Revitalizing Indigenous Cuisine: A conversation with Sean Sherman founder of The Sioux Chef

words: Francisca Figueroa & Sean Sherman

Astriking feature of modern-day Europe—an ancestral origin for many of North America’s current inhabitants—rests in the continuing cultural relevance of the ancient. To travel there as an American might leave the faintly sour taste of something lost, some link to history to whose strange absence we routinely turn a blind eye.

Shadowed by the Colosseum or the Pantheon, the stories of Lewis and Clark, Abe Lincoln and Laura Ingalls Wilder seem modern. Popular history prior to the Pilgrims appears to trail off. What history we have of indigenous peoples and the way they lived was mangled by war, genocide, forced migrations and institutionalized racism or otherwise intentionally forgotten.

Yet even rooted in such a dark and distorted past, the vision of the future is bright and clear.

Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota subtribe of the Great Sioux Nation and founder of The Sioux Chef, the Indigenous Food Lab and the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), is on a mission to revitalize Native American cuisine. In the process, his work is re-identifying North American cuisine, reclaiming an important culinary culture long buried and often inaccessible.

His cooking focuses on indigenous foods (pre-colonization) and the traditional methods of preparing them. Sherman is intent on reconnecting us to the North America before beef, pork, chicken, dairy,

Above: Chef Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota subtribe of the Great Sioux Nation and founder of The Sioux Chef, the Indigenous Food Lab and the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems

Sean Sherman: In 2008, I was living down in Mexico, about an hour north of Puerto Vallarta in a little town called San Pancho. I was in between jobs, trying to figure out my next move. One day I was on the beach, and groups of indigenous people, the Huichol, were sitting out, selling their art. The art was so similar to the things I saw growing up Lakota. Seeing so many commonalities, it really just struck me that as a chef I should focus on my own heritage. The problem was, I didn’t know that much about Lakota food.

Suddenly I had so many questions: What were my Lakota ancestors eating? Were they growing food? What kind of foods where they collecting? How are they preserving things? Where did they get salt? What kind of fats did they use? I kept thinking about everything, especially from a chef’s perspective, and breaking it down. I am learning more and more every year. There is so much untapped knowledge when it comes to indigenous food systems all around the world.

A: My partner, Dana Thompson, and I just started our own nonprofit called NATIFS, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. We are opening a restaurant through NATIFS that also has a training and educational center. [All under the brand, the Indigenous Food Lab (IFL).] IFL will be a place where people can come and learn about facets of indigenous food: agriculture, wild foods, cooking and food preservation. The restaurant will become a training center for the tribes around us, to help them develop their own food businesses. Eventually, we want to open up IFLs all over the country.

We are also opening another for-profit restaurant in Minneapolis, right downtown in front of the Mississippi River. We will be able to tell the story of the Lakota people, because the river is a uniquely spiritual place, although obviously all of the natural features are gone because of industrialization.

Also, the cookbook [The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (see sidebar)] is out, which has kept us really busy. We just did a big East Coast push and we are getting ready to do a West Coast push.

A: I think it’s just a matter of really good timing that people are beginning to understand the importance of locality in sustainability. However, I think this is a lot deeper than that. I think this is about having the deeper understanding of the landscape that people are standing on, understanding that there was history in the United States before Laura Ingalls [Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie books]. There were many cultures, and many people, and so much diversification surrounding food systems. That is why learning indigenous knowledge can help us develop a deeper understanding of the land that we are standing on and grew up on.

A: It’s been overwhelmingly positive. We are doing simple foods, but really clean foods. You know it’s such a healthy diet, especially after we removed all dairy, wheat, processed sugar and just showcased alternative proteins and things like that. Plus there is the whole historical aspect of it. I think people find something interesting in the mix of it, whether it’s wild food, native agriculture, native history or just cooking. We do a lot of fancy meals, but we also do a lot of really simple group meals.

The dictionary defines indigenous as originating or occurring naturally in a place. As far as the ecology of North America is concerned, indigenous refers to the period prior to European “discovery.” Since 12,000–15,000 B.C.E,, long before Columbus ever sailed the ocean blue, human beings have lived and thrived on the continent we now call home.

That means that for 12,000 years, indigenous peoples lived without chicken, pork, beef, dairy, refined sugar, wheat, olive oil, bananas, oranges and apples.

Instead, what indigenous peoples had were remarkably contemporary methods of cultivating and collecting food. They collected native plants like wood sorrel, purslane, plantain and lamb’s quarter–wild superfoods more powerful than kale and so well adapted to the climate that they could grow without fertilizers or pesticides. They gathered wild nuts like acorns, and processed them into protein-rich flour (both gluten-free and low-glycemic). They hunted wild game like rabbit, turkey, duck and pheasant, and never forgot to use the organ meats containing folic acid, iron, chromium, copper, selenium, omega fatty acids, zinc and an alphabet of vitamins.

Indigenous people never needed health guidelines like Paleo, Whole 30 or the “food pyramid”; they simply ate food balanced by the ecosystem. The indigenous diet designed by nature works with nature, and so works to conserve and sustain the land. To quote Wendell Berry, poet, farmer and lifelong Kentuckian, “Land cannot be properly cared for by people who do not know it intimately, who do not know how to care for it, who are not strongly motivated to care for it.”

Maybe the word “indigenous” describes something much wider and deeper than the dictionary could ever explain. Maybe it describes the way we can begin to see ourselves as originating or occurring naturally from a place, the way to value the land we stand on as if it had created us. Today, as we struggle to understand the chronic health problems and environmental threats looming over us, perhaps exploring the connection that indigenous people once shared with this land and that we, the current inhabitants of North America, share with them may have something to teach us.