MS. GIVHAN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Robin Givhan, senior critic-at-large here at The Post.

Today my guest is Chef Sean Sherman. He's the founder of the company The Sioux Chef and with that is committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine, and he's also the founder and senior director of Vision and Strategic Partnerships at the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems.

Sean Sherman, welcome to Washington Post Live.

MR. SHERMAN: Thank you for having me.

MS. GIVHAN: That was all quite a tongue twister.

MR. SHERMAN: A little bit.

[Laughter]

MS. GIVHAN: I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your background, because so many chefs talk about being inspired by their childhood foods, and that's why they want to go into cooking and to restaurants. But you didn't really have that sort of idyllic childhood food experience, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what your experience was with food growing up.

MR. SHERMAN: Sure. So I grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I’m enrolled with the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe, and, you know, a lot of families on Pine Ridge don’t have a lot of money, including ourselves, growing up. And, you know, a lot of the foods that we had were from commodity food programs which were government subsidy foods like government cheese, government powdered milk, cans of things like beef with--government beef with juices, government chicken with juices, government pork with juices. And it’s just not the ideal diet.

You know, we did hunt. We did have access to a lot of fresh beef because we were on my grandparents' ranch, but overall, like, there's still not a lot of nutritional access on places like Pine Ridge today.

MS. GIVHAN: But you were drawn to the food industry, and, I mean, you’ve worked in restaurants for something like 30 years, which suggests that you started when you were quite young. What inspired you to go into--go down that road?

MR. SHERMAN: Well, I started working in restaurants at a very young age. My mom moved us off the reservation when I was about junior high-ish, and I started working in kitchens when I was 13 years old in South Dakota, in the Black Hills. And I continued to work kitchens all through high school and college and eventually moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I moved my way up rather quickly there to become an executive chef in that city and just started this chef career.

MS. GIVHAN: I mean, your experience in different kitchens, what did you--what did you learn from that?

MR. SHERMAN: You know, I was lucky that I learned a lot of farm-to-table kind of early on in the early 2000s. I became a very young chef, so I had to train myself. I didn’t go to culinary school. I just come from a generation where we still read a lot of books, so I got a lot of my education from books.

But really for me, it was a few years into this chef career where I realized the complete absence of Indigenous anything in that industry, and it really forced me on a path to try and realize and understand what my Lakota ancestors' foods were, what they were eating, what they're preserving, were they trading with other people, were they growing, what were they harvesting, and to just trying to understand why there weren't Native American restaurants everywhere and why there was so little knowledge of just Indigenous culinary out there in the world. So that's kind of the path that I'm still on.

MS. GIVHAN: When you started The Sioux Chef in 2014, how did you go about researching? I mean, could you turn to, for instance, family members and say, you know, what are some of our family recipes? Could you--how did you build that foundation of knowledge?

MR. SHERMAN: Some of it was self-taught. Some of it was right out of high school. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service, for example, and my job was to learn the names of all the plants and trees in the Northern Black Hills, and that knowledge base came in really handy.

So I started right away just looking at a lot of ethnobotanical texts and reading a lot of history, asking family members, but, you know, this research turned into more than just about the food and what were my ancestors eating but what really happened to us as Indigenous peoples, and it really became an understanding of the story of U.S. colonialism and the extreme violence that happens against Indigenous peoples in many places. But, obviously, the focus is on the United States and my own background, and there's just a lot to unpack, you know, because it's been a very violent, very awful history of how the United States treated Indigenous peoples. And that's what I try to utilize this platform is to really talk about the effects of colonialism and what we can do to try and remove that from our diets and our mindsets.

MS. GIVHAN: I mean, one of the quotes that you’ve often referred to, I think--and this is a bit of a paraphrase--is the idea that if you take away a community’s food, you kill that community. If you take away their culture, you kill that community. What has that meant in terms of the way that Native Americans have lived today in terms of their health and the community links?

MR. SHERMAN: I just think that there's so much to understand out there, because Indigenous peoples all over North America who were living in every single region of North America had extremely amazing diets, you know, because there was an immense amount of plant diversity. Agriculture was in a huge area of what is North America, and there were so many different food styles out there.

And during especially the 1800s when the United States becomes a very young country and becomes very aggressive because it realizes that by taking over Indigenous land spaces, it could commodify it, sell it, and the United States makes an immense amount of money over the--basically the theft of Indigenous land spaces everywhere, at the same time, you know, utilizing stolen Indigenous peoples from Africa to build everything.

And we look at the effects of what happens to Indigenous communities after the reservation systems, after assimilation, after boarding schools and just everything that happens to us, and we see a decline in our diet and our health. Some of our communities can have upwards to 60 percent type 2 diabetes, and all of this is just because of a lack nutritional access, because so many of these really rural communities in different regions around the United States are still surviving off commodity food program. They’re still--and maybe they’re only food source is a gas station for miles and miles, and, you know, it’s just something that we need to change. And that’s something that we’re working really hard on finding solutions for.

MS. GIVHAN: You talk about decolonizing food when--in your cooking. What is--what does that mean in real terms?

MR. SHERMAN: So part of our philosophy to be able to showcase what is true North American foods, what are Native American foods was to remove colonial influence. So we took away things like wheat flour, dairy products, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken, and just really focused on what were people eating in whichever land space we might be working with, because there's so much diversity out there across North America. Our study is really from Mexico through Alaska, and there's just an amazing amount of diversity.

Some large areas had a lot of really amazing agriculture, growing crops like corns and beans and squash and sunflowers and chilies, and basically, everybody had a sense of what to do with the world around them, how to utilize all the plants, all the wild foods, all the trees, and we try to reflect that wherever we are and try to make food taste like where we are and really showcase that North America's history doesn't begin with colonial history, but it begins with the Indigenous history. And we can do that through food. So I think that's something that's been really powerful for us to portray at the restaurant here in Minneapolis, Owamni, and I think that we're going to continue working on many different ways to showcase this in all the different regions of North America.

MS. GIVHAN: I mean, is it fair to say that it seems like you're using food to very, sort of stealthily teach perhaps an uncomfortable history at a time when it does feel like there's a pretty large percentage of the population that doesn't really want to engage with the complexity of our history?

MR. SHERMAN: Absolutely. I mean, I feel like that it’s opened up this platform to be able to have these conversations, to be able to utilize a lot of this media attention, a lot of the speaking engagements that I do, and just use it wisely, because, you know, people might come to see, like, oh, there’s a Native American chef speaking. But I really try to use that platform to talk about why there aren’t Native American restaurants everywhere and what was the treatment of Indigenous peoples and how is colonialism still alive, because you can break colonialism down to basically just extraction for profit and just placing control over separate areas. And we just really need to change that, you know, because there’s a lot of Indigenous cultures out there. And colonialism has affected many people of color, but we just--for our work, it’s really trying to focus on how can we make life better on reservations and for Indigenous peoples living in urban areas and creating that food access and really looking at and defining what does a de-colonized education situation look like, what does non-Eurocentric academia and education look like. And that’s a big part of what the work with our nonprofit is doing is really focusing on creating access to Indigenous foods and creating access to Indigenous education by developing a whole bunch of Indigenous-focused curriculum.

MS. GIVHAN: I mean, before--I do want to talk about the nonprofit, but I’d like to circle back for a moment to talk about Owamni. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Owamni?

MR. SHERMAN: That is correct, yes.

MS. GIVHAN: Okay. I mean, it was quite a risk when you opened during the pandemic, and then you became a James Beard Award‑winning restaurant, best new restaurant last year--or in 2022.

MR. SHERMAN: Yeah, last year.

MS. GIVHAN: I mean, that's an incredible accomplishment. I mean, why did you decide to open when you did, and what was the response?

MR. SHERMAN: The response was overwhelmingly positive, and, you know, the restaurant had already been pushed out because of the pandemic. The restaurant sits in a brand-new Minneapolis Park Board location. They built a brand new park along the river in front of what used to be an amazing waterfall that the Dakota people that lived there first called “Owamni Yamni,” which meant place of the falling and swirling waters. And we basically just took the short name of that area called “Owamni,” which basically is what is downtown Minneapolis today.

And, you know, it was really difficult to open up a restaurant in the midst of a global pandemic and trying to find funding to open up that kind of project, but we were able to pull it off. It was overwhelmingly positive, and, you know, I think the timing really worked out for when it needed to happen. And I'm really proud that we're able to have an amazing staff that's able to talk a lot about the history and the meaning of the food and the intention of everything that we're trying to do.

MS. GIVHAN: Can you talk a little bit about some of the dishes? Because I think people would, one, be surprised to know that, you know, something like sugar isn't native to North America, and so you don't use sugar. But the dishes are really mouth wateringly, sounding really good. It seems terrible to be doing this virtually, talking about a restaurant, but can you tell us about some of the dishes?

[Laughter]

MR. SHERMAN: Yeah. I mean, you know, part of our philosophy is trying to purchase as much as we can from Indigenous producers locally first and then nationally. So we get a lot of our protein like bison from places like Cheyenne River, which is a Lakota Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. We have two native fisheries nearby us, one in Minnesota, one in Wisconsin. We work with some native farms. We get a lot of things like true wild rice from the native tribes around us, and maple, and there's just a lot of amazing products. And we're using a whole bunch of Native American heirloom seeds that we nixtamalize ourself and turn into things like hominy and tortillas and masa for tamales and things like that. And we're just trying to really do everything not only to educate our staff and educate the customers but also use it for an education place for people to come work with us, to learn to see what we're doing, so we can help develop more Indigenous food and culinary operations out there.

But we just have a lot of amazing stuff, you know. So even though we don't have things like flour and dairy and cane sugar, we're using a lot of sweeteners like pure maple and agave and lots of berries and fruit and even some vegetables, a lot of plant diversity because we use a lot of wild foods. We even have insects on the menu and just a lot of game. You know, there's a lot of bison, deer, elk, rabbits, antelope. We've had beaver. We've had all sorts of lake fish, and we just try to make the food taste like a place.

So if we're here in Minnesota, maybe there's something with sunchokes and blueberries and rose hips and white cedar, and it's just stuff that you could see just standing in one space and looking around your region. And we try to have that same philosophy if we're doing foods that might come from Mexico or the Pacific Northwest or the East Coast and just really think about what foods are natural to those regions and what kind of recipe would really paint a picture to describe that region and some of those cultures out there.

MS. GIVHAN: I would suspect that as a James Beard Award winner, you get a lot of foodies making reservations there. But I was‑‑I read such a lovely review from some customers who talked about finally going to a restaurant where they really sort of compared it to like, oh, this must be what it feels like to be Italian and go to an Italian restaurant, that they really felt like they were seen. That was the quote. I mean, how do you balance those two things, to both educate but also to allow people to feel seen and to kind of wrap them in an embrace?

MR. SHERMAN: Well, I mean, I think it was really we put so much thought into how we were moving forward with this restaurant, the kinds of foods we were serving, the music that we played. You know, we opened up the doors for a lot of Indigenous peoples to come on board, and we've been able to retain a really amazing staff. We have a little over a hundred employees right now, and that grows during the summertime when we're really busy. And that's just the restaurant. We have a lot more going on with the nonprofit.

And, you know, it's just trying to create a safe place. We're just trying to be role models for what's possible, and, you know, like I said, we're not trying to cook like it's the past. We're trying to create something for the future, and we're just showcasing what's possible.

So if anybody knows much about Native American foods, fry bread might be the first thing that comes to mind, but we completely removed that because that really doesn't have much to do with our own cultures. And we have so much diversity, and there's so much more to share out there, that we're just really trying to give an opportunity to showcase what we can do with Indigenous foods and how we should be thinking about region in North America and cultures and diversity in North America and embracing those diversities instead of trying to homogenize everything.

So we just--you know, we’re very proud of what we created, and we’re hoping that people can come and try, but we’re a small restaurant. So we book out really fast. We’ve been basically booked out and full of reservations ever since we opened back in July of ’21. But, you know, we’re doing our best to find more ways to get food out there so people can try and experience.

MS. GIVHAN: Well, you had teased to this a little bit earlier. You are the founder and senior director of Vision and Strategic Partnerships at the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. Can you tell us a little bit about the focus there?

MR. SHERMAN: So NATIFS, or North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems for which is the long name, we’ve created a public-facing kitchen, nonprofit kitchen called “Indigenous Food Lab,” where we do quite a bit of work. We were doing a lot of food relief especially during the pandemic and right after George Floyd in Minneapolis, because we were just a few blocks from where George Floyd was murdered, and we are on the same street where so much damage had happened during that uprising. So at the height of that, we were sending 10,000 Indigenous meals out to 9 out of 11 tribes in Minnesota.

But we're really set up to do those two main things, which is creating access to Indigenous foods and creating access to an Indigenous education. So we're about ready to launch a native market. So our community here in Minneapolis will have a place to purchase Indigenous food products, and there're there's also an Indigenous classroom where we can teach a whole bunch of Indigenous curriculum, which is everything from food and culinary and cooking and medicinals and language and crafting and just really creating a safe place to steward Indigenous knowledge and which we'll be recording everything we do and placing on our website so people have access to those.

And then our goal is to replicate ourselves. So the purpose of the Food Lab is to work directly with tribal communities and entrepreneurs in our region to help develop more food operations, and we're already working to create extensions in cities like Anchorage, Alaska; Bozeman, Montana; Rapid City, South Dakota. And we'll continue to grow, because eventually, we can cross colonial borders. We can be not only throughout the United States but up in Canada, down in Mexico, and eventually, we can cross over. We can be in South America, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, any place we can, you know, place a pinpoint to help develop more Indigenous culture and steward that knowledge base and to just make it a safe place for future generations to access.

MS. GIVHAN: I mean, the way in which you're reaching out and the breadth of it is really quite incredible, and I'm curious. Being located in Minneapolis, which seemed like it was just sort of ground zero for so many of the issues related to social justice, racial justice, I mean, how did that impact your way of thinking? I mean, you mentioned the George Floyd murder and being so close to that and to those protests.

MR. SHERMAN: Absolutely. I mean, because this is a, you know--this is a--colonialism is a global issue. It’s something that’s happened to people all over the world. It’s not unique to North America, of course, because it’s happened across South America, across Africa, across India, across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii. And, you know, we just really want to create something that we can push back against kind of this European dominance that’s been set upon so many people of color and just really highlight the value of Indigenous peoples on a global scale and what people have to offer and just looking at the world differently, looking at food systems differently, and just figuring out solutions to get more food out there for people, because, you know, it really shouldn’t matter what zip code you live in and what kind of nutritional access you have in the United States.

But, unfortunately, that’s a reality, and we wanted to change that. Is there a way to detach money and capitalism from our food sources? And is there a way to create more community-based food systems like Indigenous peoples that had across the globe? Because Indigenous peoples everywhere have had basically this blueprint to live sustainably primarily with plants in the world--in their world around them, and there’s so much valuable knowledge from Indigenous peoples on a global scale that we should be doing everything we can to save, preserve, and just make sure that those knowledge bases are available for future generations, because colonialism has never actually expired.

You know, we're still seeing a lot of violence against Indigenous peoples in places like Brazil and beyond, and there's still a lot of work to do. But I think food is something that really touches people because food is the one thing that, as humans, we all have in common, and we just really need to utilize that language better and just be better humans in general.

MS. GIVHAN: I would love to ask you this audience question. It’s from Cori Aronow from Wisconsin, and Cori would love to know, how do you balance the needs to support and service in native communities with the increasing demands of your restaurant and professional career? Yeah. I mean, as you--your vision is so expansive and--I mean, does that mean that you rarely get to be in the kitchen anymore?

MR. SHERMAN: I'm not in the kitchen as much as I would like to be perhaps, because I do love cooking, but there is a lot of really important work to do. And I think that the vision of the nonprofit is something that's really going to be impactful, because that not only impacts our local community, but also tribal communities in our vicinity, in our region, and as we set up more pinpoints out there across North America and each one of those will be a regional pinpoint to help develop more of these solutions and more of just access to foods, more of access to education and just helping to build more and more as we grow.

So, again, like, I feel like there’s--because of the growth that’s moving so fast, we’re trying to really harness that energy and make solutions that will basically impact so many people out there.

MS. GIVHAN: So much of this is coming from private entities. What do you think the role of government should be in this, or do you think that government has done enough damage and should just stand down?

MR. SHERMAN: Well, I think part of food sovereignty is having more local control over food systems and less governmental control, because we can watch politicians argue constantly, which is what we do, and see not much happen, and the government is extremely mercurial, as we know. So I’m really happy that we’re able to have discussions with groups like the USDA, but again, like, all of these things can change in a very short time. So I feel like we--it’s really up to us as the people to build what we need to build and to move forward, and eventually, the government will follow.

MS. GIVHAN: Are you finding that as you talk to younger members of the Indigenous community that they are having a different kind of experience when it comes to food and culture and language than you did growing up?

MR. SHERMAN: That's my hope is that we're just trying to set up a foundation and a structure so these following generations will have access, so they'll know exactly what their native foods are, so they don't have to go through what I did in the beginning of searching, looking through books, talking to family members, talking to community members, and trying to figure it all out. So we're trying to put all of this information into a centralized space so people can tap into it.

And we just want to see--I want to see people to know what it feels like to eat an Indigenous diet compared to what’s usually out there, which is fast food and gas station foods and all of these just empty carbs, and even the commodity food program has a lot of work to do. And so there’s just, you know, a lot of effort that still needs to happen.

MS. GIVHAN: And when you are sort of dealing with the folks in the foodie world, are you--are the techniques that you use in the restaurant--do they--are you bringing in international kinds of techniques and solely focus on keeping the food honest, or how do you balance that desire to focus on specific ingredients with sort of the politics of the food, with the adventurousness of a chef?

MR. SHERMAN: I think that in the beginning days when I was first experimenting with trying to use a lot of these wild foods, trying to utilize cutting out colonial ingredients, that at first, I was still kind of stuck in the mindset of trying to utilize a lot of Eurocentric formulas and ratios and things like that. But it came very clear really quickly to just let the food kind of speak for itself and to learn how to utilize it literally from the ground up.

I mean, I love cooking. I love all of this innovation that's out there. I love culture. I love exploring other countries around the globe, but really the focus of this restaurant was to showcase what is possible for true North American food and true North American cuisine.

And, you know, we’ve created a really wonderful staff, really creative chefs. They’re doing a really great job creating new specials every single night and sticking in with this framework, and there’s obviously a lot of these health situations going out there and all these fad diets. But a North American Indigenous diet, we’re gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, soy-free, pork-free, and it’s just what--

MS. GIVHAN: You're very trendy.

MR. SHERMAN: --all these diets are trying to get to. Exactly.

[Laughter]

MR. SHERMAN: And it’s extremely diverse on top of that, which is really cool, you know. So there’s a lot--there’s a lot of fun to have and a lot of creativity that we will continue to explore.

MS. GIVHAN: So as you look to the future, what are now the biggest hurdles do you think for the next chef who would like to open an Indigenous-focused restaurant?

MR. SHERMAN: Well, I think resources is a really tough one because a lot of us that come from reservation life don’t come from a lot of wealth, don’t come from a lot of money. It’s really hard for us to open something like a restaurant which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s world and trying to carry a philosophy around with that too and how do you be anti-capitalism in a capitalistic venture. And there’s a lot of--a lot of thought that has to go into everything, and land access is also a huge issue, and finding sources for all these foods is also a huge issue.

So we're going to continue to, you know, ramp up demands and work towards creating solutions to get more Indigenous producers out there, and I feel lucky that with just two kitchens, our purchasing power is so big and we're able to spend tens of thousands of dollars towards Indigenous food producers. And we're only going to continue to grow that.

MS. GIVHAN: Well, very selfishly, the next time we speak, I hope that it gets to be over dinner in your restaurant. Thank you so much--

MR. SHERMAN: I hope so too.

MS. GIVHAN: --for joining me.

[Laughter]

MR. SHERMAN: Thank you so much. Philámayayapi.

MS. GIVHAN: And thank you all for joining us today, and if you’d like more information about upcoming interviews, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com where you can register and find out what’s coming up.

Thank you again. I’m Robin Givhan, senior critic-at-large here at The Post.

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