08/05/2026
When I cut into a glistening steak — right out of the oven, so tender it practically melts when I bite into it — I have the warm feeling of sitting at a childhood dinner table enjoying grandma’s cooking. The same is true for a Chipotle burrito, evocative of the staples my parents served me growing up. All those meals tell the story of who I am, what my family has been through.
For Leland Swain, an enrolled member of the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, those stories are told through stews, karate bread, and beans — “a lot of beans,” he says.
Swain was born in 1948 and raised on the Moapa River Indian Reservation. He was part of the new generation on the reservation, he says, a generation which began six years after his tribe gained federal recognition, in 1942. The tribe lived on land that the U.S. government gave to the Moapa Paiutes in the early 1870s, then reduced to only 1,000 acres by 1875.
Before that, the Southern Paiute had lived along the Muddy River and farmed traditional foods like maize, beans, and squash in the arid desert, where summer temperatures top 100 degrees. Earlier generations hunted and gathered to eat.
It was a tough life, Swain says. “We didn’t have to do that. We hunted and gathered our pine nuts.”
His generation saw the introduction of the grocery store. Today, most of the dishes cooked in Native communities are made with ingredients from those stores.
But that doesn’t mean traditional practices stopped. Moapa Paiutes still hunt and gather, just not out of necessity. And in the generational overlap between Swain and his grandmother, Topsy Chappo Swain, there are dishes he grew up eating and still makes today.
✍️ Jimmy Romo-Buenrostro
🎨 Jennifer Dahbura
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