen of them facing each other. And they look like you could probably fit like four or five people in those pots.

Terry Gross

So you had to make do with whatever you were given. And sometimes it was like expired food probably.

Nephi Craig

Oh yeah, man, it was crazy because, you know, at that level, food's coming in from food banks and donation centers and whatnot. And we would pull out pallets and pallets of frozen ingredients, which they were frozen, but it was still like 1 year, 6 months, 3 months expired. So temperature control was really a big thing. So it had to get above certain temperatures for X amount of time. But again, it's jail. So like, you know, I don't think the staff really cared too much. It was just to feed the masses.

Terry Gross

Give me an example of what you thought was a good dish and what you thought was like, I'm really sorry, I have to give this to people to eat.

Nephi Craig

Oh man. Well, we made this really big batch of squash soup, just pallets and pallets of frozen butternut squash. But we did have big like 10 pound, 20 pound bags of pre cut onions. So we're able to give it some depth. And there was some like corn syrup laying around. So we made it kind of a sweet like almost like a butternut squash bisque, I guess you could say. And it turned out Nice. And the discussion we were having as we were cooking, it was like, man, I wish we had some mutton bones or some fry bread or something like that. We were just joking around. Then another time. One thing that I didn't regret giving to the inmates, but it was we had this two huge pallets of, like, this really fresh, amazing asparagus, jumbo asparagus that as a chef and a cook, you really like and appreciate. We had to just boil that to death. It just turned camouflage green, and it was just plopped into trays. It was so bad. It was so sad to see all that hard work from the farms being just killed and mashed and put into green slop.

Terry Gross

So what did you learn from having to make do with a kind of miscellany of expired food?

Nephi Craig

Oh, I think my journey to becoming a chef and the way that I've learned, it's really anchored in a lot of moments that were. That could be humiliating for others. And it was that for me, certainly. But it also taught me a sense of humility and that cooking is very human, and no matter what's happening in the kitchens, at the end of the day, we're feeding people to keep them alive. So I think that really taught a sense of humility. And then being grouped in with the natives from my own tribe and regions was reinforcing that. Like, it's not just me that feels this way. They also feel this way. So it was really humanizing.

Terry Gross

Your specialty in the kitchen is knife work. Your memoir opens with you selling your knives. These were knives that you got while you were cooking in Japan, and you were selling them because you were broke. You were living in your mother's home. Your father had died soon before of a rare stomach cancer, so you needed money for alcohol, and all you can think of doing because you didn't have a job at this point, all you could think of doing was selling these really special knives that you'd gotten in Japan. Like, what made them so special?

Nephi Craig (continued or emotional response)

Well.

Nephi Craig

Well, addiction strips away everything slowly. It's this terrible, terrible affliction that just causes you to devalue yourself and all of your belongings. And as my life stripped away of people, places and things, like places to live, finances, resources, the last things that I held onto were always my chef knives, because I knew if I had my chef knives, I could find a job anywhere in the world, literally. Because by that time, I had already traveled around the world. And so I held onto those to the very, very, very end. And around 2011, those were some of the last things I was willing to pawn off or sell on the street for money. These knives were special because I had got them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel of Osaka. So I had I cherished these knives because they were like samurai swords. They were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai. And I brought them back to the States with me, and I still have one of them with me. But I sold those other ones and it was terrible because, you know, it's just the name of the game. Things that you find very valuable, you were willing to sell off just to get high again. And that's the way that was for me.

Terry Gross

Well, we have to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Nephi Craig, and he's the author of the new memoir Our Knives Will Save Us Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH air.

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Nephi Craig

President Trump, it is the greatest threat to our country, is trying to tie

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Nephi Craig

or even 9, 11.

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Nephi Craig

is Americans are crazy, Chinese are crazy. These are two countries full of these crazy hustlers.

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Terry Gross

This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Nephi Craig. His new memoir is called Our Knives Will Save Us US Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache chef. He grew up on a reservation in Arizona. Cooking saved his life from addiction, but it took years for sobriety to stick, resulting in him getting fired from several kitchen jobs, including as a chef at a Fine dining restaurant in Phoenix. He's been sober for 15 years. He founded the Native American Culinary association and is now the executive chef at Cafe Gojo, which is a restaurant for people on the reservation and a vocational training program for the staff. He's also an advanced certified relapse prevention specialist, serving as the coordinator of the Rainbow Treatment Center's nutritional recovery program. That center is also on the reservation. He founded the Native American Culinary Association. So you, in spite of your addictions, in spite of running away from some rehabs and going, completing the program and nine rehabs, it took you a really long time to stay sober. But while you were going through all that, you worked your way up to a job as a chef at a resort in Phoenix where the chef won the James Beard Chef of the Year award, which is mighty impressive. Describe how this kitchen was structured, you know, at that kind of high level.

Nephi Craig

The restaurant that I got the opportunity to work at was called Mary Elaine's at the Phoenician in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a temple of gastronomy on the west coast. And from my first day in culinary school, my favorite instructor would talk about that place because he had worked there as a line cook. And he used to tell all of his students that if you're going to find, if you're going to try to work anywhere in Phoenix, work with the best and, and try to get into Mary Elaine's at the Phoenician. And that stuck with me. So every year from 98, 99, 2000, 2001, I would apply two to three to even four times a year there at the Phoenician. And in 2001, I was working for a chef who knew a guy that was in Marylands. And I got a stage. I just expected it to be a one night observation where you go in the kitchen and you hang out and you watch and you see. But I was offered a job at the end of my stage and I accepted it. But that place really built me up into a very strong young chef. I was an entremetier on the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and do all the garnishes. And I became the saucier and the guy that cooks the meat on the meat station. And to be in Arizona, a very meat and potatoes state, it was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was just a beautiful best of everything. Best turbo ludomire, truffles, caviar, fine wines. I think Mary Lanes had the grand award from Wine Spectator. Dozens and Dozens of years, they had one of the only master sommeliers in the whole country. So it really meant a lot to me. And when that. When I lost that opportunity because of a relapse that crept in and took over, it was heartbreaking. I did not have the words to say it then, but it was a debilitating loss that I took maybe 5, 10, 15 years to process.

Terry Gross

One of the things that you kept secret from everyone and that I don't think you resolved in yourself for years, was that you were molested when you were young. You were molested by a stranger, a guy, and you didn't tell anyone. And this is a common theme of people who were assaulted in any way, men and women. What were your reasons for being afraid to tell anyone?

Nephi Craig

Well, I included this part of my life not as the sole cause of addiction and dependency, but a contributing factor. I would learn years later that sexual abuse that happens to young boys and men is just as common as it happens to girls and women. And society gives men the message that we shouldn't talk about it, we should never mention it. Very, very stigmatized. So I never told anyone about the sexual assault I encountered when I was 10 years old. I was just a little kid. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview was that no one's going to believe me, so I just kept it in. And when I kept it in, it festered and grew into this rage and anger and shame. And so when I talk about sexual abuse in my story, it's not to point the finger at it, but I had to really take a long time to come to terms that. That I was a victim of that. And it doesn't determine who I am.

Terry Gross

The way you started talking about it was when you were in treatment, one of the times you were in treatment, the psychiatrist, because you were in, I think, a psychiatric hospital at the time, on suicide watch, and the psychiatrist asked you, what are you so angry about? And that was part of your answer, talking about the sexual assault.

Nephi Craig

Yeah, I think the psychiatrist at Hopkins asked me, what are you so afraid of? In a real firm tone. This guy was like an old school orator. And I would begin to talk and tell that I was afraid I was going to drink myself to death, that I was insane for thinking I could create a whole new cuisine that's ancient, that I was insane because I couldn't take care of my family, and that I was just going to lose it all. Maybe I was predisposed, like the firewater myth says. And so it just snowballed into that dimension of saying, yeah, I was sexually abused when I was a kid.

Terry Gross

Did you tell anyone after that?

Nephi Craig

I told my father when I had the opportunity to talk with my father, I told him. And he sat there tight lipped. And then he just broke out in tears and he started crying. He said, oh, son, I wondered, I wondered if something had happened. I couldn't ask and I'm glad you told me. And that was a really difficult moment that I remember very vividly. And he was there for me. He didn't judge me, didn't get mad, didn't get afraid. He was just open to it.

Terry Gross

Did he reassure you that it wasn't your fault?

Nephi Craig

Yeah, he reassured me that I was just a kid, it wasn't my fault. There was nothing to be ashamed of and there was work to do. You know, it wasn't the end. I think he intuitively knew that too, because my dad was also an alcoholic, an addict, and he was in recovery as well. So he was in the background always rooting for me as I was falling apart. And so when that moment came, it brought us together a little bit closer. But it also showed the depth of where I needed to go to get well.

Terry Gross

My guest is Nephi Craig. His new memoir is called Our Knives Will Save Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef. We'll be right back. This is FRESH air.

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Nephi Craig

It's the experience we're having right now,

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Nephi Craig (continued or emotional response)

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Terry Gross

This is FRESH air. Let's get back to my interview with Nephi Craig. His new memoir, our Knives Will Save Us, is about growing up on a White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, becoming addicted to alcohol, going in and out of rehab while building a career as a chef. Now he focuses on native foods as the executive chef of Cafe Gojot on the reservation, while also serving as the coordinator of the Nutritional Recovery Program at the Rainbow Treatment Center. Have you thought a lot about why drinking is such a problem for a lot of indigenous people? It's a big problem on reservations. What's your interpretation of why that is?

Nephi Craig

Oh, man, we need a whole other interview for that question. No, as indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism and colonialism differently. The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed and built by us. And as Native American peoples, we've inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it's not that we are different biologically, it's that we have a different legacy. And encounters with colonial violence in America, that's what I feel is one of the root causes of this multidimensional monster that is addiction.

Terry Gross

Well, Indigenous people in America were forced off their land and marched someplace else where they were assigned to go at gunpoint by the military. That is massive trauma. Your father's ancestors were among the people who were displaced at gunpoint. And he was, among other things, a singer songwriter. And he wrote a song about that called Someone Drew a Line, and I want to play some of that, but I'd like you to talk about that song and its place in your community.

Nephi Craig

Yeah. So that's so amazing that you're gonna play a piece of it. Like my dad, my late father, Vincent Craig was a singer and songwriter and a cartoonist. He was a police officer, Marine Corps sergeant and sharpshooter. He was a mountain rescue guy. He was a good dad. He was a sober dad. He was so many things. And one of his songs that he wrote, someone Drew a Line. It talks about reservation boundaries being created in Navajo land and people's reactions and elders reactions to this new concept of land ownership that was different from how we experience it as Navajo or Dene people.

Terry Gross

Okay. So this is Vincent Craig playing his own song, someone Drew a Line.

Vincent Craig (Nephi's father, singing)

My grandfather used to take me to the mountains in my youth. And there he would tell me the legends of long ago between the four sacred mountains, we lived in harmony. And now you tell us that we've got to go. Cause someone drew A line. Someone drew a line Someone drew a line. Hey, Mr. President, can't you see what is going on? They've taken the heart and soul from the land. Cause someone drew a line.

Terry Gross

What do you think about when you hear that? And what was the place of that song in your community?

Vincent Craig (Nephi's father, singing)

Wow.

Nephi Craig

Well, first off, thank you, Terry, for bringing my dad into this, because he is such a monumental figure in my life, and hearing him was refreshing. And my dad not only sang that song to audiences on the Navajo Nation and the Southwest, but he would travel to as far away as Alaska to communities that had suffered the same thing. So it was very much a common sentiment that our land is minimized and stolen, and there's consequences for us if we cross these boundaries and the grief that ensues. So that song was very well known. My dad also sang many happy songs. And he was a humorist, he called himself. He says, I'm not a comedian, I'm a humorist.

Terry Gross

Yeah. And he also did a comic strip and was featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian.

Nephi Craig

Yeah, My dad created the first Navajo superhero called Mutton Man. Mutton man got his superpowers from that uranium spill near Church Rock, New Mexico, back in the 70s, and him and his sheep walked across some contaminated waters. And so Mutton man was a comic strip that ran in the Navajo Times, the Fort Apache Scout. And it grew. And he ultimately took Mutton man and do an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. called Mutton Man Discovers Columbus. And it was a collection of all these great. Like, these great comics that my dad had drawn about Mutton man and other comics that poked at the oppressor in funny ways and poked at colonization and really serious topics, but they were humorous. I grew up watching him sing to wide array of audiences and carry his message through song and art and laughter. And I feel like sometimes I do that with food now.

Terry Gross

So your first name is Nephi.

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Terry Gross

And that's spelled N, E, P, H, I. When I saw your name on the COVID of your book, I thought, oh, it must be an Apache name or maybe a Navajo name, because your father was Navajo. And it's not. It's a Mormon name. And your parents were Mormons. How did they become Mormons? And I also wanted to mention that Nephi is a prophet in the Book of Mormon.

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Yeah.

Nephi Craig

Right. All my life, I always encounter these really big, complicated web of American history and our lifelines as Native American people. And so how my family encounters organized religion and the LDS Church is. When they were small, my dad was out in the Navajo Nation, there were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation. And the same thing in White river on the Apache Res. And so my parents were both placed on the placement program, which is where in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, young Native American kids were taken from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, many where there was a high population of Mormon families. And my parents were essentially raised in the Mormon Church in a Mormon community till they graduated high school. And so they, you know, that's a big part of our life. And so when the three of us, me and my brothers, come into the picture, they decide to name me Nephi. And, you know, I didn't really know it or think about it at the time, but it's really kind of been there, like in my I even write it in the book. Like this Mormon judge says, like, if you had followed your namesake, you wouldn't have been here. You know what I mean?

Terry Gross

Like, okay, no, you would have been predicting the future. You'd be a prophet if you followed your namesake.

Nephi Craig

Yeah. But so it's a lot of complicated elements in how identity forms. And for me, that's one dimension of how it contributes to substance use, but also freeing myself from it, too. You know what I mean? So it's an interesting thing how I got my name.

Terry Gross

Well, congratulations on all the work you've been doing. Congratulations on your sobriety, and thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Nephi Craig

Thank you for having me.

Terry Gross

Nephi Craig's new memoir is called Our Knives Will Save Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef. After we take a short break, John Powers will review a new novel by Nathaniel Rich about the heist of a data center in protest against Big Tech. This is FRESH air.

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This is FRESH AIR. The new literary thriller Cloud Thief by Nathaniel Rich is about the reaction against Big Tech. In the novel, a struggling eco journalist and a brilliant young woman decide to rob a data center in Oklahoma. Our critic at large, John Power, says Rapid Rich wraps a smart exploration of our data dominated society inside an entertaining heist story.

John Powers (Book Reviewer)

George Orwell famously wrote that it takes a constant struggle to see what's in front of one's nose. That may be truer than ever. These days, we barely register things that 20 years ago would have seemed downright bizarre, like people staring down at their phones in busy crosswalks. The unnatural comes to seem natural. Until it doesn't. This has happened with the proliferation of data centers all over America. After years of ignoring their mushrooming growth, There are over 4,000 in the U.S. the public now sees them clearly and doesn't like what they represent. Be it soaring energy bills or the advent of job killing, AI, people now oppose having data centers in their communities. In real life and in movies like Eddington, politicians are now pulled between their constituents desires and the devouring needs of big tech. The hatred of data centers ignites the action in Cloud Thief, a boisterous new novel that's equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness. It was written by novelist Nathaniel Richard, who may be best known for ecological nonfiction such as his 2019 book Losing Earth. Setting his story back in 2014 when tech billionaires were still considered visionaries, not bullying moguls, cloud Thief centers on a brainy young man who, like the guy in the Leonard Cohen song, is just some Joseph looking for a manger. Our narrator, Tim, a pseudonym, he says, is a freelance writer who's gone broke doing magazine articles about climate change. He's lonely and lost until he stumbles upon Virginia, also not her real name, who could be the American cousin of dragon tattooed Lisbeth Salander. Tech savvy and paranoid and scarily elusive, Virginia lives off the grid in a Manhattan mini storage unit and has plans for a blow against big tech. Evidently, Tim has never seen a noir movie because he doesn't merely fall for this 21st century fantasy of a femme fatale, he dreamily goes along with her plans to rob a data center in Pryor, Oklahoma, and make off with the sellable information their servers contain. Once they drive off to Pryor, Rich describes their road trip wonderfully. Cloud Thief kicks into high gear, serving up the juicy stuff that we all love. In a heist story, we see the baroque planning. We watch them case their target, a silver smoke spewing behemoth that has the majestic size of two futuristic airport terminals but is actually as tacky as a boondocks mini mall. And we learn how things work. While data centers contain the records of major corporations and government departments, each building contains tens of thousands of servers fat with documents. They're protected by a smattering of minimum wage guards. Nobody knows about them, tim says of these gigantic repositories, but they are the foundation of life on Earth. If every data center went dark tomorrow, we would be plunged into the Middle Ages. As Virginia and the lovestruck Tim prepare for the robbery. Cloud Thief is a blast. They philosophize, have sex, don silly disguises, bristle with suspicion, and constantly argue, often quite wittily. She's aghast at his amateur mistakes that could get them caught. They often seem like teenagers playing at committing a crime, but commit it they do. Of course, if you've ever read or watched a heist tale, you know that things never go as planned and that the setup is more fun than the aftermath. And so it is here. But rather than spoil things, I'll merely note that Rich's ending earnestly tells us what we already know. No matter. Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloud Thief stuck with me. I've read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data center nation. The blighting of the physical landscape, the voracious use of fossil fuel energy, the way that these huge, bland buildings owned by private companies like Google and Amazon now house and thereby control nearly all aspects of all of our lives. Leading a life of garrulous desperation and powerless analysis, he's the very soul of defeated idealism. Tim can kid himself into believing that robbing the prior data center might be a meaningful gesture. In fact, he's just chasing a woman and trying to escape his own thwarted life. But his blindness helps us see the world. Early in the novel, Tim ruminates on the cloud, a term whose vague innocence seduces us into not thinking about its power. The goal of any technology, he says, is to make itself both essential and invisible, like air. In Cloud Thief, Rich does the opposite. He helps us see the actual earthbound workings of the magical sounding Cloud, and he gets us thinking about the perils of needing it so badly.

Terry Gross

John Powers reviewed Cloud Thief by Nathaniel Rich. We end today's show with a big thank you to Joyce Lieberman, who's retiring from WHYY after more than 50 years. She played a major part in our show's development. She was a Fresh Air engineer for about nine years, starting when we were a local program. When we became a daily NPR show, Joyce became our technical director. She oversaw the creation of a new control room that enabled us to connect with NPR and member stations, which is how we managed to record interviews with guests in remote studios and and to send the show to NPR later. When she became whyy's engineer supervisor, she was the person we call during mysterious technical emergencies. She was indispensable in our conversion to digital technology and digitizing our archive. Early on, she was kind of a pioneer. She started at WHYY in 1973 as an intern, stayed as a volunteer working on the Feminist show. After deciding she wanted to be an engineer, she didn't realize her timing was going to be perfect. WHYY soon received a grant that was part of a larger initiative to train and hire women engineers. Joyce had already taken engineering classes and was hired. There were very few women engineers at the time. I remember when she was very pregnant with her first child. Some of our male guests looked at her in confusion. Like, what? A woman engineer? And pregnant, too. Thank you, Joyce, for all you've done for WHYY and our show. I also have to thank Thad Kirk, who's just retired after over 35 years at why. He was one of our engineers when we became a daily national program. He went on to become WHYY's chief engineer. In that role, he continued to look out for Fresh Air, and he knew how it worked and what we needed. You could always count on Thad to be calm and know what to do, even when things were crashing all around him. I wish Thad and Joyce a fulfilling retirement. We know how lucky we were to have worked with them. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers. Roberta Shorok, Anne Marie Boldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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