PODCAST: The Sioux Chef's Seat at the Table

Solveig Rennan
Welcome to Under-Told: Verbatim. I’m Solveig Rennan for the Under-Told Stories Project. We report from all over the world for PBS NewsHour on the consequences of poverty and the work of change agents addressing them. We’ve done extended interviews with hundreds of experts and people making a difference in their communities. In this podcast, we’re revisiting those Under-Told stories so you can hear changemakers around the world in their own words. This is Under-Told: Verbatim.

Minneapolis is a culinary city. In one block you can eat jerk chicken at a Jamaican dancehall, grab a farm to table brunch and have Greek, Malaysian or Mexican food for dinner. But the food with the longest history here doesn’t have a seat at the table.

Colonialism erased indigenous traditions like music, language and art. But the loss of native culinary heritage has starved generations of their physical health and cultural identity

Sean Sherman
around here. You can’t get more Minnesotan than those foods cuz they’ve been here longer than Minnesota was a concept

Solveig Rennan
While training as a chef Sean Sherman learned French, Italian and other Western styles of cooking, but he had no way of knowing what his ancestors ate. So he decided to find out himself. His cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” won a James Beard award in 2018. Today, he and his partner, Dana Thompson, run The Sioux Chef, a project to revive indigenous traditions in the kitchen and encourage cheaper and healthier eating for everyone.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
What started you down this path?

Solveig Rennan
That’s Fred, the reporter

Fred de Sam Lazaro
of going from being someone who just worked in a restaurant because that’s where you landed, to just support yourself, to embracing food.

Sean Sherman
Well, a lot of it was,

Solveig Rennan
that’s Sean, the chef,

Sean Sherman
for me personally, you know, growing up in the restaurant industry starting in restaurants when I was 13. Moving to Minneapolis, after coming from South Dakota, and working my way up into an executive chef position and playing chef for a few different restaurants and really growing a lot, educating myself in a lot of cuisines. I didn’t go to cooking school, so it was just a lot of self education, and trying to figure out how to make all these foods. So I learned a lot of, of course, European foods, you know, Spanish, Italian, French, you name it. And partway into my chef career, I just kind of had this epiphany moment of, you know, realizing that Minneapolis was a cool food scene, there was food from all over the place and the neighborhood I lived in, you can find it all up just a few blocks away, you know, just all this different cuisines you could choose from and it just all of a sudden I realized like there was no native foods, I just realized the utter absence of indigenous perspective anywhere in the culinary world. So because there’s just nothing that represented the land we were actually standing on. And having been born on a tribal community and being an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. I just thought about, like, how much was lost, you know, I thought about like, what I didn’t know, because I started looking at myself and I knew very little about Lakota recipes, you know, and I started looking around and trying to figure out, you know, what were my Lakota ancestors eating and storing away? What were they growing? How are they getting oils and salts and fats and sugars and things like that, and just trying to figure out all of this from a culinary perspective. So it took me quite a few years of just researching but it really became a passion because I saw the as I learned about my historical and ancestral foods, I also was learning a lot of history and realizing like how much damage was done to indigenous communities across North America. And of course around the world when you look at a colonial history everywhere, but just seeing like, by understanding how much was lost, I was able to see like how much we could build and put back together.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Was there any particular trigger for that? It was it was it a gradual kind of realization?

Sean Sherman
after one particularly hard restaurant, job, chef job, I moved down to Mexico. And I lived in this tiny little beach town on the Nayarit coast. And I became really interested in the indigenous peoples that were living there and selling a lot of their art. They were the Huicholes and look really starting, I just, like started researching and read about the Huichol and their history and, you know, thinking about their food. And then that’s kind of when it dawned on me really, it was just like, oh, because there was so much commonality between these people and where I grew up on the on the Pine Ridge, around Lakota people and my family. I can see it in the mannerisms and the humor, I can see it and I just thought like, oh, we’re just like really distant cousins basically when it comes down to it, you know, through space and time, of course, but really just realizing like we had this deep connection as indigenous peoples and I started thinking about that. Then I started thinking about I wanted to learn more about my own ancestry, but there was very little knowledge and information on indigenous foods anywhere it seemed to be completely invisible for the most part. So it just sent me on a path to try and understand as much as possible, you know, in digging through all this historical archaeological, ethno botanical, and just looking for a commentary perspective and everything and trying to build my own vision of what I thought indigenous foods could and should be.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
You didn’t have any kind of formal education, certainly in the culinary arts.

Sean Sherman
No, I did not. I went to school in Spearfish, South Dakota, Black Hill State University and my focus is more business orientated. So, cooking was something I just had always done because I started working on basically out of necessity because coming from reservation, my mom was just raising my sister and myself and I was the oldest and I started working right away. So I just jumped into restaurants and had a really good strong work ethic. So I excelled at whatever I did in the kitchens and just moved my way up. And after moving all through high school and college, working kitchens, and then moving to a city in Minneapolis, was able to grow really fast.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
So walk us briefly through some of the steps, you know, where did you then go to uncover and discover what we, you know, what you now know, and talk about the evolution of the Sioux chef.

Sean Sherman
So I started really researching the plants because in my mind, I knew that my indigenous ancestors and assumingly all, in all indigenous communities had a really strong connection with the plants around them. And part of it was identifying you know, just what was the education for indigenous peoples which was basically thousands of generations of knowledge being handed down orally member family member after family member giving them the tools to live sustainably with plants around them. So there was so much with the plant knowledge was the biggest key to it because not only was it the food, but it was also the medicine and the shelter, and all those pieces but being able to understand there’s like all of this plant diversity that’s just completely underutilized by the Western diet, you know, around us, especially here in North America, where we see so much, so much, you know, so many plants out there. And of course, I started digging through a lot of historical texts trying to understand any kind of first accounts but also realizing those accounts were usually very skewed. Because usually they were from a military point of view or religious point of view. And they were very much you know, promoting their their kind of colonial take, and also realizing how short in history a lot of this stuff happened to was a big part of it, you know,

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Wasn’t that long ago

Sean Sherman
Was not long ago because for me, I was born in 1974. So I think 100 years before my birth in 1874. My Lakota ancestors were still living on the plains traditional, and had the full extent of the knowledge that they have always had at that point in time. They hadn’t discovered gold in the Black Hills until 1876. Then things go really bad really quickly over a few, quite a few short years. And there’s many battles between the Lakota and the United States. So, like my great grandfather was born in 1850s. And he was 18, during the Battle of Little Bighorn against general Custer. So I think about like how much information and knowledge was lost in such a short time period. And where did that happen? You know, so it started just looking at how assimilation efforts and boarding school systems really broke up a lot of our knowledge as indigenous people and really separated us even further from our food systems. Even though we’d already lost a lot of land at that point, we’d already lost a lot of our resources. But the dismantling of our education system was probably the most damaging piece to it. So that’s where I became really focused on trying to, you know, really try to try to figure out what was lost so we can build that back. So you know, asking a lot of elders any memories they had, but I really wish a lot of this work had started in my parents generation because there would have been a lot more elders alive with more direct memories because some of the elders at that generation could have remembered directly. A lot of this before it really went bad, you know, before the the commodity food program and things like that.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Can you talk briefly about that, about the corruption of the diet, if that’s the right word for it, that came with, with settlers with colonization?

Sean Sherman
Personally, like I grew up with the commodity food program, you know, which was a program started in the 1930s to help poor families and which included a lot of reservations. And then you know, today we still have the, you know, a form of that, and a lot of families still surviving off of government commodity foods, but it’s, you know, unfortunately, it’s never been much of a nutritional program. So we see a lot of food and health disparity especially among amongst tribal regions, so we can see what happens to entire generations at this point when this is their sole source or their main source of nutrition. And you’re using a food that is just government staples of, you know, wheat flour and corn product and over saturated fats and just over-processed foods in general, and the immensity when you have a community with over 60% type two diabetes today. You know, there’s something wrong with the food system. So looking at how healthy indigenous foods were in the past, and seeing that we could actually bring a lot of health back through foods was a big part of the drive for what we do today. Because indigenous diets are just so clean. They’re hyper local and hyper regional, because we’re using an immense amount of plant diversity, a lot of wild game a lot of seeds and nuts. But for indigenous peoples, especially here in North America, like we didn’t have to worry about obesity or heart disease or type two diabetes or even tooth decay because of the low glycemic level of our foods. So a lot of this work is trying to make something right that is awfully wrong still today. And it’s hard because a lot of these families who have been using a lot of these staples as their as their like comfort base of foods, and then supplementing that with gas station foods or fast foods and when that’s all they have access to. So we really want to create a system that can create access to healthy indigenous foods that would be particular to these people all across the board.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
So you’ve had your epiphany, you’ve discovered that this can be a means of restoring health. And so you start evolving this idea called the Sioux chef, tell us a little bit about how that that moniker came to be and talk about the evolution of your larger business model if that’s the right expression.

Sean Sherman
So I started the company as Sioux chef in 2014. But it had taken quite a few years to get to that point. And I wanted to do something that was really featuring regional indigenous foods and cutting out colonial ingredients that didn’t exist here not that long ago. So right away removing dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, just processed foods in general even removing beef, pork and chicken and just looking at like what were the diets of those particular regions. So starting the the sushi chef with that focus of just trying to focus on just this hyper local area to really represent what were the, you know, searching for the indigenous pantries basically, and trying to make see how many foods we can come up with those items, looking for corns and beans and squash and sunflower. And I really at the beginning, just wanted to start a restaurant because I thought it would be a great platform to be able to bring so much awareness to this out there. And part of what we also wanted to do was support indigenous food producers. So I wanted to find as many indigenous food producers as possible so we could purchase from them first. And then I was purchasing from local growers around us who were happening to growing a lot of indigenous food because it’s all around us, you know, get sunchokes and maple and dandelions and all sorts of kind of all sorts of stuff. And we weren’t trying to recreate a cuisine that happened in, say, 1491 we were just trying to understand as much as we could from our ancestors and the knowledge that they had to be able to make this food authentic, but also knowing we’re in a different world now. And there’s a lot of different plant species around us that weren’t there before. So looking at foods with an indigenous perspective, and really thinking about all of especially as wild plants, like instead of trying to say like, I can’t use that, because it’s not indigenous. It’s accepting it because what’s the purpose of this plant? You know, is it edibles medicinal, can you do something with it, and usually it’s all three. So using dandelions and purse lanes and anything that might have been introduced later, we could, you know, absorb that still into the diet, but just keeping it really clean. My partner here, Dana Thompson. You know, she came on really early, and we just started we saw the immense potential of course of what we could do and we just started you know, jumping into it, and then we’re right on the cusp of getting ready to open up our first big brick and mortar this indigenous Food Lab concept we have to help bring more awareness and really do this right.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Pick it up from there, Dana, you joined this initiative, what have been the biggest challenges? What’s exciting and what’s challenging at the same time?

Dana Thompson
Well, we immediately started getting a lot of attention.

Solveig Rennan
That’s Dana Thompson, Sean’s partner and chief operating officer of the Sioux chef brand

Dana Thompson
and started to get a lot of attention from tribal communities as well. were popping up on their radar and getting emails and almost immediately a challenge was that we weren’t able to visit every tribal community that reached out to us. So we had to say no to a lot of people, which was really hard for us. And that really inspired us to understand that we have to think really critically about how we’re going to expand this model and get more partners on so that we can reach more tribal communities in a faster fashion. And I have to say that everything that we imagined happening has basically happened, all of our wildest dreams basically, you know, just being able to bring on more people from tribal communities, onto our catering team specifically, and to develop them and to help continue to create ways for them to learn the fundamentals of these indigenous foods so they can apply that to their own ancestral history. That’s a huge, that’s a huge part of our vision. And it’s been working. And another example of that is to have the book published, so that we could take all that knowledge that was in Sean’s brain and put it into something that we could share with communities and could be used as a resource. And then, you know, it went so far as to be on all these top 10 lists for the best books of cookbooks of the year and to win the James Beard award. It’s just beyond beyond our wildest dreams in a sense,

Fred de Sam Lazaro
but but at the at the community level. you’re looking for absorption, if you will, meaning people taking this into their kitchens, and eating, what would it the challenge has been? How is that gone?

Dana Thompson
Incredibly well. Sean is just a phenomenal, you know, he’s a visionary. And he also happens to have this incredible talent of being really soft spoken and articulate and able to communicate with people from all different demographics, he’s just incredibly relatable, just naturally.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
But the question is to actually get this into people’s kitchens as an idea. It’s a challenge, is it not? I mean, how do people afford access to many of these ingredients?

Dana Thompson
Yeah, well, what I was gonna say is that people can just go into their backyards and get quite a few of them, which kind of an epiphany,

Sean Sherman
cutting out those colonial ingredients was a big key to it, but using a lot of the plants around us. So a lot of this stuff, you know, people are afraid at first when we’ve had that before where people say, Well, I don’t know if I’d be able to find anything. And we’re like, literally you just go outside, you know, it’s right there. So if you need some cedar, you find a cedar tree, you know, because some of these foods are not commodified, they’re not, you know, just order them online. From a big, you know, online distributor, you have to like spend some time searching some of these flavors, because there’s so many plants around us that people just aren’t using. We’re in this region where we have so much wild rice that comes out of these pure lakes. And people, it’s a big thing it’s going on right now. So they’re out there harvesting right now, and a lot of families are able to create a lot of staples off of that. And we’re trying to entice people to be outdoors more and start to collect a lot of these foods that were ancestral foods for us as indigenous communities, and each region is unique and special. And we have this vision of helping to create indigenous restaurants and just thinking how amazing it would be to drive across North America in any direction East West north, the South, whichever, stopping at indigenous food businesses along the way, and you can really start to see that diversity because every few hundred miles or so there’s gonna be different language, different history, different religions and different food and flavors and everything right there. And we can showcase that through the food. As today we live in such a homogenous kind of focus, you know, we have very little plant diversity in our diets. And you basically find the exact same food across the board. So every time he’s pullover, if you’re driving across the country, you’re gonna see the same hamburger, you know, the same soda, everything’s the same, you know, there’s so and that consistency, obviously, is great and fine, but there’s so much diversity, we could be celebrating. There’s so much diversity of indigenous peoples just like everywhere.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
I don’t think anybody would argue that any of these ingredients, the fresh produce, things that you can pluck out up the wild or in your garden, aren’t good for you. The question becomes, you know, in a modern world that people have time to do that, to even think in those terms. And so does it just seem a little daunting psychologically for a lot of folks to go out and, and do this when it’s much simpler when all you have ever done is gone to your neighborhood grocery store?

Sean Sherman
It’s very possible, but we’re just opening up a different perspective to people, you know, for indigenous peoples, they see it, they get it and they want this to be a part of their community. And we want to help them to find those tools and resources to make that a thing that that that could be a consistent thing for them to be able to harvest things from the wild all the time, because that’s how our indigenous ancestors were eating. And for other people who are interested in that just who people who might want to think outside the box, literally spend a little time outdoors it wouldn’t hurt anybody to spend a little time outdoors to learn the plants, you know, and we should be because the plant knowledge is so important. We should be learning about all the properties of these trees and plants around us and how much food is is out there. And you know where it’s not if we can learn how to control that and sustainably harvest a lot of these pieces and not damage our environment and utilize a lot of plants that really want to grow well and not try to force other things.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
A lot of people in this modern world would probably listen to you and say, Yeah, but we need stuff produced at an industrial scale. Because there’s 9 billion people on the planet, there’s all of this, do you think that there is that capacity and we’re just not seeing it?

Sean Sherman
I think what what’s more important is really focusing on how regional and community based food system could be really important for a future because we could be using our landscape better number one, instead of like spending so much time on lawns, and golf courses and things that are just kind of a No offense, waste of space. You know, we could be thinking smartly, we could be landscaping with, with purpose with inputs, putting food everywhere on all these open spaces, but we need, you know, community kitchens and people who are trained in them to be able to process those foods. So for us, our work is trying to help build that infrastructure, especially for indigenous communities. And if we can use some of these small indigenous communities who can start to really grasp a true sense of food sovereignty and be able to create enough food for their own, that’s gonna make them extremely, just better off for everything for health, for economic prosperity, and just for cultural revitalization in general. And any community could really embrace that by spending time but people have to work for it. They can’t expect other people to supply their food for them constantly. If you want to create a system that works, people are going to have to actually be a part of it.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
You just described a part of it. But Dana, what is this food infrastructure that you’re trying to build, essentially, in how, you describe the mechanics of putting all of that together, and how, how is that gone?

Dana Thompson
Well, we’re at the point of just getting the indigenous Food Lab up and running.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Can you talk a little bit about that, too, I mean, what is an indigenous Food Lab?

Dana Thompson
Essentially, it’s the first one is going to open in Minneapolis. And it’s going to be a culinary Training Center, with offices for our nonprofit executive staff, and a commercial kitchen and a commissary kitchen so that we’ll be able to have training restaurant where people can come in and learn about the fundamentals of the indigenous food system, and then, take that knowledge back to their own communities to start their own small businesses, and we plan to have business plans and any kind of support that we can offer so that they succeed, essentially

Sean Sherman
And part of the question was like, how can we get this food out there everywhere. We saw the need for it all over the place, you know, in tribal communities all across the nation. So we wanted to figure out a system that we could do that you know, as a and using our skills because we come I come from the food business. So like, how can I do something with what I know how to do, and looking at like how could like a corporate restaurant, mimic itself, send out 200 stores in a very short time period, and be able to just get out, get that get that out there, write that message out there, whatever they might be doing. So I thought maybe we can utilize something like that to be able to spread awareness and to spread this food because we really want to create a situation that pushes for a center of where people can have access to indigenous education and also helping to create the infrastructure to how to create food access for people out there for indigenous food access. So we developed under NATIFS, which is an acronym for North American traditional indigenous food systems are this is where the indigenous Food Lab is born. So we’re in using the indigenous Food Lab as a nonprofit restaurant model, where people will be able to come to the restaurant and try it and experience these foods. But it’s going to be a training and classroom situation where we can offer a whole bunch of education and curriculum around indigenous foods, everything from seed saving to farming techniques to wild foods, and ethnobotany cooking and culinary curriculum all over the place. So food preservation, of course, even language history. And even trauma is like dealing with some of this trauma and offering classes and groups around that too. So we want to create a place that just really focuses on education, but our goal is to work with the tribal communities nearby us, helping them to develop some kind of indigenous kitchen for their community. It could be something as small as a catering operation for a community that doesn’t have that many resources. Or it can be as large as a full scale restaurant if we have a community that has a lot of resources, but giving them the training and the kitchen to be able to maintain that. So we would train all of their workers through ourselves and the Food Lab, and then help them develop and design it to be particular to their tribe, their, their community, their language, their history, their region, their flavors, and using all those pieces. And our goal is to be able to make this as a replicable model. So we would be able to open up indigenous food labs in cities everywhere. So we could be in Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Albuquerque, Toronto, Anchorage, Mexico City, each one could be a regional center point to work that education and training with the tribal communities around it, helping them to develop some kind of food system that would create healthy food and hopefully it really bend the way people think about nutrition and health and give the the future generations of kids access. So when they growing up, they’re always going to be around their traditional foods is that’s one thing it’s just missing is just that access to those foods anywhere.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
And that was part of my other question, I mean, yes, you encouraging people to grow their own food in their backyard. But is there not a need to develop a system in which the places where we buy food, like stores have a better selection that is more accessible to people?

Sean Sherman
I think we’re going to really be able to grow into that, because I think the growth could be really endless, you know, so if we can get communities who and entice people using those smaller kitchens as incubator kitchens to help develop more indigenous food producers, they can start to help create, we can help them on the path to create products and to be able to put plug them into these networks that we’re building. And to be able to get them out there on the market. And to even eventually, you know, be able to because like, even if we could just get some of those gas stations out there and those really rural communities to just have one section one shelf of healthy indigenous options to choose from, you know, just take away one big shelf of chips right and just put a whole bunch of healthy foods there. When we can help indigenous peoples market that.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Isn’t it true that those chips would be a lot cheaper than the healthier options that might replace them.

Sean Sherman
Yep. But if we can help bring a little bit if we can help bring economic prosperity back into travel communities create more food base create healthier community food base in general. So like a healthier indigenous community food shelf, have more options to staples, as a lot of people up here should have access to things like wild rice and dried corns and dried squash and dried beans and all these staple foods that they’ll be able to build, you know healthfully eat and while we’re stuck with the commodity food program at this moment, you know, ideally we could take that over down the road right? One thing we know we have to do is really fix our food systems and fix just the the trend we have towards bad diets. And to be a lot more preventative and the indigenous diet is just such a great and

Dana Thompson
I just want to say about that the chips being cheaper, it’s cheap, it’s cheaper on the front end, because if you look at all the health disparity in the statistics, it’s out of this world insane. If you eat these indigenous foods, they’re literally medicine, you’re going to eliminate all those foodborne illnesses. And if you look at the costs of treating all of those foodborne illnesses, it wipes that, that price of the chips right out,

Fred de Sam Lazaro
That’s hard to see though if you’re on a limited budget and one a quick snack or, or a piece of food. So that that is ultimately the challenge is if not?

Sean Sherman
And part of is just being role models, especially as chefs because we’re showcasing a whole bunch of ways to use these foods, ways to access these foods and different things. And we’re hoping to see more chefs you know, that come out of our group or other people around the nation because there’s this is kind of a movement happening and this push for indigenous food sovereignty is happening all across the nation right now.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
What’s the hurdle in getting more adoption in many ways? Is it price? Is it is it marketing? Why? You know, what you’re saying makes perfect sense. There isn’t a doctor that would disagree there isn’t a public health official that would disagree. So, what’s the hurdle?

Sean Sherman
Our hurdle, you know, of course, you know, a lot of people who come from a tribal community much like I did, you know, we were born without any money, like any land and resources we had around were stripped from us long before we were born basically. So we weren’t born with a rich uncle or a rich father who could sign off on a million dollar loan or something for us as we grow. So starting all of this from scratch from from the very base of it, you know, is something that a lot of indigenous peoples would would have to struggle, you know, so that’s one of the biggest struggles is just not being born with entitlement to be able to, you know, and having the monetary resources to be able to grow freely, even if we have a good idea. So a lot of this is setting a path for people out of this because a lot of people like on our team particularly grew up just like I did, they grew up very poor in a tribal community. That you know, there was they saw a lot of abuse a lot of addiction, a lot of just issues in general growing up and barely survived past that point, you know, barely survived not being in jail or incarcerated for long periods of time. Or just being completely addicted to drugs or alcohol, when it comes down to it, that we are just trying to be a role model of showcasing a way we can get out of this. And a lot of what we’re trying to do, too, is just become more resourceful because our indigenous ancestors didn’t have the entitlement to be wasteful. So they couldn’t just throw everything away. Like we throw so much away. In today’s society, we have enough food to actually feed the world a few times over, but we throw it all in the trash. At a certain point, you know, so we want to be as resourceful as we can as we try to grow into new systems that could really help combat and battle that you know, so there’s a lot of gigantic hurdles and we’re not trying to fix the world in a couple of years. We’re just trying to set ourselves on a right path to be really strong role models to showcase a different perspective, but something that’s always been there

Fred de Sam Lazaro
One of the hallmarks and you were saying that today in your demonstration was the simplicity, the simple elegance of so much of what you prepare. I come from a culture where, you know, if it doesn’t take, you know, 17 ingredients, and, and spices and take days to marinate, you know, it’s just not worth it kind of thing. Tell us a little bit about that discovery that, you know, doesn’t take a lot to make simply elegant, nutritious food.

Sean Sherman
I looked at some of the recipes that I knew that were traditional that were still handed down. So you look at things like say piki bread from the southwest, you know, you’re basically using blue corn and a little bit of Juniper ash, which adds a little bit of sodium and everything to any kind of nixonalizes that cornmeal just a tiny bit, and then you’re also or alkalizes that I should say, it might make it easier for people understand, but also, you know, then they’re using sheep brain, or brain or deer brain or whatever to you be the oil for the hot stone that they cook this bread on you know, it’s very simple three ingredients basically right there, or I grew up with wasna you know, which we were doing on stage and it was just pounded meat, some usually some dried berries which were typically choke cherries for where I grew up. And you can add bits and pieces of other things if you want to. So I had a little bit of that ground hominy corn that we had somebody pounding and next to us something very simple, you know, so just a very few ingredients, right and just the simplicity of just having like roasted squash soup with just the broth and it has so much flavor and sugar and the smoke from the fire that has been cooked on. There’s already a lot of flavor in some of these foods. So for us, we’ve been able to create a lot of fun dishes and do a lot of dinners and you know, create a put a lot of artistry onto the plates. But just keeping it super simple. You know, it’s just very simple flavors is like we’re making food tastes like where we are so we can have some sunchoke and some rose hip and some blueberry and some walleye. And you can like just go into a lake right around here and look around and see all those pieces right next to you, you know? So it’s just, you know, thinking hyper regionally like just like what kind of flavors would you see walking through the forest, and being able to express that on a plate, but also tie the importance of those foods and those flavors because of the cultures that had utilized them to survive with for so long.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
It’s a spiritual journey, in some ways, is it not?

Sean Sherman
It’s just that deep connection that indigenous people share to the earth, you know, like we’re just so deeply connected. There’s so much respect that goes into the food when you’re harvesting, you’re leaving down prayers and tobaccos in the old days, they would sing songs as they harvested very particular songs for the harvest. As a thankfulness as a prayer, you know, or for us doing our spirit plates are offering plates at the beginning of every dinner, and just making it a part two, to think all of the plants and animals and people that made that meal possible,

Dana Thompson
ancestors

Sean Sherman
and all the ancestors and everything just like being thankful for a moment and being cognizant for a moment of that thankfulness. You know, and it’s just a part of again, like indigenous peoples from around the globe share that deep respect to the earth and the plants and the food that they’re able to get from that.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
So much of what we do, we’re addicted to what we eat. I mean, is that part of the problem?

Sean Sherman
Yes

Fred de Sam Lazaro
We’re addicted to, to what we

Sean Sherman
definitely and we know that a lot of these foods are very purposefully built to be addictive to on top of that, you know, you look at a lot of fast food, you look at that combination of salt, fat and sugar. And just like hitting those, all of those neurons that go off in your brain when you’re eating those food

Dana Thompson
dopamine

Sean Sherman
and all the dopamine that happens, right? And, you know, you just you you get this little high almost off of those, those sugary and fatty foods and they feel good for a moment but then you don’t feel good. Your body tells you you shouldn’t have ate that whole box of whatever you just ate, right? So for us nutrition and diet is really the most important thing and we found it to be what much more impactful especially working with tribal communities to talk about traditional indigenous foods and how these foods can actually bring back a lot of health and then being able to do a dinner with them, showcase them and then let people see like, after you eat a big dinner of this really a healthy food base that’s particular from the region we’re standing on, you just feel more energized and healthy in general. It’s not that we’re pushing healthy foods, particularly, it’s just that the indigenous diets have had to happen to be extremely healthy. And it could be really impactful to get these foods out there

Dana Thompson
And driving wealth back into tribal communities. It’s a core part of our mission.

Sean Sherman
You know, for us, we just see a path and we’re just taking it so we see something that can be positive. It could do a lot of good, a lot of impact. And we’re not claiming to have all the answers for all the problems of the food systems of the world. But we just happen to see a clear path that can have a lot of impact.

Fred de Sam Lazaro
Sean, it’s been a very long day for you, I’m sure and for you Dana and thanks so much for sharing

Solveig Rennan
Our interview with Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson was originally featured in our story called The Sioux Chef, which aired on PBS NewsHour on October 16 2019. To check out the full story and a virtual reality experience at an Indigenous Food Expo, go to under told stories.org. Coming up, our next few episodes will explore the lethal legacy that landmines leave behind.

Rebecca Letven
If an area is contaminated by landmines, sometimes they just don’t have a choice other than to enter that minefield

Solveig Rennan
and Zola 90s post apartheid kitchen

Zola Nene
The fact that we’ve overcome a lot of those things makes us so much stronger as a country.

Solveig Rennan
You can find every Under-Told: Verbatim episode, virtual reality 360 experiences and our entire library of Under-Told news reports from around the world at under told stories.org. This episode was hosted by me Solveig Rennan and produced and edited by Simeon Lancaster. The interview is conducted by our director Fred de Sam Lazaro, Under-Told: Verbatim is brought to you by The Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. As always, thanks for your support.