To watch Sean Sherman forage is to see an expert surveying all manner of flora, near and far, in the concurrent interests of food, beverage, medicine, and education. Sherman, who is Oglala Lakota, notes a sunflower in bloom as he moves from the edge of a low prairie towards dense wildflowers. He explains that it will be cooked whole as he cuts just below its heavy head.
Armed with a cooler and a camera, Sherman also sees time. Some young and tender shoots will be enjoyed differently when picked now instead of later, while mushrooms at the edge of a dense forest are left to grow. Some foraged plants are substantial parts of a meal, like dandelion greens; others play supporting roles, like marshmallow root, a reliable source of pectin.
As Sherman places each item into his red-and-white cooler, he describes his intent for it. They will be traveling with him to his Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni by the Sioux Chef, destined for diners who have come from near and far to experience Sherman’s “modern Indigenous” cooking. The scope of his botanical knowledge did not come strictly from his childhood or from formal teaching, Sherman says, but from years of listening, reading, and practice. His job now is to disseminate that knowledge, whether in his books, at his events, during foraging workshops like this one, or via every plate that comes out of Owamni’s kitchen.
Sean Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the 1980s. He moved to Spearfish, South Dakota in his teens where he attended college, and worked in a few local kitchens between classes, starting as a dishwasher. After graduating, he spent several seasons in the U.S. Forest Service in and around the Black Hills, which fostered his interest in native plants.
When he was 23, in the late 1990s, Sherman relocated to the Twin Cities with the goal of attending the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. But after determining that he couldn’t afford art school, he returned to the kitchen, and found a job at Broders’ Pasta Bar, an Italian institution in southwest Minneapolis. “I actually moved my way up rather quickly in the [Twin] Cities and because I had a good eye for art, it also helped me have a good eye for making plates look pretty,” he says.
After about six years, he landed his first executive chef role at the innovative Solera tapas restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. But he was nagged by the growing realization that the food of his heritage—decolonized, or pre-colonial, food—was nowhere to be found in American restaurants, and certainly not within the consciousness of most U.S. diners. While many non-Natives can name and often cook dishes from other countries, regardless of their immigrant histories or nationalities, very few can describe a traditional American Indian dish, or even the kinds of ingredients that would be used in Indigenous cooking.
“Every single plant has gifts. If we don’t know what the gifts are—it’s on us. We need to take the time to find the gifts of a particular plant.”
This is a multifactorial loss, one that stems from the long-term genocide of Native Americans, visible through events like the forced consolidation of Indigenous people and the eradication of traditional ingredients and culinary knowledge. For example, Native American children living in residential schools were never served Indigenous dishes, while from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, about 75% of the genetic diversity among U.S. agricultural crops was lost.
While doing his own study of indigenous plants, medicinal ingredients, and the commoditized food of the nation’s Indian reservations, Sherman traveled widely, and spoke to community elders in places ranging from Mexico to Montana. One thing became clear to him right away: Native foodways are as diverse as each reservation, community, and neighborhood, while being wholly underrepresented as a collective. In fact, the only restaurant Sherman could find serving Native American fare was the Mitsitam Native American Foods Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
One such elder that Sherman has formed a strong bond with is Hope Flanagan of the Turtle Band of the Seneca Nation in what is today New York State. Flanagan, who has resided in the Midwest since childhood, enjoys working alongside Sherman, and has spoken at events with him. As a culture teacher and part of the community outreach at Dream of Wild Health, a comprehensive Indigenous-focused farm and food sovereignty initiative in central Minnesota, Flanagan’s deep passion is the bounty of the earth around her—not what is cultivated, but what arises naturally, like nettle, ground cherries, and juneberries. Her passion is part of the ecosystem keeping and spreading Native stories, traditions, and knowledge.
“Yesterday I got to visit with a Dakota project in the St. Paul area,” she explains. “You always hear different tribal takes on the same plant—how they might be using it, how we might be using it. There’s different stories of how it has been used. I really enjoy that.”
Flanagan’s botanical and cultural interests were encouraged when she was young and assisted Ojibwe elders to find ingredients. Her beneficiaries would repay her in knowledge. Flanagan continues to physically source critical plants for those who are either far removed from them or who have mobility issues, for example birch bark for a member of the White Earth reservation. She also works with chefs like Sherman, members of farther-flung tribes, and schoolchildren, helping them in locating and appreciating native plants for their diverse array of uses, whether on the Dream of Wild Health farm or on plant walks near the learners. “Every single plant has gifts. If we don’t know what the gifts are—it’s on us. We need to take the time to find the gifts of a particular plant.”
Sherman himself knew very little about his own food culture when he began moving from mainstream kitchens to cooking the food of his ancestors. He became consumed by each new fact he uncovered, he says, and with each successful conversation was convinced that this was a vision worth bringing to a wider audience. Through his work speaking to elders, foragers, and ethnobotanists, he discovered a map of sorts—no two regions or tribes used the same ingredients or techniques, but many influenced each other through practices such as trading and seed-saving, different cooking techniques visible across wider geographic regions.
In 2014, Sherman took on his first public speaking engagement about Indigenous cuisine. Members of the Little Earth of United Tribes, the only urban housing assistance development for Native people in the United States, heard him speak about Indigenous ingredients and soon invited him to develop a menu for their freshly purchased food truck.
Little Earth is located in the poorest neighborhood of Minneapolis, where 48% of people live in poverty. It consists of several blocks of medium-rise apartments, townhomes, and small greenspaces frequented by young families, all with steady car traffic running throughout. The housing development serves as a space for many Indigenous people who may no longer be living with their families of origin, and may not have reliable access to food.
“They [Little Earth] were talking to another Native chef in town who had been working with Shakopee for a while, the Mdewakanton Sioux [tribe], but his concept was a fry bread truck,” says Sherman. “Well, they were really wanting something a little bit different. They didn’t know what they wanted ’cause it didn’t exist, but then they found me and that’s what they wanted.”
Fry bread—flat, deep-fried dough made from commodity flour, sugar, and lard that were provided to Native Americans by the U.S. government—originated among the Navajo in Arizona about 150 years ago. The ingredients were provided to prevent the tribes from starving during the “Long Walk,” one of many forcible relocations of Indians, this time from Arizona to New Mexico. In this way, fry bread is representative of violent colonization, and the real and ongoing effects of a processed diet on Indigenous people. But it has also been reclaimed by some as a food of origin, a symbol of survival and pride. It is at once a stereotypical American Indian food as depicted in mainstream media; a real fixture at community gatherings; and also a scapegoat for those who fret about rates of diabetes (23.5% among American Indian and Alaska Native adults, in contrast to 8% of non-Hispanic whites), obesity (Native Americans are 60% more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic whites), and heart disease (American Indian and Alaska Natives have a 50% greater risk).
This tension over fry bread speaks to the differences in public opinion about revising and correcting the way U.S. history is taught in schools. The shift in educational paradigms about The First Thanksgiving and the international attention given to Residential Schools in the U.S. and Canada may be starting to turn some hearts and minds towards empathy and restoration.
On October 8, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation establishing October 11 as Indigenous People’s Day. The first celebration of the new holiday on a national scale fell at a time of toppling statutes, changing public opinion about harms suffered by Native Americans, during a global pandemic that disproportionately impacted people of color, and in the face of growing outrage over multiple pipelines running through sacred land and threatening water. President Biden’s message included, “On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our Nation celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government’s trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.” Yet Columbus Day was not eradicated.
Sherman operated the Tatanka Truck on a consultant basis. Using only pre-colonial ingredients—some of which were sourced from the Native-operated Wozupi Tribal Gardens in Prior Lake, Minnesota—he crafted a menu that was healthy and sustainable, emphasizing Ojibwe and Dakota fare. Tatanka Truck served regularly throughout Minneapolis with dishes like sumac-seared walleye and cedar-braised bison. Eventually, in autumn 2017, the truck was sold to the White Earth Band of Chippewa Tribe in Northern Minnesota to further its mission of reaching even more remote families with Indigenous food, and to allow Sherman and his team to focus on other endeavors.
Sherman got the hang of events very quickly. In 2015, he curated another event at the Minnesota History Center focused on Indigenous cuisine, in partnership with a local publication, The Heavy Table. Owner James Norton remembers it as a success. “People loved digging into the backstory of a rich, hyper-local cuisine story that many of them hadn’t heard before,” he says. “I think the event presaged a lot of Sherman’s international resonance—he represents a fight to uncover, develop, preserve, and advance a critical food story that has long been in danger of fading away.”
Preservation is important to Sherman. At the same time that he was developing the Indigenous menu for the food truck with the Little Earth team, he was also authoring a cookbook with local author Beth Dooley. The cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” discusses Sherman’s childhood foodways, which were a mix of government rations and foraged foods, and won a James Beard Foundation Media Award for Best American Cookbook in 2018.
Several key ingredients star in this book, and Sherman is sure to make them familiar and approachable to readers by describing their history and significance. While he offers substitutions that are more available to most home cooks, he does encourage the real thing when it comes to proteins like bison and elk, as well as botanicals including sumac, juniper, and cedar. Standout dishes include the familiar—like squash and apple soup with fresh cranberry sauce—as well as sunflower-crusted trout and maple-juniper roast pheasant. The idea to write the book came from Dooley, and Sherman quickly envisioned how it would take shape. “I just wanted to focus on what the work was—modernizing Indigenous food and showcasing how it can be done,” he says.
That same sentiment could also describe Sherman’s latest restaurant project, Owamni by The Sioux Chef, which opened in July 2021 to much critical acclaim and anticipation, in part due to its enormously successful Kickstarter campaign. When I remarked that the fundraising campaign was the most successful restaurant Kickstarter to date when it closed at over $150,000, Sherman was quick to point out that there have since been higher-grossing fundraisers. “But we had the most supporters,” he clarifies. “So, it was the most organic. We had over 2,500 people and our average [gift] was like $40.”
Owamni is also remarkable because of its location. Sherman and business partner Dana Thompson, a lineal descendant of the Wahpeton-Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota tribes, won a competitive bid to open within the Water Works Pavilion at Mill Ruins Park. The two-level stone building overlooks St. Anthony Falls and was archaeologically preserved and developed in conjunction with the Minneapolis Parks Department and its Riverfirst project, drawing visitors to the once-industrial portion of the Mississippi River. Owamni is situated among the ruins of the massive flour mills that once operated along the river, in an area called Owámniyomni in Dakota. Every seat in the restaurant and patio has a view of the lands still considered sacred by the Dakota people, including the wild, multi-tiered waterfall juxtaposed by a decommissioned lock and dam system. These are the very mills where much of the white flour that infiltrated Indian reservations would have come from throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
White flour isn’t among the ingredients used at Owamni. All dishes are composed of pre-colonial components, mainly those that would have been found in the area before it was developed, and many of which still grow wild in the Midwest today. But it is the ingredients that Owamni does use, rather than the ones that it doesn’t, that define its identity—bison, sumac, mustard greens, and a sauce called wojapi made from chokecherries and blueberries.
“When you look at our food systems, you can’t just look at one component. When you talk about Indigenous foods or landscape, many things can affect those sources—clean water, climate change. Advocacy needs to be multifaceted. It’s about being good stewards of the land. The stronger network we have supporting our food, the more sustainable it will be going forward.”
Joatta Siebert, who has since departed from her role as chef de cuisine at Owamni, grew up cooking wild game like bison and elk. Siebert doesn’t claim a Native identity, though she has close family in Wahpeton, North Dakota, who do. She came to the Twin Cities “to do this for real,” she says, back in 2015. Seibert went on to win a MENT’OR grant to do a stage, or apprenticeship, in 2019 at Noma in Copenhagen.
When I interviewed her, she noted one of her favorite ingredients to forage in the summer was cedar. She used red and white cedar when braising large cuts of meat, and chopped up tender pieces to use like herbs while finishing plates. She also highlighted the tepary bean on several Owamni menus—a high-fiber legume most similar to a navy bean that has “a beautiful nutty quality”—as well as mushroom varieties that she had never encountered before.
“What has been so beautiful is that Sean has been hiring our garden warriors [group of teenage garden students] to work with him,” Flanagan says enthusiastically. “People who have had experience at the farm now are passing that on at the restaurant.” Flanagan sees the visible success of Owamni as a key to a better and much-needed understanding of Indigenous foods. “I feel like it’s waking people up to see food differently. To say, ‘Wait a minute—we have to respect these plants, these insects.’”
Staffing a kitchen, a nonprofit, and a steady stream of catering demands has come with challenges. While Sherman and his leadership team have worked to balance a spirit of openness and second chances with mental health support and background checks, Sherman was criticized this spring for continuing to employ Shane Thin Elk, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, despite a history of spousal abuse as determined by the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate court. It was later discovered that tribal court documents were missing from the screening process, and backed up the statements made by Thin Elk’s ex-wife, Allison Renville.
“There are active solutions and resources already in place for these type of amends to be made, using them and encouraging their success are where change can happen; paving the way for real decolonization,” Renville wrote at the time.
Thin Elk resigned in July, and Sherman followed up with a statement in September. “I believe in the power of redemption as well as the healing power of restorative justice,” he said. “However, due to the nature of this incident, it’s clear to us that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to heal this harm.”
Sourcing Owamni’s menu of pre-colonial food hasn’t always been easy. Farms like Dream of Wild Health and Wozupi Tribal Gardens are mainstays in Sherman’s supply chain, as they maintain and expand Native-kept seeds and growing techniques. These farms are able to provide traditional foods that are not found elsewhere. Some of these seeds, Flanagan explains, have been kept for centuries despite numerous forced relocations of tribes, with some members even sewing critical seeds into their garments to avoid them being stolen and destroyed.
Thanks to Sherman and a growing number of Native chefs and businesses, these farms have bright futures. As the use of Indigenous ingredients grows, so can these operations. In 2020, Dream of Wild Health expanded from 10 acres to 30, and the land stewardship started with healing the soil before cultivating anything to eat.
“They’ll ask, ‘Don’t you understand the struggles that our people have with substance abuse?’ I kind of shut that down. I do that by saying, ‘No, you don’t understand. The White Man did not introduce alcohol to our people, the alcohol has always been here.’”
Beyond food, the drinks menu at Owamni has presented an entirely separate set of challenges. Native beverage makers are rare. Spirits producers, especially, are few and far between. “It’s a pretty expensive business to get into. Even breweries. The paperwork and regulation keeps people away from making that kind of a business attempt. The cost is—it’s pretty high,” says Curt Basina, whose Copper Crow Distillery is the first documented Native-owned distillery in the country.
Copper Crow opened in Bayfield, Wisconsin—a weekender’s summer town on the shores of Lake Superior, across the mainland to Madeline Island—in 2017. Basina and his wife and distillery co-owner Linda are both enrolled members of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. The Basinas left successful careers to get into distilling, and have been adamant about saving and investing. Their feasibility study alone, which attracted banks, cost several thousand dollars. And half of the startup costs at Copper Crow were self-funded. “Unfortunately, due to various economic circumstances, there aren’t a lot of Native Americans that have thousands of dollars lying around,” Basina says.
Relationships with other Native-owned businesses have been key for Copper Crow’s distribution, which include links with other Native-made gins and vodkas, as well as local partnerships with inns and restaurants. “We’re at the casino. It’s only a quarter of a mile away, so it seemed like a no-brainer. Like, We’ve got one of our own people here running the first Native-owned distillery, we should carry it,” Basina says.
At Owamni, the model is to source all products in an intentional way, including beer and wine. “We purchase local Indigenous first, national Indigenous second, and then we support BIPOC local, BIPOC national, and then local allies,” Sherman explains. But he is even stricter about this hierarchy when it comes to alcohol, choosing to buy only from Native, BIPOC, and women producers.
“With the wine list we did really well, we were able to find a bunch of Native wineries,” says Sherman. During one visit in late 2021, the list featured Twisted Cedar winery of Lodi, California, owned wholly by the Cedar Band of Paiute Indians. California selections from Native-woman-owned brands, Kitá Wines and Camins 2 Dreams, joined a handful of wines from the Guadalupe Valley of Mexico and New Zealand to form a robust list. Many of the beer options were from La Doña Cervecería, a nearby Latinx-owned brewery, with a handful of choices from Brooklyn Brewery, including its non-alcoholic brand, Special Effects. Sherman wishes there were more options. “It’s a good conversation-starter—it's more of a conversation around privilege because, obviously, especially in the beer industry, there is just so much beer out there and so, so not diverse. It’s almost cliché to think of the white beardy guy.”
To stay true to an authentic vision of pre-colonial ingredients, the beverage list also includes zero-proof cocktails such as the Zesegaandag (Spruce) with spruce tips, cinchona bark, lavender, allspice, and agave. The iced and warm tea blends also feature Indigenous ingredients, like Hot Nimaamaa, made with raspberry leaf, nettle leaf, oatstraw, lemon balm, and peppermint.
“We were on the fence about even having beer and wine, just because there is a lot of negative stigma around alcohol and Native communities,” says Sherman. “But it was part of our contract [with the building] to have beer and wine offerings here.”
The stigma is a pervasive one in modern American culture, but historically, alcohol use among tribal members had more to do with power and control imposed by paternalistic policing structures and less to do with personal choice. The misconception of poor self-control, or a genetic pre-programming for alcoholism, results in the racist stereotype of The Drunk Indian. In reality, U.S. soldiers were trading whiskey with the tribes they were tasked to protect, while no genetic predisposition for alcoholism has ever been demonstrated by large epidemiological studies. This lack of autonomy is supported by the fact that it was illegal to distill within the boundaries of a reservation until 2018, meaning that tribes could not produce spirits until four years ago, when the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation successfully petitioned for change.
Basina takes a strong line when he receives pushback for creating and selling spirits on his own land within the Red Cliff Reservation (a loophole which meant he was not subject to the longstanding prohibition other Native distillers faced). “They’ll ask, ‘Don’t you understand the struggles that our people have with substance abuse?’ I kind of shut that down. I do that by saying, ‘No, you don’t understand. The White Man did not introduce alcohol to our people, the alcohol has always been here.’ You know, our ancestors were pretty smart people. They had to know and figure out, if I pick a bunch of berries, and squish them up, some natural yeast will get in, and create alcohol. My belief is that our ancestors knew this, and used it not only in their religion but oftentimes for celebrations—for the heck of it. It’s no different than peyote or other hallucinogenic substance.”
Basina is correct. Before any act of colonization, Indigenous groups in the Americas made at least 40 unique alcoholic products. In the U.S., the dominant ingredients were corn, agave, manioc, as well as fruits and seeds. The majority of these beverages were present in the southern U.S. as well as what is now Alaska, and in some regions, it is documented that alcoholic beverages were primarily used in spiritual ceremonies.
Currently, Sherman is in talks with the Native-woman-owned Bow & Arrow Brewing Company in Albuquerque—the brewery behind the Native Land collaboration project, which benefits Indigenous causes—in the hopes of finding a distributor to bring their beer to Owamni.
During the Craft Brewers Conference in Minneapolis this spring, Bow & Arrow’s owners, Shyla Shepard and Missy Begay, visited the restaurant; Shepard indicated to me that with their recent increased production, they hoped to “make periodic shipments to a few select locations, including Sean’s restaurant.”
While Sherman is pleased at the positive response to his work furthering Indigenous fine dining, it’s clear from our conversation that his deepest passion is manifested in his nonprofit, NāTIFS, or North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. Within NāTIFS, Sherman and Thompson have created a nonprofit outreach center called Indigenous Food Lab, which functions as a venue for training and education, and also promotes Indigenous food access.
Everything from ethnobotany to traditional food preservation techniques falls within the Lab’s purview, and Sherman’s ultimate goal is for the center to replicate for the benefit of the 547 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. and beyond. “This year we’re planting seeds in Anchorage, Alaska; Bozeman, Montana; and Rapid City, South Dakota. And there’s other cities behind those, too. So we are just going to start growing and building and creating a support center to get more Indigenous food operations out there everywhere,” he says.
Indigenous Food Lab is where some of Owamni’s leadership and staff, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous, reclaimed the use of Indigenous ingredients before joining the restaurant crew. Siebert spent a month in the lab testing out ingredients prior to Owamni’s opening, learning their Indian names and how to use them.
“One thing that’s very clear about food sovereignty is that groups of people can be controlled through food access,” says Flanagan. “When you look at American history, that is part of what happened with Native communities. There is a reason buffalo were fought to extinction.” The opposite is also true. As Indigenous people are given greater access to the food of their ancestors, it doesn’t just heal individuals. It changes families, it grants access to healthy lifestyles, and it combats climate change.
If you ask Elena Terry, traditional foods are in the blood of Indigenous people—it’s not that they are being encountered for the first time. Terry is a contributing member of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the founder of Wild Bearies, a nonprofit network of seed savers, chefs, and restaurateurs. She is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation in central Wisconsin. “It’s about getting those ingredients into your home and letting your spirit feel those things. Those familiarities are instilled in our blood,” she says.
Woodland-region resources like cedar, sweetgrass, and berries are the staples of Terry’s cuisine, and squash is her favorite ingredient. “They nourish you differently, and especially when you have them in community,” she says. The Ho-Chunk do not have a reservation; instead, they mainly live within 14 counties near Wisconsin Dells, and food is a major source of unity.
Recently, Terry was selected to participate in a pilot program through the James Beard Foundation in an effort to support underrepresented groups in the culinary sphere. There, she met mentor and winemaker Tara Gomez, whom she describes as an Indigenous advisor (Gomez’s wines are served at Owamni). She is also a friend of Sherman’s, and the two cooked together at the Taste of the Tribes event at the 2019 Great Lakes Intertribal Food Summit in Michigan, an event showcasing tribal agriculture.
Witnessing Sherman’s ascent into the public eye, into personal and professional success, is not strictly surprising, though it is undoubtedly impressive. Indigenous food has always and will always be part of our culinary fabric. Practices that are trendy now—including foraging, paleo diets, eating seasonally—have centuries, if not millennia, of precedent within Indigenous cultures. With educators like Sherman and Terry, there’s more opportunity to center Indigenous people in these conversations, to provide wider awareness of and access to Indigenous cooking, and to uplift these culinary traditions into the future.
When I speak with Sherman, the James Beard Foundation Awards Ceremony is approaching; a few days later, Owamni wins the Best New Restaurant award, an honor that Sherman is quick to share among his team. As he tells the crowd to an uproar of applause, “We hope that one day we can find Native American restaurants in every single city.”
“I love Sean. He and I both were presenting at the National Native Nutrition Conference,” says Flanagan. Sherman moderated a panel about seed rematriation and also did a cooking demonstration at the conference. “He had reminded me of things I had totally forgotten,” Flanagan tells me, reflecting on the threat of residential schools during her childhood and the history of food being weaponized, like the mass killings of buffalo. “But he also has that beautiful way of expressing, and now we can use it for healing.”
Terry agrees that there is more work to be done, and that that work requires a comprehensive worldview. “When you look at our food systems, you can’t just look at one component. When you talk about Indigenous foods or landscape, many things can affect those sources—clean water, climate change. Advocacy needs to be multifaceted. It’s about being good stewards of the land. The stronger network we have supporting our food, the more sustainable it will be going forward.”
As the seasons change into warm and informal, Owamni will follow suit, opening its patio and moving from a tasting menu to family-style and à la carte options. After being successful in, as Sherman puts it, “playing within the kind of fine dining stratosphere a little bit,” he’s ready for passing plates, evenings on the patio, and even opening up the Tatanka Truck outside.
The turning of the seasons seems palpable as we talk. I hear him slowly exhale. As Sherman writes in his book, “Creating an Indigenous kitchen for the modern world requires attention to the cycle of food and our responsibility to nurture ourselves, each other, and our mother earth.” At this pivotal juncture in his work, Sherman seems deeply attuned to that wider picture.
Words by Paige Latham DidoraIllustrations by Angel S.
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