On May 5 The James Beard Foundation will present one of only five 2018 leadership awards to Minneapolis-based chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge. The award celebrates visionaries who are working to create healthier, more sustainable food systems. Michelle Obama has won the award and so has poet Wendell Berry and chef Alice Waters. In making the award, the James Beard Foundation honored Sean Sherman’s work to revitalize indigenous foods. But as Laurie Stern reports, the Sioux Chef is more than one man.
Transcript
Marie: This week on Minnesota Native News, a celebration of all things Sioux Chef.
This is Minnesota Native News. I’m Marie Rock.
Story #1: James Beard Award
MARIE: On May 5 The James Beard Foundation will present one of only five 2019 leadership awards to Minneapolis-based chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge. The award celebrates visionaries who are working to create healthier, more sustainable food systems. Michelle Obama has won the award and so has poet Wendell Berry and chef Alice Waters. In making the award, the James Beard Foundation honored Sean Sherman’s work to revitalize indigenous foods. But as Laurie Stern reports, the Sioux Chef is more than one man.
STORY #2 NATIFs
Chef Darius Willard is pouring water over pieces of rabbit laid out in a braising pan. He’s been braising rabbit since he was eight years old. He used to watch his grandmother cook this way.
When I was young it I was like ew rabbit? But she said ‘this is what we lived off of when we were younger, when we had nothing
So Chef Darius says he learned how to cook the way she did. He grew up in Busby Montana on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Where he ate a lot of potatoes, and deer meat -- cooked by the sun.
You don't cook it all, you just flip it over and you let that cook for about, that's about two weeks as the whole process and everything and you can boil it down and everything. But my grandmas were very traditional. They always wanted to make everything off the land. … grandma was telling me when she got older, she said, well, as soon as soon as we go, a lot of the stories, the food's going to go with us. So let us our job to pass it down to you guys.
Darius moved to Minneapolis for work and by 2015 he was working with Chef Sean Sherman on the Tatanka food truck, serving healthy indigenous food around the Twin Cities. The truck moved up to White Earth and the Sioux Chef moved on. Now Darius works for the Sioux Chef’s catering company.
Dana Thompson: everyone calls Sean the Sioux chef and people just like that intuitively, but he never meant for it to be a moniker for himself. We consider everyone on our team to be a sioux chef.
That’s Dana Thompson, Wahpeton-Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota. She co-owns the Sioux Chef and has done much of the strategic planning that led to its current success. The catering company is just the beginning, she says.
I'm also the Executive Director of the nonprofit called NATIFS, which stands for North American traditional indigenous food systems. Two main focuses, one is indigenous food access and one is indigenous food education. my family is Dakota and Sean's family is Lakota and that's a micro local tribal affiliation. But you, so the nonprofit is so that we can look at all of the indigenous peoples from Mexico all the way up into Alaska.
NATIFS will open an indigenous food lab – a training kitchen where tribal people from all over North America and learn and share traditional, sustainable, healthy ways of cooking and eating.
Dana: So the way Sean envisioned this is that it's not a reenactment of 400 years ago. It's just a way to take away the foods that were not here before colonialism and be creative with those foods.
So no to beef, pork, chicken, wheat flour, refined sugar. Yes to bison and venison, plums, chokecherries, wild rice and so many herbs and vegetables.
Dana:
there's all sorts of, you know, indigenous tacos where we use corn based - like a little pocket and fill it with braised bison or smoked Turkey or Walleye from Red Lake. Um, and then, you know, there's beautiful salads and we make Cedar Maple Tea and Labrador tea and a lot of native people are going to know what Labrador tea is by the name of swamp tea and it's super delicious. Super Nutrient dense, packed with flavonoids and antioxidants and all of this food is literally medicine.
NATIFS training kitchen will try to buy ingredients from Native sources. That way it will promote and encourage fishing, foraging, and agriculture in tribal communities. Traditional ways of gathering food and, of course, preparing it.
Because once we get this indigenous food lab open, we're going to want people to come and learn about this stuff so that they can take that knowledge back to their own communities and develop their own businesses. A key part of what we're trying to do is to drive wealth into Indian country as quickly as we can.
(ambi Darius)
When I get older and everything, I do want to bring something back to my tribe.
That’s Darius Willard again, working on his braised rabbit. He says there’s no conflict between working as a chef at Sioux Chef and bringing skills back home to his community. In fact, it’s exactly what NATIFS aims to do. For MNN, I’m Laurie Stern
MARIE Story 3 New Restaurant
MARIE: The Sioux Chef is also partnering with the Minneapolis Park System to open a for-profit restaurant overlooking St. Anthony Falls. The restaurant is part of a large new park called Waterworks; a place to learn about the history of Minneapolis AND the Dakota history that came first. The new restaurant is expected to open in about a year. You can learn more about all the things The Sioux Chef is involved in by going to Sioux hyphen Chef dot com.