‘Eating Indigenously’: award-winning chef celebrates Native American cuisine in new cookbook

As a child growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s and 80s, Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota member and a James Beard award-winning chef, recalls pounding dried bison and mixing it with chokeberry to create a snack called wasná. He and his cousins would often hunt for pheasants and grouse, or harvest wild berries and Thíŋpsiŋla, a wild prairie turnip that’s a staple Lakota food. Sherman’s earliest memories of food were full of history, culture and spiritualism. His idealistic experiences of harvesting and hunting for food on the reservation were juxtaposed with the legacy of colonialism. Most of the time, Sherman and his family ate government-issued food such as canned beef, or blocks of cow cheese, which diverged from their traditional diet. It’s a tale that Sherman, co-founder of the Minneapolis-based Indigenous restaurant Owamni, shares along with other stories in a new cookbook that highlights Indigenous cuisines throughout North America. There was a time when the Great Plains, which ranges from the Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces in Canada to Texas, was teeming with bison. Tatanka, which means bison in the Lakota language, shaped the Native people’s religion and mythology. But much of the grasslands were decimated by farmland and overgrazing upon the arrival of European settlers, and the bison nearly became extinct from overhunting in the late 1800s. In recent decades, though, efforts to restore the bison to the Great Plains have allowed Native American communities to return to their traditional food practices. Published on 11 November, Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America, explores the spiritual, historical and cultural role of Indigenous foodways in the Great Plains, as well as a dozen other regions. Co-authored by Tlingit journalist Kate Nelson and cookbook author Kristin Donnelly, Turtle Island – named after the term for North America in some Indigenous cultures – weaves together travelogues, history, and contemporary recipes with traditional ingredients. In the cookbook, Sherman’s modern take on wasná pairs the traditional dish with an herb salad wrapped in anise hyssop leaves.In a nod to the turtle, which in some Native American lore has 13 scales on its shell to denote 13 moons, the book consists of 13 chapters to represent various regions. In the south-west US, the Diné, or Navajo, use dry-farming techniques to grow beans and squash. And in the Pacific Northwest, the Coast Salish peoples host an annual First Salmon Ceremony where they catch a fish that is shared among the community and its remains are deposited in the river to express their gratitude. Related: After centuries of trauma, Montana’s Blackfeet Nation turns to an old friend for food sovereignty: bison The Indigenous knowledge systems explored in the cookbook can serve as a blueprint for a better future, Sherman said, with access to healthy food that is endemic to the region and sourced in a sustainable way. Indigenous food sovereignty, defined as Native people’s ability to own how their food is produced and distributed and to have access to healthy, culturally appropriate food, Sherman said, can help Indigenous communities address systemic issues including health disparities. Native Americans continue to die at higher rates than other populations of diabetes complications, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis. During a time when Indigenous histories are suppressed by the Trump administration’s federal policies, including changing the name of the tallest mountain in North America from Denali in the Athabascan language to Mount McKinley, Sherman hopes that the cookbook will “give people a better understanding of the land that they live on”. “The US has historic amnesia when it comes to understanding its own history, especially around Black and Indigenous people. I wanted to highlight: ‘What does North America look like without the colonial borders?’” Sherman said. “Food is not this detached item that you just pick up at the grocery store to fill yourself up, but it’s actually something that was generations in the making with so much tradition and so much cultural aspect baked into it.” Food sovereignty in practice Just as Sherman’s restaurant eschews what he calls Eurocentric ingredients including dairy products, wheat, beef, pork, chicken and cane sugar, which were introduced during colonialism, the book pushes readers to view food systems through an Indigenous lens: one that draws upon heirloom traditions and Native regional ingredients. In the pantry recipes toward the beginning of the book, Sherman provides instructions on how to nixtamalize corn, which is an ancient practice from Mesoamerica, in which dried corn kernels are simmered in water with an alkaline solution, making it supple enough to grind into dough. Corn serves as a staple ingredient in the book, given its cultural significance throughout the Americas. Prior to colonization, tribes traded food items including corn, derived from wild grass in Mexico, which contributed to its widespread use. It is seen as sacred in many Indigenous cultures, with celebrations that honor the crop. Sherman hopes that the book helps people “learn some history lessons that they might not know, to think about the land that they might be living on currently,” he said, and to have “a deeper connection with more plant and protein diversity.” Along with corn, Turtle Island’s recipes also feature ingredients like beans, squash, tomatoes, fish, and game meats such as rabbit and elk. Nelson’s contributions to the book took her around North America to connect with Indigenous elders, cooks and farmers. Since much of the Indigenous knowledge isn’t documented, she needed to talk to people on the ground to gain a deeper understanding of the culinary traditions. For a section on Northern Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, she traveled to the Nunavut territory in the northernmost point of Canada, where Inuit culture was so ubiquitous that signs were written in the Native language, Inuktitut, ahead of the English translation. “It was really incredible to spend time with some of the elders and different culture bearers there who talked through the unique struggles that Inuit have experienced in Canada,” Nelson said. “Part of it has to do with the fact that food sovereignty in a place like Nunavut is inherent and almost synonymous with food security. The traditional harvesting methods are still, oftentimes being practiced today, not just in order to preserve those practices, but out of need.” While some Arctic towns have grocery stores, the food prices can be prohibitively high due to the costs of transporting the food from elsewhere. Every part of a hunted animal is processed, including using the sinew to make nets, and melting the fat into oil. Marine mammals such as seals, walruses and whales are a common part of the diet. Seal tartare, one recipe featured in the section, involved seasoning the finely diced seal meat with plants and herbs including wild onion, shallots and mustard flowers. Heather Ponchetti Daly, a University of California San Diego history assistant professor who specializes in Native American history, said that barriers to Indigenous food sovereignty include assimilation policies that sought to disrupt Native societies. The Dawes Act of 1887 encouraged individual land ownership and the growing of wheat. And beginning in the 1970s, a federal initiative called the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations introduced non-Indigenous foods to tribal communities, including cow cheese, canned vegetables and peanut butter. As an Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel tribal member who grew up on the reservation in California, Ponchetti Daly said that she can’t stomach the taste of peanut butter any more because she associates it with the food distribution program. “The old ways were not transmitted down to the young people,” Ponchetti Daly said. But chefs like Sherman, she said, are inspiring a resurgence in Indigenous food. Inspired by Sherman’s first cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Ponchetti Daly created a class on Indigenous food sovereignty at UC San Diego in 2021 that involved a cooking lab where only Native ingredients were used. Most of the food came from a grocery store and then she sourced the meat, beans and rice from Indigenous suppliers. The class, which is on a hiatus, had tangible results: Some of the students who were diabetic said that their blood sugar didn’t spike after eating the meals. “After eating Indigenously, they had energy to go out and attack the world, attack their other subjects,” Ponchetti Daly said. “That’s when the kids started bringing their own containers to take food home.” Cal Poly Humboldt has an Indigenous food sovereignty lab where students conduct research and have hands-on learning, which Ponchetti Daly hopes to one day replicate at UC San Diego. Over the summer, Ponchetti Daly flew to Minnesota solely to visit Sherman’s restaurant. One of her favorite items on the menu was lobster with refried beans and fried yucca chips. “It was amazing,” she said. “I never would have come up with some of the food pairings that he did for this restaurant.” Along with Owamni and his cookbooks, Sherman is also the founder and executive director of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), a non-profit organization that promotes Indigenous people’s access to healthy food. The Indigenous Food Lab, NATIFS regional hub in Minneapolis, is a professional kitchen, classroom and demonstration studio for Indigenous food knowledge. On its YouTube channel, the food lab features more than 200 educational videos about wild plants and cooking demonstrations from guest chefs. NATIFS also features Indigenous food producers’ products in their online market. The organization’s new program, Meals for Native Institutions, will manufacture healthy Indigenous food that is then delivered to hospitals, schools, and community centers in Native communities beginning in 2026. “We wanted to create a model to bake in food sovereignty by utilizing local and regional Indigenous products, and to keep those food dollars circulating in those communities,” Sherman said. He also wants “younger children to be able to see and normalize their own foods on their school menus”. Sherman is in the process of replicating a food manufacturing facility and restaurant in Montana, and also has seed money to start the same process in Alaska. In the future, he hopes his hubs will spread throughout North America, similar to the Indigenous foodways featured in his cookbook.