A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, Chef Sean Sherman was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His focus is on the revitalization and evolution of Indigenous foods systems throughout North America. Through his activism and advocacy, Sean is helping to reclaim and celebrate the rich culinary heritage of Indigenous communities around the world.
Sean has dedicated his career to supporting and promoting Indigenous food systems and Native food sovereignty. His goal is to make Indigenous foods more accessible to as many communities as possible through the non-profit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS) and its Indigenous Food Lab, a professional Indigenous kitchen and training center. Working to address the economic and health crises affecting Native communities by re-establishing Native foodways, NĀTIFS imagines a new North American food system that generates wealth and improves health in Native communities through food-related enterprises.
In 2017, Sean published his first book with author Beth Dooley, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, which received the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook in 2018. He is also the recipient of the 2019 Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation. In 2021, Sean opened Minnesota’s first full service Indigenous restaurant, Owamni by The Sioux Chef, which received the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in America for 2022. Most recently, Chef Sean Sherman was honored as TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023 and in 2023 was named recipient of the ninth annual Julia Child Award.
Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Sean Sherman:
Growing up on the reservation, we didn’t have a lot of native food. I worked my way into becoming a chef at a pretty young age. I was like 27 or 28 when I became a chef, and ] I had a pretty good career in Minneapolis and worked for lots of styles of restaurants. And a few years into that career is when I had the epiphany of just realizing the complete absence of my own heritage in the food system.
Even growing up, I knew what was on my plate was not Lakota food. Now I’ve had a lot of press because as a native chef, especially during this time of year with Native American Heritage Month and Thanksgiving coming up, people ask “What was it like to grow up eating native food on the reservation?” And they want to hear the cool stories like, you know, I’d get up in the morning and hunt down a bear, or take down an elk with a sling I made, and we’d have a big feast and gather a bunch of herbs and shit on the way… That’s the story they want to hear. But in reality, we lived in a very segregated, colonized state, so I grew up primarily with the USDA Commodity Food Program. And so this is not a great program. It feeds us. We are happy to have the food. But it has nothing to do with our culture. It’s a lot of fruit, and bad syrups and sugar, and a lot of vegetables packed in high sodium, and a lot of empty carbs.
When I started the Sioux Chef in 2014, right away I started getting a lot of press. And the first few years was always the same question from the press. It was always like “Native American foods? Weird. Never heard of it.” So I’d have to explain that over and over again. And people didn’t understand the concepts of pre-colonial foods. What are pre-reservation foods, you know? So then I realized that there was a lot of history involved with this, a lot of education involved. So I started giving what became this talk.
Links:
North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS)
The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (Cookbook)
Owamni by The Sioux Chef (Restaurant, Minneapolis, MN)