Chef authors cookbook about Indigenous cuisine of North America

Sean Sherman is a chef known for embracing Native or Indigenous ingredients into his cuisine. His James Beard award winning restaurant, Owamni in Minneapolis, Minnesota, showcases modern Indigenous foods, made only from ingredients that are regionally available to him. Now, he has written a cookbook that looks to find and tell the stories of indigenous food from other areas of North America. Arthur Jones spoke to him about his journey, and how it felt to write about his home, the Great Plains.

Arthur Jones: So Sean, tell me a little bit about your time growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Sean Sherman: I was born in the town of Pine Ridge in 1974, and we spent a lot of time out that way. My grandparents had a cattle ranch, kind of close to Batesland, South Dakota, not too far from where Gordon, Nebraska is. And I just really treasure those memories growing up on the plains and just running around, as you know, partially feral kids.

Jones: Growing up while you were there, did you eat any traditional Oglala Lakota cuisine, or was it mostly, I think the term you used in in the cookbook is more like [a] prepackaged type of thing?

Sherman: There wasn't that much when it came to like, true Lakota Indigenous food around us growing up, because, largely, like a lot of people on the reservation, we were living off of commodity food program foods. We had a single grocery store in Pine Ridge that serviced an area the size of Connecticut, almost right?

But we had a few things. We grew up hunting, so we had a lot of grouse and pheasant and deer, antelope, sometimes rabbits, turkeys, things like that. We harvested a wild prairie turnip that we call Thíŋpsiŋla [pronounced timsula]. And we still see a lot of those prairie turnips in a lot of Lakota family homes. And we harvested a lot of choke cherries, too that just kind of grew here and there. We had some growing around the shelter belts near us.

Jones: What made you decide to change to pursuing Indigenous cuisine and only using ingredients that are native to North America?

Sherman: One day I kind of had an epiphany. I was living in Mexico for a little while after some kind of grueling chef jobs in the Twin Cities, in Minneapolis, and I just kind of took a little break, moved down to a beach town on the Pacific coast in the state of Nayarit, and was hanging out. I got to become really curious about the Indigenous community down there who were the Huichol, and I started researching them a lot because they had a lot of commonalities that I saw just growing up in Lakota territory. Because they had really beautiful bead work. They had really beautiful and strong mythology and religion stories about plants and animals and all of these spiritual beings. And I just saw a lot of connection, you know, and then something just kind of woke up in me where I just realized that I had been studying all this other food from all over the world, and I knew many different, and did many different European recipes, from many different European countries, in European languages. And I realized that I knew very little about my own ancestry and heritage when it came to like, what were my ancestors eating.

So I just kind of set on a path to start to learn as much as I could about Indigenous foods. You know, starting where I grew up, in the Great Plains region, but eventually, kind of grew into looking at other cultures and other regions. Because eventually I moved around, and I started doing this work in Minnesota, where I currently still live today, and started researching a lot of tribes there. And you know now, we just finished this whole book that looks at all of North America, from Mexico through Alaska, kind of erasing these colonial lines, and just looking at this vast tapestry of diversity that lies out there.

Jones: Is it alright to say, then that the Turtle Island, the cookbook, the seeds were started in that time in Mexico, the sort of wanting to explore the Indigenous food ways is the sort of the term I saw you use a lot?

Sherman: Yeah, because I just saw that commonality as Indigenous peoples to North America, and I realized that there was so much that we could be learning from and for myself, I was just curious, because, like, I didn't grow up really knowing what Lakota food was like. We had fry bread, but I knew it something was bigger than that, just because, you know, fry bread comes from wheat flour, which wheat flour wasn't indigenous to North America, for example.

In order to highlight modern indigenous foods, I just cut away colonial things that were introduced to the Americas. So I took away beef and pork and chicken, dairy products, wheat flour, cane sugar-and just focused on native agricultural pieces with all these varieties of corns and beans and squash and sunflowers and chilies and so forth. A huge education of the wild plants around us and utilizing a ton of wild flavors in our cuisine and just looking at other protein options. You know, what other birds and animals and fish were around us that were utilized.

And so, it kind of opens up for a lot more excitement of just how we can live more sustainably, and how we can have a lot more flavor, and just how we can really see regional foods out there everywhere.

Jones: You being from the Great Plains, how did it feel to write that section versus, say, the section on the Great Lakes region, a place you moved to?

Sherman: I loved the Great Plains section, just because I poured my heart into that area too. And like some of those recipes, like the soup recipe with the dried bison and the thíŋpsiŋla [pronounced timsula] prairie turnips like that, just tasted like home. Because it just tasted like growing up on plains, you know, and running around those grasslands as a kid. And so for me, that was really special. And you know, it was also a challenge, like, how do I talk about other people's regions without explaining it to them, but just allowing their perspectives to come through? Because I didn't want to mansplain to everyone. I wanted people to have this opportunity and to have their voices come through. And it was really amazing working with my two co-authors, Kristin Donnelly and Kate Nelson, and using Kate's journalistic approach to really help pull some of those stories outwards, too, you know. And so, it was a lot of work to pull all this together, because, you know, North America is a huge area, and where do we start? All we could do is scratch the surface of how much story there is to tell out there. But I think it opens up a lot of doors. And I'm very, I'm very proud of the work.

Jones: Sean Sherman, author of Turtle Island and the Sioux chef. His book Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous People of North America, is out now. I really appreciate you talking with me.

Sherman: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me and just happy to share these stories.