Oglala-Lakota chef Sean Sherman talks about his efforts to draw attention to modern, regional Native American food.
In the January 2016 issue of C&I, we spoke with Minnesota-based chef Sean Sherman (Oglala-Lakota). In the interview, Sherman shared how he was raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, worked his way through restaurant kitchens, and came to researching and advocating for pre-European-contact Native American foods. Now, under the name The Sioux Chef, he is part of movement that is passing up oppression foods such as fry bread in favor of cuisine representative of a pre-European-contact diet based on local and seasonal ingredients. In Sherman's case, the focus has been on pre-contact foods of the Oglala-Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwe tribes. The emphasis, he said in the interview, is education through practice. He has gone into schools and cultural centers, conducted cooking demonstrations, and rolled out his own food truck, the Tatanka Truck, in cooperation with Minneapolis’ Little Earth of United Tribes community.
“I really feel like food is really kind of the center to really kind of be a cultural identity for people,” he told C&I during our conversations. “And for a lot of the Native communities to have lost their traditional food systems, like 100 years ago, it really took a hit on the culture itself, because once we lost utilizing our traditional food systems on a daily basis, it really affected a lot of us. We’re still kind of recovering. But I think it’s still there. I think we can still pull it back, and it’s going to be strong, and people are going to be really interested to want to try Native American foods and understand it more. I think it’s going to be good.
“It takes a little bit of explanation, but then people get it right away. Then they’re always like, ‘Why hasn’t this been done before? Why aren’t there a whole bunch of Native American restaurants all over the place?’ ”
He also noted: “It’s an extremely popular movement coming around, and I think once we’re able to get some food trucks and restaurants out there, we should be able to see a lot of Native restaurants across the country that focus on the regions. It would make the American landscape so much more interesting because it just changes so dramatically as you travel across the country. It’d be great to experience the foods of all these different regions and peoples.”
More attention was brought to the movement this week when Sherman was featured in a video on the .Mic website. In it, the chef expounds on his mission and the mission of others in Native American communities to effect change. It’s worth your time.
