Restaurants in the US serve up dishes and ingredients from around the world. But often missing from the menu? Indigenous foods. That’s why chef Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe, has spent the past decade cooking up awareness — through his widely acclaimed cookbook, nonprofit, and James Beard Award-winning restaurant, Owamni. Here’s what he had to say…

Q: Growing up, what was your experience with Native American food? 

I grew up on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. We had one grocery store that served an area basically the size of Connecticut. There was very little food access ... [A lot of what we ate] came from the USDA’s Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, so it was canned vegetables and fruits, lots of white carbs, powdered milk, and “government cheese.” Just all this not healthy food ... [But] we had bits and pieces of Native foods. One thing we still utilize at Owamni today is a berry sauce called wojape. Traditionally, we made it with chokecherries. We’d harvest those as kids on the reservation because they grew all over — it’s a real traditional food for Lakota.

Q: How does a kid subsisting on the processed food available on a reservation get to the forefront of Indigenous cuisine in the US?

As soon as I turned 13, I started working in restaurants, which I did throughout high school and college. [Then] I moved to Minneapolis and worked my way up into an executive chef position ... but I burned out and moved to Mexico ... I got really interested in the Indigenous community there — Huichol — because I saw a lot of similarities between how I grew up and [their culture] ... Something struck, and I realized I could name hundreds of European recipes, but I knew nothing about true Lakota food.

… I reached out to elders in my community, especially [my] family that spent their entire lives on the reservation. But they’d gone through boarding schools and assimilation, so they’d lost a lot of culture … I dug through history books and ethnobotanical texts … I started to learn which plants are really valuable and which are indigenous to the area.

... [My] work became focused on how we could return this knowledge back to our communities and have a deeper understanding of Indigenous foods … [That ultimately meant] cutting out colonial ingredients to showcase what was here — which is an immense amount of diversity in foods, proteins, and plants.

Q: When you talk about cutting out colonial ingredients, what does that actually look like?

We cut out things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken because those things didn’t exist here. [Instead], we focus on different animals, [like] birds, fish, mollusks, and insects. We use a lot of wild plants … When we’re making recipes, we [want it to] make sense [in terms of] the region and culture. So where I am right now — which is the Great Lakes in Minnesota — we might have walleye, blueberries, rose hip, balsam, highbush cranberries, and white cedar. You could stand in a single spot on the lake and see all those ingredients.

… [At Owamni], we really try to make food taste like a place. We’re not necessarily recreating traditional foods. We’re not trying to cook like it's 1491. We’re showcasing modern Indigenous food — and hopefully, planting the seeds of creativity in a new generation of Indigenous chefs to take it further.

Q: We’re nowhere near being able to go to any city and easily find Native American restaurants. Do you at least see progress in that direction?

When we started, there were just a few of us focused on Native foods: Chef Nephi Craig, Lois Ellen Frank, and Loretta Barrett Oden. Now, there’s so many. We’re seeing other Native chefs win James Beard Awards. We're seeing other Native restaurants, small catering operations, and food trucks appearing ... and it’s not just here in the [contiguous] US. I'm headed to Hawaii next week. We were in Australia earlier this year. And we’re connected with lots of people — chefs from Africa, from the Sámi people in Northern Europe ... I think people are starting to look at the world differently and are pushing away the values that European colonialism forced upon so many of us. We’re seeing the importance, as Indigenous peoples, of having a really strong voice in the world today.