SEAN SHERMAN: THE PIONEER

MINNESOTA-BASED CHEF SEAN SHERMAN PAYS HOMAGE TO HIS NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE BY CREATING EXPERIMENTAL DISHES USING ONLY THE INDIGENOUS INGREDIENTS KNOWN TO HIS ANCESTORS.

- DELLE CHAN

Flour, sugar and butter are all staple ingredients in the US, popping up in everything from pies to pancakes. Yet, they don’t figure in traditional Native American cuisine, the oldest — and perhaps also the most underrepresented and misunderstood — food culture in the country. Granted, it isn’t easy to describe Native American cooking in a nutshell — after all, there are over 500 federally recognised Native American tribes, from the Cherokee of the south east to the Navajo Nation of the south west, meaning regional nuances abound. Fundamentally, however, the cuisine is underpinned by a close relationship with the land, characterised by the use of fresh, foraged, indigenous ingredients such as corn, beans, sunflowers, tomatoes, squash and pumpkins.

The fact so little is known about Native American cuisine today is something Sean Sherman is determined to change. For the past seven years, the Minneapolis-based Sioux chef has worked to preserve and promote the food traditions of his ancestors by revitalising age-old recipes, cooking methods and food-preservation techniques. As he explains, many of these culinary practices were lost over the years as a result of discriminatory government policies. In the early 19th century, Indigenous tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations, effectively cutting them off not just from their ancestral lands but from the cultural and culinary practices tied to those areas.

“A lot of Indigenous food has been stripped from us over the past couple of centuries, and there’s still so much social and nutritional segregation today because of the reservation system,” Sherman says.