It is one thing to accept the value of a diet rooted in ancestral tradition — it’s another thing to live it.
To do that requires knowledge not just of what to eat and why it’s better, but where to get the raw ingredients, how to prepare them, who can teach you.
“There’s so much to learn,” said Sean Sherman, founder of the Sioux Chef, a company committed to Native American foodways. “It’s too much for a lifetime.”
Still, Sherman has become in many ways the “who” in the equation, determined to build a framework that will bring a “decolonized” diet to tribal communities that have lost the knowledge.
“We’re not trying to cook like it’s 1491,” Sherman said, referring to the year before Columbus reached the Americas. Rather, the aim is to reflect the diversity of today’s tribal cuisines, while reducing dependence on foods such as dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork and chicken, in favor of the indigenous plants of the continent, and meats like bison, elk and native fish.
An example is the dish Sherman will prepare as a guest chef at a Hawai‘i Food & Wine Festival dinner on Nov. 18: braised elk with wild rice, in a broth of chokecherry, a wild berry with a deep, rich flavor that is native to North America. Alongside will be crisp slices of Lakota squash, an heirloom variety that traditionally was dried on sticks over a fire all day. “We use a dehydrator,” Sherman said. “It makes it a little faster and a little more sanitary.”
Sherman is a tribal member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. He was born in South Dakota, but his hometown is now Minneapolis, where for several years he was a chef, trained in classic European cuisines. It was around 2009, when he was in his mid-30s and living in Mexico, that he became aware of how much closer Mexico’s indigenous communities were to their traditional foods, he said.
“I came back with very clear intentions.” His mission: a revitalization of the native diet, beginning with his own education, learning from ethnobotanists about indigenous ingredients.
“We started with the plants around us, creating meals that taste like where we are.”
Sherman has become an internationally recognized advocate, spreading knowledge of ancestral farming techniques, harvesting of wild foods, land stewardship, hunting, fishing and food preservation. “We are the stewards of this knowledge for this generation, and we have to take care of it.”
In August, the Sioux Chef opened the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis, a nonprofit teaching and research kitchen. Sherman and his partner, Dana Thompson, plan to take the model to cities like Seattle, Denver and Albuquerque, N.M., establishing regional learning centers for nearby tribal communities.
“It’s kind of like a hub and spokes,” Sherman said. The labs would work with tribal communities “in our languages.” The result could be farms, catering operations, restaurants or just better eating at home.
The indigenous diet is not just more healthful — “It’s better for your body; it’s better for your brain” — it also strengthens communities, as individuals work toward a common goal of feeding the whole, he said.
Eventually, Sherman said, the model could “go global,” beginning with Canada and Mexico. He said he could easily see it working in Hawaii, as well.
In Minneapolis, he and Thompson also plan a for-profit “decolonized restaurant” that would fit tribal ways into a modern framework.
For now, the food lab is making 400 meals per day as donations to community groups, in the process introducing preparations of hominy, quinoa, beans, wild rice, duck, turkey and fish.
“For us, as we get it out there, more and more, people get used to it,” Sherman said.
“At first people are, like, ‘What is this?’ After people try it, it’s ‘I want four of these!’ ”
NATIVE FEAST
With chefs Sean Sherman, Kealoha Domingo and Terry Lynch
>> Date: Nov. 18
>> Place: Maui Brewing Co., Waikiki Beachcomber by Outrigger, 2300 Kalakaua Ave.
>> Tickets: $800 for table for four; $1,000 for five, at 808ne.ws/native feast
