North America is an unusual country – you can go to a city and find cuisine from Europe or Asia, or anywhere else in the world, but there is no reflection of the country’s own indigenous past,” says Sean Sherman, founder of The Sioux Chef. “The Culinary Institute of America doesn’t even teach about indigenous food. American history has been rewritten, from the point the settlers came over, and its Native American origins have been all but wiped off the map.”
Growing up on a reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Sherman says he was raised on a diet of “oppression food” supplied by the government, such as tinned salmon and fruit. As tribes were moved away from their original lands, their means to produce their own food was limited and they became increasingly reliant on a less healthy diet, which they weren’t used to and which had a negative impact on their health, way of life and identity.
“Native Americans had lived on their own clean food for centuries, but the Europeans came and forced their diet on them,” he says. “Tribes were isolated by government policies and became dependent on packaged, canned and processed food, which were high in fat and sugar, as well as foods they had never tasted, like cane sugar and wheat flour. As Native Americans were unused to this diet, it has led to food-related diseases, like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, as well as tooth decay, which was previously unheard of.”
Lost generations
Sadly, it wasn’t just the diet which was lost, but the whole culinary culture and agriculture. Knowledge of how food was grown and prepared, which had been passed down through generations, was stopped in its tracks. With his company, The Sioux Chef, Sherman is committed to re-educating North America about its roots. He believes food will be a game-changer in reviving the health and cultural identity of the hundreds of Native American tribes still in existence, from South Mexico up to the Rockies.
When Sherman was 13, his family relocated from the Pine Ridge reservation, where there were few jobs and little money, to a touristy area in the Black Mountains. Sherman started working in restaurants, which served standard American dishes, like steak and potatoes. However, as many of the dishes were made from scratch, he honed his culinary skills.
Later, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to study, continued working in restaurants and quickly moved up the ranks. “I came across a lot of different styles, such as French and Italian, but never indigenous American,” says Sherman. “At this point, I had an epiphany. I was studying all of these different cultures, but knew nothing about my own heritage, so I started researching Lakota food.
“It was very hard to research as it was so fragmented and not much was written about it. I wanted it to be entirely traditional, not fusion. I wanted to understand the different tribes and create a model of indigenous food systems.”
In 2006, Sherman moved to Mexico, where the food has retained a more indigenous influence than a Spanish one. “Take away imported food like dairy, pork and chicken, and the diet is still the same: corns, beans, squash and regional foods,” he says. “It opened my eyes to indigenous cultures and I didn’t know what I needed to know, but I knew what to look for.”
Back from the brink
Fortunately, Sherman’s epiphany had come just in time: his great grandfather’s generation had lived traditionally, and there were still enough elders alive from whom he could mine knowledge. Added to this, he has dug through history, anthropology and ethnobotany books to find out about plants, medicines, permaculture techniques and agriculture and to understand the plants and flora of different regions.
Sherman realised that a single restaurant wouldn’t be wide-reaching enough to revive a culture, so, along with his business partner, Dana Thompson, he started a non-profit organisation, NaTIFs (North American Tribes Indigenous Food Systems). The plan is to open a network of restaurants in tribal areas, each with an education centre to teach people about traditional techniques, including food preparation, foraging for wild foods and seed saving. Sherman wants to pass on agriculture and permaculture skills as well as culinary skills because in those days it was everyone’s job to be involved with food production.
Each restaurant will celebrate the food of that particular area and gradually the model will be introduced to big US and Canadian cities. However, it won’t be expanded to other countries: the point is not to have a chain of restaurants, but to empower tribal communities to take charge of their culture and health once more. “By giving back knowledge we can reclaim the food systems,” says Sherman.
