Food for the Journey
Food lines in development
From the road to your table.
Ktunaxa-inspired foods for camp, travel and the comforts of home.
The idea began on Troy’s travels. Staying in hotels, he wanted a low-cost, delicious alternative to eating out all the time. That practical search grew into a food line designed with backpackers, car campers and everyday home cooks in mind.
We are developing easy-cooking packages with the aim of reaching store shelves soon in the Rocky Mountains and surrounding region. Products are not yet available to order.
Tradition meets today’s appetite.
Our developing range looks to the dietary needs of the 21st century, with vegetarian possibilities drawing on Alberta-grown soybeans and lentils, Canadian Saskatoon berries and Indonesian tempeh.
Some of Troy’s recipes are Indonesian-inspired, shaped by life with his wife, who is from Java, and his years in Jakarta.
Bison and salmon, the staples of a people of both the Plains and the Plateau, also have a place in the broader food vision: bringing traditional Ktunaxa foods back to the palates of people who visit and do business with us. As Troy writes, the fires are being rekindled.
Heritage & inspiration
Food carries a story.
Ktunaxa people gathered nuts from whitebark pine—q̓anǂat̕ana—a tree of the Rocky Mountains’ high-elevation, subalpine landscapes. As they travelled through the land, they gathered roots, berries, nuts, fish and meat, processing and drying foods for winter and for trade with other nations they met.
Whitebark pine has been listed as Endangered under Canada’s Species at Risk Act since 2012. KPHI plans to use commercially available pine nuts, not whitebark pine seeds, in some dishes—a nod to this heritage without harvesting the endangered tree.
Ktunaxa food knowledge long predates the flour trade. Today, Troy uses wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) in some of the culinary blends KPHI is developing. He also recalls cattail (ʔak̓is hanq̓u) roots as a source of flour, and places where camas (xapi) was tended and cultivated. These food traditions inspire a developing range, not a final menu or a guide to gathering wild plants.
Salmon once ran all the way to the Columbia’s headwaters. Troy writes that the Ktunaxa speared salmon and used fish weirs, then smoked and sun-dried the catch. He has heard a Kainai memory of a Ktunaxa trader arriving on horseback with a wagon full of dried salmon—a treat the children likened to candy.
In his Old Time Story writing, Troy looks back to Peter Fidler’s 1792–93 journey and his meeting with Ktunaxa people at the Gap on the Oldman River. Fidler recorded watertight root and bark vessels and fish cookery—glimpses of knowledge, skill and resourcefulness that continue to inspire Troy.
At the Columbia’s headwaters in September 1845, Pierre-Jean De Smet met Morigeau—“our Canadian”—whom Troy’s family history identifies as François Monrogeau, dit Morigeau. De Smet describes him travelling with his wife and seven children.
De Smet also records three Indigenous families “who accompany him in his migrations,” whose children were baptized alongside Morigeau’s wife and children. On leaving, he calls the family’s travelling companions “their companions of the chase, the Sioushwaps” (Shuswap).
Troy’s family history identifies these Shuswap companions as the Kinbasket family line—the Kinbasket people who made their home in Ktunaxa territory.
At the Morigeau feast, De Smet says he was served “two paws of a bear,” followed by roast porcupine with a moose’s muzzle. Then came a kettle of “hotch-potch, or salmagundi”: he lists beef, buffalo, venison, beavers’ tails, hare and partridges in the soup. His account places this hospitality at the Plain of the Nativity.
In a separate, earlier encounter among the Arcs-à-Plats, De Smet witnessed an annual “grand fish festival.” He describes osier vessels “cemented with gum” and filled with water and fish. Stones heated in the fire were lifted with two flattened sticks and put into the vessels to cook the fish by stone-boiling. This is his historical description, not a KPHI recipe or a modern cooking guide.
These accounts offer early visitors’ partial perspectives, not the whole story of Ktunaxa foodways. Our inspiration is to honour ancestral foodways and Ktunaxa heritage while making room for new ideas.
More heritage sources: FirstVoices: cattail; FirstVoices: camas; Canada’s whitebark pine recovery strategy. Whitebark pine: FirstVoices Ktunaxa dictionary; B.C. Tree Book. Read Troy’s “The year was 1792”, Fidler’s journal excerpt, and De Smet’s Oregon Missions and Travels: fish festival, pp. 198–199; Morigeau family and feast, pp. 209–211. Troy’s family story.
Flour, bannock & breaking bread.
At ʔaq̓am along the St. Mary’s River (ʔaq̓am ʔa·kinmituk), Ktunaxa families grew wheat during Father Léon Fouquet’s time at St. Eugene Mission. St. Eugene’s history describes its mill as the first flour mill in the region. Troy recalls flour bought at Galbraith’s Ferry—today Fort Steele (yaqawxaquʔkuʔki) Heritage Town—and the high prices families faced in the 1870s.
Flour, bannock and breaking bread run through Troy’s Taming the Wild Horse, including the conflict surrounding the flour trade. Historian Thomas A. Lascelles records an assault on Fouquet in 1881, but treats flour competition as a possible motive, not a proven one.
Sources: Thomas A. Lascelles’s thesis; St. Eugene’s history; Fort Steele Heritage Town. Price recollections and the film’s themes are Troy’s account.
A little slower. A little closer to home.
The vision is simple hospitality: tea or coffee with a light meal, bison jerky, barbecued salmon, or fry bread with blueberry pudding. A warm loaf, real butter and berry compote. Familiar pleasures, with room for old-world and new-world inspiration.
Infused oils are among the culinary treats Troy hopes to bring to the table.
Explore the cultivation, building and display ideas behind this hospitality vision.
“We will keep our hearth full of love and sunshine as we grow a new future.” — Troy Hunter
Steamed bread
Vegan chili — in development
A hearty vegan chili is among the foods we are preparing to introduce.
Café & Gift Shop
A taste of the café and gift shop Troy imagines.
These dishes come from Troy Hunter’s kitchen at Kootenae Plains Holdings Inc. (KPHI), a 100% Indigenous-owned business. They show the warmth and mood Troy hopes a future KPHI café could share: unhurried food, made with care and meant for gathering. Details to come.
The gift shop concept
Troy envisions a small gift shop beside the café, carrying his photo prints from the KPHI gallery (available through Pictorem), packaged KPHI foods as they’re ready, and painted tipi-cone lanterns with deer and diamond motifs.
Be there for the first taste.
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