Tawnya Brant, a chef from Six Nations of the Grand River, who previously appeared on season ten of Top Chef, is leading a new series on APTN.
The show follows Brant as she embarks on a journey to strengthen food security and local economies in her home community of Six Nations. The nine-episode series premiered on January 7, 2025, with new episodes airing each Tuesday night at 7 p.m.
Creating and filming the show has been “a pretty fun journey,” so far, Brant said. “I think I’ve grown by leaps and bounds, as a chef.”
Brant grew up in Ohswé:ken, and initially started experimenting with cooking Indigenous foods when her mother, a seed keeper, would give her produce. “She was always giving me these weird things, like, oh, here, you know, Haudenosaunee squash. Go make it a food,” Brant said.
She now has 30 years of experience in the industry, and started catering Indigenous foods 12 years ago. During the pandemic, she opened a restaurant, Yawékon, in the Iroquois Village Plaza, serving Indigenous and Haudenosaunee fusion cuisine and house made drinks. Around this time, her sister, Dakota Brant, encouraged her to start a YouTube channel.
That YouTube channel led to a lot of views, and eventually to the APTN show. A producer approached Tawnya and Dakota after seeing them online, and visited both Tawnya’s restaurant and Dakota’s store next to it. “She’s like, ‘what you do and what your family is doing is really unique… you’re great personalities…. you’re good on camera,’” Brant said. “‘Would you consider doing a show?’”
APTN gave them $150,000 to make an eight-part series. At that point, Brant said, they had “no idea what the show would be about,” though they knew they wanted to cover people that were doing “good food sovereignty work, that weren’t really getting the recognition that we felt that they deserved.”
Since they were filming during the pandemic, they weren’t able to travel widely for the show. The show became “a beautiful representation of Six Nations and the people that live here, and just how we live our daily lives.”
The show, One Dish One Spoon, “delves into the challenges, successes, and sacrifices involved in creating the only professional Indigenous food service within an Indigenous community” according to the APTN website. Guests on the show include Brant’s family, seed keepers, farmers, agricultural experts, and historians as they explore community and food security.
The response to the show so far has been really good, Brant said. “People have been dying for me to do this, they want to know about Indigenous food and how we access them.”
For her, the biggest thing is just mixing Indigenous foods with contemporary foods.
“I refer to it as everyday Indigenous eating, because it’s not possible for us to eat pre-colonial all the time,” Brant said. “So I started Indigenizing recipes where I’d be like, okay, well, we don’t need ground beef. We can use elk, or we can use bison.”
She hopes that the show encourages more people to become involved in the food sovereignty movement, and to look at how they can support people doing good work already.
The show has already been greenlit for a second season, this time with a budget of $1.4 million for 13 episodes. The second season is going to be translated into Mohawk as well, offering an English and Mohawk language program.
The success of the show has unfortunately meant that Brant had to step back from other commitments, including her restaurant.
She wasn’t able to find a staff to keep it going, and because the restaurant occupied so much of her time, she was “saying no to so many opportunities… I fought for a decade for these opportunities.”
The decision to close was “heartbreaking,” however, as “there’s a lot of elders that went there,” and she saw so many people changing their eating habits due to the restaurant.
Season two will start with Brant “putting the closed sign on that door,” she said, “and then it’ll carry on into the things that I’m doing now, and people I’m working with, and it’ll follow my career a little more.”
People will also learn in season two that Brant’s mother passed away suddenly last year.
“It was pretty unexpected…. I think a lot of people, too, might be finding out through the series,” Brant said. “Because it was so fast. It changed a lot for our family.”
Brant has since taken on her mother’s garden, which is a Mohawk seed keeper’s garden, and wants to move her focus to how to amalgamate the different businesses.
The show will share a “closer up view” of what Brant’s family is doing. “Dakota is very knowledgeable and does so many incredible things. My mom was the same way. I’ve been blessed to have amazing opportunities in the food realm.”
Brant is also “really happy to see” how proud her community is to see themselves on television.
“We have so many amazing stories in Six Nations…. there’s some incredible things happening,” Brant said. The show is “kind of like a little love letter to my rez that made me, made me who I am.”
