When we think about the cultural elements that have been endangered by colonialism, the language, history, and customs are among the first things that come to mind. However, Indigenous cuisine is equally at risk as any other part of the Native American heritage. Chef Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, experienced this firsthand.
Throughout his youth, he worked at a lot of restaurants, and a few years into his career, he noticed the absence of Indigenous dishes. And despite his extensive culinary knowledge, he knew only a handful of recipes that were truly Lakota. As a teenager, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There, he was tasked with learning the names and properties of different regional plants, which sparked his curiosity regarding the possibilities of locally sourced ingredients.
Hoping to change the food landscape, he started researching. Native American recipes, like most ancestral knowledge, are handed down from generation to generation. While he singled out which ingredients were truly autochthonous—as opposed to adaptations from the canned food supplied by the U.S. government through the Commodity Food Program—he had to figure out the use of each component on his own. His studies inspired him to create his own company called The Sioux Chef in 2014.
To fully decolonize the kitchen, he serves dishes that prioritize Indigenous-sourced foods native to this region, leaving things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken off the menu. “We might have something with, say, wild rice or rabbit or rose hips or blueberries,” Sherman told NPR. “These are all ingredients you can see just standing in the forest and glancing around.” Nevertheless, the cooking techniques are contemporary. “We're not cooking like it's 1491. We're not a museum piece or something like that. We're trying to evolve the food into the future, using as much of the knowledge from our ancestors that we can understand and just applying it to the modern world.”
His vision comes to life at Owamni, the restaurant he opened in Minneapolis and won a James Beard Award for earlier this year. Before that, he co-wrote a cookbook titled The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, which he sees as an introduction to the Indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories. “If we can control our food, we can control our future. It's an exciting time to be Indigenous because we can use all of the teachings from our ancestors, and apply them to the modern world,” Sherman explains. “This is an Indigenous evolution and revolution at the same time.”
Chef Sean Sherman, known as The Sioux Chef, shines a light on Indigenous cuisine and Native American ingredients.
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To fully decolonize the kitchen, he leaves things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken off the menu.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
His vision comes to life at Owamni, the restaurant he opened in Minneapolis and won a James Beard Award for earlier this year.
“If we can control our food, we can control our future. It's an exciting time to be Indigenous because we can use all of the teachings from our ancestors, and apply them to the modern world.”
Owamni: Website | Instagram
h/t: [NPR]
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