Indigenous Food Lab

Sean Sherman, Chef, Founder, The Sioux Chef and co-founder North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (Indigenous Culinary Officer). Oglala Lakota, born in Pine Ridge, SD, has been cooking across the US and Mexico over the past 30 years, and has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of Indigenous foods. His main focus has been on the revitalization and evolution of Indigenous food systems throughout North America. In 2014, he launched The Sioux Chef as a caterer and food educator in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area. His first book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen was awarded the James Beard award in 2018 for Best American Cookbook and was chosen one of the top ten cookbooks of 2017 by the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Smithsonian Magazine. Chef Sean received a Bush Fellowship in 2018, and a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2019.

The Indigenous Food Lab will address the interconnected economic, environmental and health crises affecting Native communities by reestablishing Native foodways in a reimagined North American food system that sustains health, culture, tradition and the environment. By leveraging Indigenous wisdom, we can move away from current unhealthy practices such monocultural practices that deplete soil health, nutrition and create a more localized food system to support communities. 

I am working to reconnect Native Americans with traditional food systems to improve health, promote economic development, establish food sovereignty, and preserve tribal history and culture across artificial colonial boundaries. Through development of a new food system based around cultivation and incorporation of healthy, wild, culturally appropriate, traditional ingredients and agriculture, we are empowering Native people to use the power of their history and culture to counter the multigenerational impacts of colonialism and dispossession. To combat the systematic cultural genocide that has taken place here, we feel that we can begin to heal ancestral trauma through both the Indigenous foods themselves, and the knowledge of the history of this land. All of these native plants, specifically, are medicines that combat many food-bourne illnesses such as Type 2  diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and even tooth decay. We aim to tackle the root causes of deep, persistent problems – not just apply BandAids to the symptoms of health disparities and economic and environmental exploitation. We’re changing the economic and health forecast for Indigenous people and our planet. 

I am establishing an Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis that will house a Professional Indigenous Kitchen and Training Center covering all aspects of food service, research and development, Indigenous food identification, gathering, cultivation, and preparation; and all components of starting and running a successful culinary business based around Native traditions and Indigenous foods. We are working to unite Native people around our common food heritage and its ability to bridge the tradition of our past with the promise of our shared futures. Food access and justice are inextricably intertwined. By providing education and training that give Native people access to healthy, local, indigenous food, we can not only address serious issues of malnutrition, food-related illness, and economic impoverishment on tribal lands –we can also use our shared heritage to build bridges and build power within and between Native Communities and our allies. The vision of this work is food business development and economic empowerment that provides Native people across North America with access to healthy Indigenous food, preserves Native food traditions, addresses the health crisis on Native lands caused by subsidized commodity agriculture, generates wealth for Native communities, and connects and unites geographically dispersed Native communities around a shared heritage.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years being visible and part of many conferences, making a lot of connections in tribal communities across the country. Our target audience includes:

•           Native chefs, farmers, ranchers, foragers interested in launching or expanding an Indigenous Food-related enterprise.

•           Native people interested in learning about Indigenous foods, for their own education, as a base for food service work, or in preparation for starting their own food-related business in their tribal communities.

•           Food service professionals cooking for large quantities: chefs, casino culinary teams, school lunch workers.

•           General public interested in supporting a healthful, sustainable Indigenous food system.

•           Nonprofits and agencies serving the Indigenous community.

We aim to not only increase access of Indigenous foods to Native people, but also increase markets and demand for Native chefs/ farmers/ ranchers/ harvesters, promoting their products to Native and non-Native consumers alike with the intent to increase economic wealth in tribal communities.

My project touches on all three dimensions prioritized by the Prize. This project centers on elevating opportunities for Native Americans, who have been traditionally disenfranchised and stripped of their cultural traditions with resulting devastating health and economic impacts. This project brings attention to Native foodways, cultures and traditions, giving non-Native people an opportunity to learn and participate.

I was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as were both my parents.  I have been in the culinary world for most of my life, starting after my mother moved me and my sister off the Pine Ridge Reservation to a small town in SD called Spearfish. I started working in local restaurants there and around the Black Hills, and cooked all through high school and college, then made my way to Minneapolis shortly after college.  I continued working restaurants in the city and quickly moved my way into an Executive Chef position in my mid-20s and started my career as a chef.  I luckily worked in places that were working on farm to table, back in a time when there were only a handful of restaurants attempting to purchase directly from local vendors, and I’ve carried that model with me ever since.  A few years into my chef career, I had an epiphany of the path I am on now.  I realized that being a chef in such a vibrant food scene where you could find food from all over the world, there was nothing that represented the land we are currently on.

I’ve been on a journey to discover what my direct ancestors were eating, storing, growing, harvesting, trading, and sharing just a couple of generations before me.  After quite a few years of researching what exactly were Native foods, I started my business “The Sioux Chef” and focused on creating regional Indigenous foods utilizing products from tribal producers, Native heirloom agricultural products, wild foods from our region, and proteins alternative to Beef, Pork, and Chicken. I challenged myself to cut out colonial ingredients, particularly dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar.  I wrote a cookbook that was published late 2017, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen”, which won many awards including The James Beard Award for best American Cookbook. 

I traveled around the country a lot, sharing my research and vision of the importance of getting Indigenous foods back into Indigenous communities.  This allowed me to build many connections with tribal communities, academic institutions, culinary leaders, and thought leaders.  This was an important part of my personal growth and helped me with my own vision of what I could do to help.  I’ve been able to witness the varying degrees of Indigenous food knowledge across many communities, and see that the vast need for change is apparent everywhere.  I’ve been able to help influence many of these communities directly through speaking engagements, community dinners, and culinary classes along with indirect influence through social media and the use of our cookbook, which contains over 100 Indigenous-focused, healthy recipes giving readers an outline to prepare Indigenous foods while retaining health, culture, and regional relevance. After seeing the necessity of this everywhere, I designed my concept of the Indigenous Food Lab, a non-profit Professional Indigenous Kitchen and Culinary Training Center, to help not only build, but support an Indigenous infrastructure creating a center for Indigenous Education and a way to create and maintain the much-needed healthy food access throughout Indigenous communities everywhere.

The area I was born, Pine Ridge Reservation, has been the poorest county in the US since it’s inception with still today upwards to 75% of the population living in absolute poverty and facing many health and social inequalities.  The vision we have through the Indigenous Food Lab is work to create a system of change around not only the access to healthy Indigenous foods, but also the perception of.  Our plan to create a replicable system of helping tribes develop a focussed professional kitchen within their communities to serve Indigenous foods designed to be unique to the tribes, history, language and region, will we believe because of our tireless work over the past few years be extremely impactful.  Too long have our tribal communities been overly reliant on industrialized and federally appointed food systems at the expense low nutritional access creating rampant food borne illnesses and emotional distress.  Our focus is to help bring much needed change through focussed education and creating a modern sense of Indigenous foods by being positive role models.  Our model will help build the proper foundation  for future generations to continually develop stronger and more robust systems to attain true regional based food Sovereignty.

The success and attention from the work we have been pursuing over the past seven years I feel shows the immense demand for a better understanding of preserving indigenous cultures through food and true histories.  I feel blessed to have gotten so much attention with support of organizations like the James Beard Foundation and Bush Foundation have greatly helped propel my voice to reach larger and larger audiences.  Winning two James Beard awards in two years helped solidify our work to the professional culinary world and has created immense curiosity within both the general public and Indigenous communities who have been following our work intently.  More importantly knowing this work was and will never be about myself personally has helped to keep the message clear and allowed for the vision to grow both larger and more focussed on how to implement and continue to be a public role model.

The need to return knowledge and practice around healthy modern Indigenous foods is immense.  The negative impact colonial diets and education has had on tribal communities the past 150 years has created countless cases of malnutrition, food borne illnesses, mental health disparities, and cultural erasure.  Our main focus of working to preserve, protect, reeducate, and support modern practices of creating center points of access to Indigenous Education and Indigenous Foods has the potential to positively reinforce countless future generations of Indigenous Peoples.  By simply creating Indigenous focussed kitchens and training centers, we can build the much needed infrastructure in a very short timeline to directly impact tribal communities everywhere.

Food is cultural identity.  Through a disgraceful and unaddressed colonial history made by colonial powers like the USA towards it’s first peoples, we have seen two centuries of great losses of life, language, culture, wisdom, and food knowledge.  Our theory for change is to create a replicable and sustainable model to create more and more access points to create models of modern Indigenous food systems through Education and focussed and welcome trained and supported professional Indigenous kitchens.  Our vision is to help develop regional based food businesses in tribal communities across North America to directly impact the Indigenous communities and raise much needed awareness to non-Indigenous communities about the history and amazing diversity that our generation needs to become true stewards of to make sure we protect, develop, and celebrate these diversities.