Sioux chef revives Native American tastes of yesteryear

Getting the next generation to change its mindset is one of the reasons Michael Roberts, president and CEO of First Nations Development Institute, helps organize a Native Food Summit in Green Bay, Wisconsin, each year where Sherman has been included as a chef.

“Sean is fascinated by food,” Roberts said. “When you look at the cuisine Americans have sampled, it used to be only Italian and Chinese were as far as we went, but now there’s every ethnicity. America’s looking for new flavors and ideas. The timing might be just right.”

More seriously, he added, is Sherman’s mission to educate people.

“There’s a real awareness of the poor health on Indian reservations,” Roberts said. “There used to be no recorded incidents of diabetes on reservations, even up to the 1930s. There must have been something wonderful in Native diets." According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native adults over the age of 20 were obese in 2011 and 2012. That number rises to almost 70 percent when counting how many Native adults over the age of 20 are overweight, including obesity. The CDC has also reported that cancer is the No. 1 killer of Natives, with heart disease and diabetes ranking second and fourth.

Christine Werner, 23, works as Sherman’s event coordinator and catering organizer and sees him as part of a bigger movement in the U.S. “He made me rethink the word ‘original,’” she said. “It’s literally about origins.”

But opening a restaurant is a cutthroat business, and Sherman’s establishment could be a tough sell at first. “It’s the faux pas that it might be too healthy and not taste good,” she said. “The No. 1 barrier is getting someone in the door. It’s an awesome way to teach that lesson. Healthy food can taste good. Why eat food from all over the world when the food right under our feet is delicious?”

All people, not just Native Americans, would benefit from indigenous food, she added. “We took a wrong turn somewhere,” she said. “We could have had American cuisine, but we destroyed it somewhere.”

That wrong turn, many say, was during the time of forced assimilation and the removal of tribes from their land. Many young Native Americans were sent to boarding schools, and entire generations lost out on learning to farm, hunt and fish, Sherman said. Today many reservations rely on U.S. Department of Agriculture commodity food, which is packaged and processed.

Now, Sherman said, unhealthy eating is nothing more than “convenience and habit,” and the result is high rates of diabetes, cancer and obesity among Natives in the nation’s 566 federally recognized tribes. “The diets just fell apart,” he said. “They used to gather foods and preserve them, and once that stopped, they relied on government food, and we see what happened. Natives used to live to a nice old age.”

During the cooking show, Sherman challenged the students to view the world through a different lens. Several had never tasted buffalo, spent little time outdoors and had never seen a carrot other than orange ones.

“You guys need to get out and hike,” he said, placing a fat knife over a handful of juniper berries and striking it with the heel of his hand to crush them. “You just look out your windows and in the forest, and it’s all food. Everything tastes really good drenched in fat, but it’s not good for you.”

The dandelion is a prime example. “We didn’t really have a word for ‘weed’ because everything had a purpose,” he said. “The dandelion wasn’t here before Europeans. The whole plant is edible and makes a good salad.”

But, he said, “people try to sell you chemicals to kill them.”

Nephi Craig, executive chef for the Summit restaurant at a ski resort in northeastern Arizona for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, feels a connection with Sherman’s mission. The entire Summit culinary team is composed of Natives from the local tribe.

The restaurant serves indigenous food from reservations across the country, including Navajo heritage churro lamb and salmon from the Pacific Northwest, as well as local fruits and nuts, acorns, cactus fruit and wild game.

Why aren’t there more like him and Sherman? “For those of us on the reservation, the opportunity or notion to become a fine dining chef is an outlandish concept,” he said. “That’s a Western concept. We’re not a restaurant culture.”

He’s hoping that changes.

“It’s about building a culture of chefs in Native communities and tapping into that ancestral knowledge,” he said. “It’s a generational and a spiritual battle. It’s a choice to prepare Native food … Hopefully, people will return to action and responsibility and the indigenous principles of human interaction and relationship with the landscape.”

After the cooking show wrapped, Sherman and Werner headed to the Global Market — a popular ethnic center in the center of a city that has become home to thousands of Hmong, Vietnamese and Ethiopian refugees over the years. The market is a mecca of food and trinkets, foreign teas and cookies, gifts and language. It’s a prime example, Sherman says, of why here and now is just right for a Native American restaurant.

“It’s not about me becoming a famous chef,” he said. “It’s that Native people had amazing flavors to play with, and we are just putting that in a modern context.”