Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Sean Sherman — an award-winning chef, restaurateur and advocate for Indigenous foodways — has been named to the 2023 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Sherman, Oglala Lakota, is leading the movement to revitalize Indigenous food systems through his nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems; his restaurant, Owamni, in Minneapolis; and his best-selling cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen.”
Sherman is listed among a group of “innovators,” by Time, which announced the list on Thursday, April 13. He’s one of two Indigenous people on the Time list. Sam Rivera, Taino, is cited in the “pioneer” category for his work providing support in New York City for people who use drugs.
Sherman told ICT via Zoom that the recognition from Time magazine was “an immense honor.”
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“I’m still trying to understand how that makes me feel because it’s just a lot to unpackage there,” he said. “For me, this work isn’t really about myself, it’s not an ego project. But all of this attention definitely helps us open doors, especially for the work of the nonprofit we’re doing, which is just trying to create less hurdles for people to do the same work, to get more Indigenous foods out there and have healthier foods being served to our communities … All this keeps helping us move forward as an entire Indigenous community.”
The recognition was announced just a week after an April 5 electrical fire at Owamni that could keep the restaurant closed for several weeks. Sherman is chef at Owamni and co-owner with Dana Thompson.
The building, a historic 19th-century structure owned by the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation board, filled with smoke and was evacuated. It has been closed ever since.
“I was at RES [Reservation Economic Summit] when I found out about it,” Sherman said. “It was just a perfect storm of situations, of water leakage because of the snow runoff that happened to leak right over the main power box that powered the entire building. It just shut us down completely and we’re still getting information on how fast we’ll get up and open.”
A reopening date is still uncertain.
“We’re just crossing our fingers,” he said. “We have a lot of staff on hold, and we’re just going to get through this challenge as we get through everything. We’ll be back open for the public very soon.”
Owamni, which sits along the Mississippi River and means “place of the falling, swirling water,” won the prestigious James Beard Best New Restaurant Award in 2022. Sherman has won two previous James Beard awards, for Best American Cookbook in 2018 and the James Beard Leadership Award in 2019.
“He has galvanized a new generation of Indigenous chefs to honor their culinary heritage and to decolonize their diets,” chef Padma Lakshmi wrote about Sherman in the Time list.
‘Invisibility’
Sherman is no stranger to Time magazine, as he wrote a powerful essay in 2018 about the Native perspective of Thanksgiving and how he is refocusing that holiday.
“Because of where I’m at, being an Indigenous chef, I get a lot of asks during that time of year to talk about Indigenous foods and Native American foods,” Sherman said.
“A lot of press on Native food goes straight to Thanksgiving, so I try to utilize that opportunity to really tell a different story, to showcase the history of that particular holiday and how we should be reframing it and thinking about it completely differently,” he said.
“We should be focused on things that are real and not mythologies when it comes to our uplifting colonial histories that are extremely violent and dark,” he said. “We should be focused on the food. If people want to focus on Indigenous cultures, they shouldn’t be utilizing this myth of Natives and settlers coming together but focused on the land you’re standing on. Focus on the resiliency of the Indigenous peoples, of where you live and understand some of the struggles they went through and appreciate the foods that they’ve been utilizing for countless generations that happens to be the world around us.”
Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, hunting and foraging with his grandfather but also eating plenty of commodity foods such as flour, lard and canned hash. He began washing dishes in a restaurant at age 13 and went on to work at a series of restaurants in Minneapolis in his 20s before becoming an executive chef.
His awareness of food inequality happened slowly, he said.
“Some of it was just growing up in restaurants,” he said. “When my mom moved my sister and I off the reservation, right before I started high school, I just started working in restaurants at a really young age, and I continued working in restaurants after moving from Spearfish, South Dakota, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and worked my way up to a chef position really quickly.”
After being a chef for a few years, he realized the complete absence of his own heritage and the lack of Indigenous foods.
“There were very few cookbooks on the subject, and it was just invisibility,” Sherman said. “It just really struck me, especially realizing I had a pretty good food and culinary education, and I could cook foods from all over the world and especially European foods. I knew hundreds of European recipes off the top of my head in European languages, and just knew very little about what was truly Lakota.”
The realization set him on a new path.
“The more I learned about my own heritage, the more I saw all the other Indigenous communities around me,” he said. “Today, I look at this really pan-Indigenous perspective and see Indigenous peoples across the globe with so much beautiful knowledge, especially around food systems, of how we should be working towards getting there again.”
Working for change
Sherman leads a team of culinary staff, educators, and advocates to create resources crucial to the Indigenous food movement. His nonprofit organization collects and disseminates knowledge of Indigenous food systems that include agriculture, culinary, and ethnobotany for those interested in Native food culture and food sovereignty.
And though he was not trained as a journalist, he writes eloquently in his essays and in his cookbook, which reads in part like a prayer connecting to food and land.
“I grew up in a generation where we still read a lot, maybe the last of the generations,” Sherman said, “so I’ve always enjoyed books and I’ve always enjoyed writing.”
And there’s more to come.
“I am working on another cookbook, and I do have support with that,” he said. “It’s a project that paints a picture of North America through an Indigenous lens and celebrates all the Indigenous diversity from Mexico through Alaska, and utilizing foods and stories and recipes as the cornerstone of that particular book. It’ll be exciting when it gets out the door.”
He said he will also continue his work for change.
“We need a lot healthier food access and so much change in our food systems in general,” he said. “I think Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledge could really help save us as a human species for future generations to come.
“But we have to work really hard to get to that point and have that reconnection again.”
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