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NATIVE HUT/ Vanessa Shields

@native_hut

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Botanical Design meets Austronesian Cookery.
ISLANDS zine now available at Now Serving in LA, link in bio.
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ISLANDS, Volume I 🐚 Some books arrive like a tide. This one came in on violet paper, a coral branch brushed across the cover, and *a cookbook in six parts* written in a looping, sun-faded hand. Vanessa Shields came home to San Diego in 2014 looking for a second chance. She found it at the edge of the Pacific, along with a love story she says came straight out of a Gauguin painting. ISLANDS is where that search leads, back toward the Philippines and Aotearoa and the ancestors who first crossed the water between them. Inside, the pages unfold like a tide pool: unfurling koru ferns and the fjords of the Land of the Long White Cloud, pressed seaweed laid out like botanical plates, letters written by hand, a nipa hut sketched under two palms. The path runs from Luzon to Palawan, where Vanessa writes that she could finally *”feel my ancestors.”* It’s a book about cooking and living from what the earth and ocean give, and about the Austronesian thread that turned scattered islands into one world. Illustration and design are by @steventachauer, with photography by @kristallmatth As Filipino American History Month comes to a close, it feels right to end on a story about finding home by finding where you come from. Nine years in, we’re still thrilled every time something like ISLANDS finds its way to us: a small, self-made book that feels like a discovery. This is Volume I of the @native_hut series, and we can’t wait to see where the next volumes take us. 🌊 Now on our shelves and online, link in profile. #nowservingla #filipinoamericanhistorymonth #fahm #filipinofood by @native_hut
The ISLANDS Zine Volume One is now available to collect at @nowservingla , the culinary bookstore in Los Angeles. Set against the Gauguin Blue, the forms drift like something of the ocean — sensual, marine, and texturally alive. It was important that the cover felt elemental, as if it belonged to the sea itself — placing nature and its quiet beauty at the forefront. by @native_hut
It was at Cendrillon that I had my first taste of lambanog, a distilled liquor made from the unopened blossoms of coconuts. Amy and Romy were always teaching me something about the Philippines, whether it was the quality of heirloom rice, or the origin of certain dishes through trade. In many ways, Cendrillon transformed me. Read more at nativehut.substack.com by @native_hut
The Islands zine is now available to collect through the culinary bookstore, Now Serving @nowservingla in Chinatown, Los Angeles. by @native_hut
Yesterday with Hina…learning about the permaculture design principles to prepare for our own garden. First stop @permaculture_garden , run by Nicky Schauder who smiled when she found out we were also Filipino. Second stop @naturecomposed with founder @jenn.pineau , who shared she also knew Nicky from studying permaculture. Her soulful store is one of my absolute favorites and always worth a drive to Middleburg. by @native_hut
Where I go for a holy experience. by @native_hut
Back in 2022, while moving and driving from San Diego to the DC area, we stopped at Cahokia in Illinois. @justifarian previously told me about his childhood field trips there, and I was eager to see it. Cahokia was the largest pre-Columbian city north of present-day Mexico and the center of trade in North America, connecting people and goods from the Great Lakes down into the Gulf. Spanning over six square miles and four great terraces, Cahokia is an architectural achievement and changed how historians’ understand Indigenous life in North America. #indigenouspeoplesday by @native_hut
Today’s newsletter is titled Filipino American Art History (The 1960s-1970s). Nativehut.substack.com Painting by Pacita Abad. One Night Stand, 2002. Oil, painted batik cloth hand-stitched on canvas. #FAHM by @native_hut
Carlos Villa painted Māori-inspired tattoos on an image of his own face in Tat2 (1971). I relate to his search for Filipino identity, and his desire to identify with indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific and the Americas. This artwork appeared in the 2022 exhibit, Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision— the first major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist. W is quoted saying the exhibit, “Makes Filipino American History.” It took until 2022 to dedicate a full museum retrospective to a Filipino American, but Filipinos have been in the United States since 1763, when Filipino sailors (the Manilamen) escaped the Spanish Galleons, and settled in the marshlands of present-day Louisiana. by @native_hut
As I’ve been researching cooking tools, I’ve come across a lot of beautiful instruments made in the same materials—wood, gourds and ceramics. There is something so soulful about these objects because they are tied to self-expression. Not just from the artist who made the instrument, but also the artist who played the instrument. We are constantly listening to music and eating delicious food, but something magical happens when we cook and create music for ourselves. Photo: Whistling Jar, Chimu (North Coast, Peru) 1000-1476. On view at the Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 684. by @native_hut
Maybe it was watching Forgotten Island twice in the last week, or my obsession with Filipino American History Month coming up in a few days, that made me want to write about orchids today. “Long before Western contact, indigenous groups like the Bagobo people of Mindanao revered native orchids like the Waling-waling (Vanda sanderiana), treating them as sacred dwelling places for forest spirits.” Read more at nativehut.substack.com Photo: Orchid, 1987 by Robert Mapplethorpe, National Gallery of Art by @native_hut
The Creative Daughter: An Unauthorized Use of Potential is now live. We are calling this a creativity workshop because the real thing felt too intense for the subject line. But a blank page has a way of bringing all of it with you. So does a business idea, a half-finished project, the thing you’ve been “meaning to start” since 2021. Your work rarely arrives alone. It brings old expectations, family roles, at least one invisible relative wondering if this is practical. The Creative Daughter is about the version of you who learned how to be promising. The one who became easy to explain at family dinners. It is about what happens when that identity meets something uncertain and cannot charm, plan, or overprepare its way to the answer. We moved through the Cobalt + Capulets Method with Vanessa of @native_hut to explore creativity from three angles: the patterns we inherited, the parts of ourselves we lost contact with, and what becomes possible when we give those parts somewhere to live. There was reflection. There was practice. There was definitely a family member living rent-free in someone’s creative process. This is your unofficial permission slip to explore with us. Subscribe to the C+C Substack to watch the full workshop. Link in bio. #creativeentrepreneur #aapiwomenlead #aapiartists by @native_hut

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