‘Eating Indigenously’: award-winning chef celebrates Native American cuisine in new cookbook

James Beard-winning chef Sean Sherman's cookbook Turtle Island pushes readers to view food systems through an Indigenous lens

As a child growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s and 80s, Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota member and a James Beard award-winning chef, recalls pounding dried bison and mixing it with chokeberry to create a snack called wasna. He and his cousins would often hunt for pheasants and grouse, or harvest wild berries and Thipsila, a wild prairie turnip that's a staple Lakota food. Sherman's earliest memories of food were full of history, culture and spiritualism.

His idealistic experiences of harvesting and hunting for food on the reservation were juxtaposed with the legacy of colonialism. Most of the time, Sherman and his family ate government-issued food such as canned beef, or blocks of cow cheese, which diverged from their traditional diet. It's a tale that Sherman, co-founder of the Minneapolis-based Indigenous restaurant Owamni, shares along with other stories in a new cookbook that highlights Indigenous cuisines throughout North America.