Sean Sherman and Indigenous Food Sovereignty

The chef

Sean Sherman, The Sioux Chef, is Oglala Lakota, born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, trained as a chef in conventional kitchens, and over the last fifteen years has built a body of work centered on pre-colonial North American Indigenous food.

The cornerstone projects:

Owamni (Minneapolis, opened 2021). A restaurant serving entirely decolonized Indigenous food: no wheat, no dairy, no cane sugar, no beef, no pork, no chicken — the staples colonialism imposed. Instead: bison, elk, venison, salmon, corn (heirloom), beans, squash, wild rice, foraged greens, sumac, juniper, sage.
NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems). A nonprofit working on Indigenous food access, education, and seed sovereignty in collaboration with multiple tribes.
The Indigenous Food Lab. Training program and food hub in Minneapolis for Indigenous chefs and food workers.
The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (2017, James Beard Award-winning cookbook).

What the project is, beneath the food

Sherman's argument is that "Indigenous cuisine" is not a museum exhibit. It is a living food culture that was disrupted by genocide, forced removal, the reservation system, commodity-food programs, and the loss of land access. The work is reconstruction, not nostalgia — figuring out what a contemporary Indigenous food system looks like on land that has been mostly stripped of its pre-contact ecology.

The first step is naming what was lost. The second step is sourcing what can still be sourced. The third step is teaching the next generation of Indigenous chefs how to cook from that foundation rather than from culinary school's default European basis.

What you can do as a cook

Read The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen. Cook from it.
Support NATIFS through donations or by attending events.
Learn what's Indigenous to your region — Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Pacific Northwest, Southwest, Southeast — and what's actually being grown or harvested there now by Indigenous communities. Source from those producers when you can.
Skip the romanticization. Sherman is doing actual work; it doesn't need spirit-quest framing.

Related chefs and writers

Brian Yazzie (Navajo). Chef, also Minnesota-based, also working on Indigenous food sovereignty.
Loretta Barrett Oden (Citizen Potawatomi). Earlier-generation chef; her PBS series Seasoned with Spirit (2006) is on YouTube.
Freddie Bitsoie (Navajo). Former executive chef of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian Mitsitam Cafe; cookbook New Native Kitchen (2021).
NĒPō Tribal Foods, First Nations Development Institute, Native Seeds/SEARCH — the institutional ecosystem around Indigenous food sovereignty.

A meal to try

Wild rice, bison, roasted squash, blueberry-juniper sauce. None of these were colonized into this region. They were here. They still are.

Who Sherman is

Sean Sherman is an Oglala Lakota chef from Pine Ridge, South
Dakota, and the founder of The Sioux Chef catering operation, the
NATIFS nonprofit, and Owamni — the Minneapolis restaurant that
opened in 2021 and won the James Beard Best New Restaurant in 2022.

Sherman's project is the recovery and contemporary practice of
Indigenous North American foodways, with an emphasis on what he
calls "decolonized" cooking — preparations that exclude
post-Columbian ingredients (wheat flour, sugar, dairy, beef,
pork, chicken). The restaurant Owamni puts the principle into
practice; the menu uses only Indigenous-to-the-Americas
ingredients.

The Indigenous-only constraint

The constraint is more interesting than it might sound. The
pre-Columbian American food complex was extensive: corn, beans,
squash, sunflowers, wild rice, pumpkin, sweet potato, peppers,
tomatoes (in the south), bison, deer, elk, turkey, fish, berries,
nuts, wild greens. A cuisine built from this list is not
deprived; it is differently abundant.

The Owamni menu demonstrates the abundance. The wild rice cakes,
the bison preparations, the corn-and-bean stews, the foraged-green
side dishes — together they constitute a complete cuisine that
existed for millennia before European arrival.

The sovereignty framing

Sherman frames the work as food sovereignty rather than food
nostalgia. The argument: Indigenous communities have the right to
define their food systems, to access their traditional foods, and
to determine their nutritional and agricultural futures. The
recovery work is part of a larger sovereignty project that
includes land rights, treaty enforcement, and educational
self-determination.

NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), the
nonprofit Sherman founded in 2018, works on Indigenous food
education and access. The Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis is
its physical hub.

The cookbook

The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (2017) is the canonical
contemporary Indigenous North American cookbook. The recipes are
organized regionally (Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Northwest,
Southwest, etc.). Each recipe is accompanied by historical context
and ingredient sourcing notes.

The book is worth owning even for non-Indigenous home cooks. The
preparations open up cooking possibilities that Western cookbook
shelves do not include.

Where the work is going

Sherman's work has catalyzed similar projects across North
America. Indigenous chefs and food activists include:

Loretta Barrett Oden (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), an earlier
generation of Indigenous food revival.
Crystal Wahpepah (Kickapoo), Wahpepah's Kitchen in Oakland.
Brian Yazzie (Diné), Intertribal Foodways.
Karlos Baca (Tewa/Diné/Nuche), Taste of Native Cuisine.
Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe's food sovereignty programs.
The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance broadly.

The Indigenous-food revival is one of the more substantive
developments in 21st-century American cuisine.