About 20 minutes from the Oregon coast, a group of high school students at the Siletz Valley School are learning hands-on culinary skills, chopping chives, flipping hoecakes in sizzling frying pans and carrying stock pots of bubbling broth. But this is far from your average home economics class.

“I like to run the program like work,” said Patrick Clarke. “It’s just like being in a restaurant kitchen.”

Clarke is the Culinary Director for the K-12 charter school, but even with two decades of cooking experience, he never intended to be a teacher.

“I barely made it out of high school myself,” laughs Clarke. “I joined the military right afterwards and then went to restaurant work. I went to Cordon Bleu and did more restaurant work, and I never expected to be here.”

The program is just a few years old and started after the students asked for more career technical education opportunities, specifically a culinary program. At the same time, Clarke had stepped away from a chef position in California and relocated his family to Oregon.

“I am a veteran, so I talked to the local Veteran Resource Officer in Lincoln County,” he explained. “His wife actually is the principal here, and he mentioned that Siletz Valley School was looking to start a whole culinary program.”

Clarke teaches a variety of unique culinary classes like Wild Foraging and Seafood Butchery, but also oversees the school’s food program.

“We don’t participate in the national school lunch program. It’s too restrictive and so we’ve found our own funds to feed every single student here for free,” said Clarke.

And a lot of the work that the culinary students do in class goes directly to the school lunch program.

The goal is to teach transferable, real-world skills to his students, and also to expose them to foods from around the world, including Indigenous, first nations foods from the Americas.

“I’m Navajo Native and I never got to grow up learning my culture, but now I get to because of Patrick.” said senior Jaiden Knapp, who’s been in Clarke’s culinary program since it started. “Here we wouldn’t just do the Native dish, he would talk about it and tell us where it’s from and how they used to use it and what they used it for.”

More than half of the students at this charter school are Indigenous, most of them members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. And the students are lucky to have a nearby example of Indigenous culinary success: James Beard Award-nominated Chef Jack Strong, who grew up right down the road.

“I know what it’s like to grow up in Siletz, a town of a thousand. There’s nothing different from [the students] and myself other than getting exposure to the world,” said Strong.

Strong is now the Executive Chef at The Allison Inn & Spa in Newberg and as part of a celebration of Native American Heritage Month, he welcomed nearly a dozen culinary students to help with a First Foods dinner.

“We’re really going to be telling stories through food,” said Strong. “[We’ll be] highlighting Native cuisine as well as Native foods in general.”

Joining Strong were two visiting Indigenous chefs: Rob Kinneen and Nephi Craig.

“I’m doing an Apache seed mix-crusted acorn squash with Three Sisters and bright citrusy salad with microgreens, amaranth, and marigold petals,” said Craig, who is half Navajo and from the White Mountain Apache Tribe in northeastern Arizona.

The trio of chefs each created a dish highlighting Indigenous cuisines, often expanding on their own backgrounds.

“I’m Tlingit from Alaska, and I feel like I’ve been kind of pigeonholed into seafood and seaweed,” joked Kinneen. “So I did a strong left turn [with my dish] and I’m doing braised bison cheeks served with Minnesota harvested wild rice accented with local mushrooms, turnips, and dandelion greens.”

The culinary students from the Siletz Valley School created their own dishes too, serving them during the welcome reception.

“We made a duck BLT on a blueberry hoecake with some duck bacon and a tomato compote,” said Siletz Valley senior Zoey Koehler. “And we have wild rice cracker that we made and a mushroom pâté that we’re putting on it.”

The students were paired with the chef-mentors and did everything from shucking raw oysters to thinly slicing sous-vided bison cheek. They also plated hundreds of dishes for the multi-course meal, all while Patrick Clarke looked on like a proud parent.

“They’re doing a good job,’ he beamed. “It’s a great opportunity for them, and I wish that I had even more educational opportunities exactly like this with other chefs that we could just rotate through consistently. That would be the perfect education to get them set to move forward out of high school.”

This was the third annual First Foods dinner hosted at the Allison and the largest one yet, with more than 140 people in attendance. After the meal, the chefs spoke about the impact of the event.

“For all three of us, I don’t think we could have imagined something like tonight would have happened 25 to 30 years ago,” said Strong. “It was as elegant or as creative as any other type of cuisine, and because we tie that in with the Siletz youth that are here tonight — they’re the future, they’ll be replacing us at some point.”

The impact of the night was not lost on the students either.

“It was a lot of fun [and] I was really surprised with how much I learned so much in that short period that I cooked with them,” said Siletz Valley sophomore James Pearson. “I’m happy that somebody from Siletz is pushing Siletz more out, ‘cause we could use all the help that we can get.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/26/indigenous-chefs-culinary-students-siletz-valley-school/