While Sean Sherman was in his 20s, it occurred to him how little of the food consumed today could be traced to his heritage. Growing up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he remembers occasional glimpses of his ancestor’s foodways—picking chokeberries, hunting pheasant—amid an expanse of government-subsidized provisions.

So he decided to change the menu, first with The Sioux Chef, a food truck and catering business, and then Owanmi, a restaurant in Minneapolis that quickly became the national exemplar of Indigenous cooking, winning the James Beard Award for best new restaurant in 2022.

“It was about putting myself in the shoes of my ancestors,” says Sherman about the restaurant’s “decolonized” approach. “I’m not trying to go back to 1491, I’m just looking at what was happening right before precontact, before disruption.” That means a menu heavy on wild game and heirloom beans, and lacking in processed carbs and sugars.

We talked to Sherman about bridging the urban-wild divide, creating more access to Native knowledge and products, and how his summers cataloging flora for the Forest Service in South Dakota’s Black Hills sparked his love of plants.

What was your relationship to ancestral foods while you were growing up?

We didn’t have much access to true Native foods because reservations are colonized concepts and are typically very oppressive. We had a lot of commodity foods and one grocery store that serviced the entire reservation, which is almost the size of Connecticut.

How did your time with the U.S. Forest Service influence you?

For two summers during my last year of high school and first year of college, I was a field surveyor. They would give us an aerial photo to plot out endpoints, and then we would name and age every plant in that circle. It was an amazing job because it was just hiking and being in nature. I was learning about so many plants and their great f lavors. I had grown up grabbing berries around the Black Hills and during this time started to scratch the surface of mushrooms and herbs.

What made you decide to leave the Black Hills for Minneapolis?

I moved to Minneapolis after college to work in restaurants. Five or six years in, I had an epiphany. I saw the absence of anything that was related to my culture, which set me on a path to figure out: Why were and are Native American foods out of the conversation?

Soon after, I took a job at a lodge near the Beartooth Mountains in Montana. You have these two big ecosystems up there, from all the mountainous Forest Service areas to the plains and grasslands. I thought it’d be a fun space to start to learn about from a culinary perspective.

How has that evolved into your current endeavors?

I came up with the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems to create access and distribution points, as well as focus on education.

In Minneapolis, we have a market space with over 50 Indigenous producers, a food lab where we’ve started creating educational videos, and a production space that makes items for distribution. We just finished an Indigenous baby food as a pilot project.

We’re now opening our first extension in Bozeman, and are looking at launching in Anchorage, Honolulu, and Rapid City. Each tribe has their own knowledge, so we want to create more pinpoints. Each outpost will act as an engine for job creation, for product movement, and for becoming a larger voice.

Follow Sean on Instagram at @the_sioux_chef to learn more about his work. Shop for products at Indigenous Food Lab Market’s online store at natifs.org, where you’ll find everything from gift boxes of chili-lime cricket snacks to Sherman’s cookbook The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen.

Cover photo of Sherman foraging for ingredients. Photos by Bill Phelps.

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