Sean Sherman (SS): I started cooking at home really early on for my sister and I because my mom was going to school and working a lot. As soon as I was able to get a job—when I was 13—I started working in restaurants out of necessity. I gained a lot of experience in the food world and, once I finished high school, I kept working in kitchens. Post-college, I moved to Minneapolis. I already had a lot of experience, so I worked my way up through the ranks quickly. After about four years, I landed my first executive chef position, and I just kind of took off from there.

When I first moved to Minneapolis, I began working with a lot of local, organic spots—which turned out to be really lucky. This was in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, so there weren’t a lot of chefs in the city that were working with local farmers to that degree. I got to be a part of that farm-to-table scene from the very beginning, so I was able to work in some of the kitchens that were at the forefront of that movement.

S: How has that movement grown since then?

SS: Oh it’s huge now; yeah, it’s all over the place. You can’t go anywhere without finding local produce and whole wheat and things like that. It’s really sprouted [laughs].

S: It seems to have become a selling point for a lot of restaurants too.

SS: Definitely. People are really starting to understand the value in it. It’s a big deal nowadays.

S: How about your decision to focus on indigenous American cuisine and cultivating traditional gathering techniques? What were some of your influences in coming to that decision?

SS: I got to a point in my career where I needed a breather, so I moved to Mexico for awhile. I was living on the Pacific coast in a state called Nayarit, and I was watching this group called the Huichol—the indigenous people from the hill region in that state—and I just saw so many similarities between the way they are and the way I remember growing up in Pine Ridge. The mannerisms, the sense of humor, the art and the stories were all similar; and it got me thinking. I had this epiphany where I realized I needed to focus on the foods of my heritage. I had spent so much time learning about other peoples’ cuisines, as you do when you’re learning to be a chef—French foods and Spanish foods and Italian foods—but all of a sudden it made so much sense that I should be doing native foods from America.

But when I started looking around for it, I realized there was almost nothing out there, as far as indigenous foods of America. It really became a passion of mine and I started trying to figure it out. When I finally moved back to the States, I immediately jumped into that project, which allowed me to spend a lot of time outside in remote areas doing a lot of research. I was living just north of Yellowstone in southern Montana, and studying my heritage and the migrational history of the American peoples, and everything that happened with the westward expansion of the United States. I was trying to answer a simple question: What were people eating back then? What constitutes truly indigenous food?

I spent a ton of time learning about wild foods and indigenous agriculture. I grew up in the Dakota Plains, and the Missouri River Valley had sophisticated agriculture happening for generations. The further south you go, the longer the agriculture has been happening. At that point in my career, I had designed a kind of food map of the indigenous food systems, just for myself, so I could understand all of the pieces and how they fit together. I realized that the map actually works even when you extrapolate it outward to the whole world but, at first, I was just focused on my own area.

There are so many different groups just within North America. If you’re looking at the tip of Mexico all the way up to Alaska and Canada, there’s hundreds and hundreds of cultures there. Some people had agriculture, some people didn’t; but every one of them had incredible knowledge of wild foods, as well as other plants that were used for everything from medicine to making clothes and dyes. There’s so much out there that nobody was really talking about, so I set off on my own path to figure it all out.

S: What are some of the goals you have for the Sioux Chef business model?

SS: Right now we’re very small—we’re just a catering company plus the Tatanka Truck. We did a Kickstarter in 2016 and we will be launching the restaurant in 2017, which will be called The Sioux Chef: An Indigenous Kitchen, and we’ll continue our mission of using homemade, indigenous ingredients from our region as much as possible. We also want to go all wood-fired and step away from petroleum, and just be as green as possible.

But our business model goes beyond even that. We’re in the process of setting up a nonprofit brand called NATIF, which stands for North American and Traditional Indigenous Foods. The nonprofit will focus on indigenous food business development and indigenous food education. So the restaurant will have a lot of indigenous culinary curriculum, and the end goal is to have multiple, linked indigenous culinary centers. We want to be able to offer classes in foraging techniques, wild food cultivation and indigenous agriculture, seed-saving, food preservation and cooking techniques, history and more.

There’s so much involved in indigenous food systems, but the food business model is at the center of it all: we’re connected to the growers, the hunters, the fishermen, historians and scientists—the business touches all of those pieces. A big restaurant with a training center in the city forms the hub which then connects with the tribal areas and other, smaller indigenous restaurant units in those areas that will be designed to crack the issue of limited food-access.

We want those reservation areas to have at least one place where people can eat indigenous food and where we can bring sustainable jobs into the community. Eventually, we want to replicate that concept all across the United States, and even into Canada and Mexico. We feel like there’s a serious need—all over the United States—for indigenous restaurant infrastructure that focuses on the food and culture of a given region.

S: What defines the food from the Minnesota/Dakota area in terms of ingredients and preparations and flavors?

SS: I’m Oglala Lakota and the Lakota people moved around a pretty wide swath of region—basically from the Rockies in the west out to the forests in Minnesota in the east, and south into Nebraska and north up into Canada. For the flavors there, you have a wide mix that reflects the diversity of the landscape: there’s the plains, there’s mountains and then Minnesota itself is really unique because it has all these lakes and the surrounding forests. And each region has smaller micro-environments, so it’s a really cool area to play with.

There’s a lot of wild rice varietals growing in the forests that act as a staple within the cuisine. Hand-harvested wild rice, versus the black, paddy-rice coming out of California, is a completely different product. There’s all these different kinds of tubers as well, and wild onions and garlics. Of course there’s the maple and other trees that can be sapped. In the plains, you had cultivation of all these different beans and corns and squash and melons for centuries. We even look at things like different salts being produced in the areas, fat production and sugar production by region.

So there’s a lot of variety actually, but it’s all about letting the region define itself by looking at what grows naturally there and what’s been growing there for centuries. The indigenous groups that had lived there and harvested there actually helped those plants to continue to grow well in their respective ecosystems. Our ancestors made sure that these wild foods were being properly seeded so they would grow back again the next year, rather than clear-cropping an area.

Each year, as we learn more, we can add more and more flavors and ingredients. We have a very small team, but one of the first people I brought on was an ethnobotanist, because that knowledge is such an important part of the culinary direction we want to go in.

S: In the Pacific, native food systems were almost entirely supplanted by colonial-industrial ones, which had adverse impacts on the health of Pacific peoples, the strength of their communities and their very identities, as defined by their relationships with the land. Can you talk about the importance of food to the cohesion of communities and the longevity of culture?

SS: Definitely. I believe that food is the central piece to a cultural identity. It doesn’t matter what your heritage is, the foods of your grandparents and great-grandparents have a special place as to who you are. The vast majority of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada had their food systems ripped away as well. We lost a lot of knowledge, so a lot of us grew up not having that direct connection of what constituted the food of our heritage—a lot of that had been almost entirely destroyed by the reservation system.

It’s really important to bring back what is truly indigenous food compared to what we call “reservation food,” which is comprised of commodity foods like fry bread—things that aren’t healthy at all and weren’t ever even indigenous. The counter to that is the food knowledge that we’re now using that involves the wild foods and seeds that were traditionally grown in these regions, the techniques that our ancestors used to process these foods, the animals that were traditionally raised or hunted and, in general, showcasing genuine indigenous food. It’s better for your body, it’s better for the culture, it’s better for the spirit. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world—there’s indigenous culture everywhere and indigenous knowledge everywhere. The food dates backwards and acts as a means for people to hold on to that tradition and that past.

It’s vital that cultures be able to embrace their true indigenous foods and make them a big part of who they are. It’s going to help preserve that culture. We’ve been lucky to hold on to things like languages and art and stories, but food was one piece that I was certainly missing growing up on a reservation in the United States. I see that same thing missing today, and we want to change that. I want our youth today to grow up knowing and appreciating Lakota food.

S: Going back to that idea of indigenous knowledge, we talk about how Native Hawaiians were able to support a population of multiple hundreds of thousands in the islands because of sustainable agricultural and resource-management technologies such as the Ahupuaʻa system. What do you think that we, in the 21st century can—and need to—learn from indigenous technologies and techniques?

SS: Hawaiʻi is an awesome example of how well precolonial systems could work, and there’s so much to learn. Mexico is another great example—the floating gardens around what is now Mexico City—some of those means were so sustainable. Think where we’d be if those traditional farming techniques hadn’t been destroyed through colonization. Or looking at the cultivation of corn that was brought up to the United States region from Mexico, through the Southwest and all the way out to the East Coast and up the Missouri River Valley and Canada—that same farming technique was so widespread and sustainable. People were utilizing their regional food systems and landscapes to feed themselves and to make sure those food pieces were always a part of the ecosystem. There’s so much to learn from looking backwards.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the government was handing out homesteads like candy, and people were just landing and setting up European farms and trying to grow European foods, and destroying all of this awesome native food system that was already there as they went. Looking at modern farming systems today, you can see the damage in the soil; the amount of chemicals you need to constantly apply just to maintain viable crops. But if you look at people who are growing small, indigenous gardens, or any kind of organic farming system, it’s going to work so much better. Each indigenous culture really understood the landscape they were in and were able to work with the land and not against it.

S: How would you like to see the food industry and agricultural systems change in the coming years as resources become more strained? What kind of policies and initiatives would you push for, particularly at the local level?

SS: I think that utilizing the local resources around you is really important, and making your own area work for the population that you have around you is going to be vital. Using local farms, driving for more permaculture landscaping with food edibles—I mean there’s no reason to have lawns anywhere because they serve zero purpose. We should be focusing all these resources on agriculture and developing a lot fewer golf courses. Palm Springs has like 40 golf courses across the desert and they’re in the middle of a drought. That’s just insane; it really makes no sense.

In Minnesota, people have built summer cabins all around the lakes. The lakes are these amazing resources, but we can’t use them properly because development and tourism has either destroyed or hemmed in our ability to access them. Imagine if, instead, they were once again used as food sources for wild rice, fish and wild tubers and all sorts of cool stuff that would grow there if it wasn’t for the development.

So we’re going to have to look at our natural resources and determine what’s excess and what’s not necessary and really confront that. We need to start figuring out how to move away from petroleum addiction and figure out how to live a cleaner, more natural lifestyle. There are a lot of hard problems to solve, and indigenous culture and ideas and technologies hold a lot of the answers.