Sean Sherman—Minnesota (Mni Sota Makoce)
Sean Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Oglala Lakota, eating what was available rather than what his ancestors had eaten. He spent years as a professional chef before a mid-career reckoning made the absence visible: there was virtually no Native American cuisine represented in the contemporary culinary landscape. That absence wasn’t accidental. It was the residue of policy. He has spent the years since building the infrastructure to address it.
The Work
At Indígena by Owamni in Minneapolis, the menu contains no wheat, no dairy, no ingredients that arrived with colonization. This is not a dietary restriction. It is a philosophical position made edible. What remains is what the land of this continent already knew: corn, squash, beans, wild rice, bison, walleye, serviceberries. Foods that fed people here for millennia before a different food system was imposed by force.
Sherman’s organization, NATIFS — North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems—exists to help Indigenous communities worldwide rebuild their food systems from the knowledge that was never fully destroyed, only suppressed. The model he’s building draws on a complete epistemology: wild foods, permaculture, native agriculture, seed saving, seasonal lifestyles, ethno-oceanography, hunting and fishing, whole-animal butchery, mycology, fermentation, traditional medicine, star knowledge, land stewardship. Not a cuisine — a civilization’s accumulated intelligence about how to live in reciprocity with a specific place.
Why It Matters
Sherman’s argument is simple and radical: food sovereignty is not the same as food security. Security asks whether people have enough to eat. Sovereignty asks who controls what gets grown, how it gets distributed, and whether it reflects the culture and knowledge of the people eating it. For Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, that sovereignty was not gradually eroded. It was deliberately destroyed.
The food system that replaced Indigenous agriculture didn’t just erase a culture. It poisoned the land those cultures had spent thousands of years learning to tend. Sherman wants Indígena by Owamni replicated across the country. He knows it may not happen in his lifetime and is building toward it anyway. There are currently no Indigenous restaurants in all of Manhattan—this island, which the Lenape called Mannahatta, has not a single establishment rooted in the foodways of the people who tended it for thousands of years before European contact.
Support This Work
Sean Sherman’s organization, NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), supports Indigenous food sovereignty through education, research, and community programs. → NATIFS
Indígena by Owamni, Sherman’s James Beard Award-winning restaurant in Minneapolis, serves a menu rooted entirely in pre-colonial Indigenous ingredients. → Indígena by Owamni
Turtle Island: Original Recipes and Stories from the People of Turtle Island is available wherever books are sold.
New York City has no brick-and-mortar Native American restaurant. The closest is Buffalo Jump, Leo Cordier’s catering company serving pre- and post-colonial Indigenous foods. → Buffalo Jump
Read the full essay → What the Land Already Knew — On Sean Sherman, stolen land, and the question of what we owe a place
