Sean Sherman an Oglala Lakota Sioux chef, cookbook author, and promoter of indigenous cuisine. Sherman founded the indigenous food education business and caterer The Sioux Chef, as well as the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. He received a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award and his 2017 cookbook, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, won the 2018 James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook.
Early life
Sherman was born in 1974 and grew up on his grandparents' ranch on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He hunted and foraged from an early age, recalling his grandfather giving him a shotgun on his seventh birthday. He grew up eating many government commodity foods such as cereal, shortening, and canned hash. He attended Black Hills State University. His grandparents were fluent in Lakota.
Early career
Sherman got his first restaurant job washing dishes at 13, soon moving onto the line. He spent a summer working for the US Forest Service in the Black Hills, identifying plants. He spent most of his twenties working in a series of Minneapolis restaurants and by 27 was working as an executive chef. By 29 he was burnt out and spent some time in Mexico regrouping; while in Puerto Vallarta he spent time with some Huichol people and had an "epiphany", saying: "After seeing how the Huicholes held onto so much of their pre-European culture through artwork and food, I recognized I wanted to know my own food heritage. What did my ancestors eat before the Europeans arrived on our lands?”
Career
In 2014 Sherman founded indigenous food education business and caterer The Sioux Chef. The Washington Post called it "a homonym to another ... culinary concept", the sous-chef. He founded the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems with his business and life partner Dana Thompson. The organization includes the Indigenous Food Lab, which works with ethnobotanists to record the earliest names of native plants. In 2017 Sherman co-authored The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, published by the University of Minnesota, which won the 2018 James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook. In order to create the book's recipes, he interviewed older community members and searched archives for descriptions of traditional Lakota foods. Recipes in the book contain no dairy, wheat, beef, pork, or cane sugar, as these are non-indigenous ingredients, brought to North America by European colonizers. Sherman describes the recipes as "hyperlocal, ultraseasonal, uber-healthy most of all, it's utterly delicious." Publishers Weekly called the book, "an illuminating guide to Native American food that will enthrall home cooks and food historians alike." That same year he prepared a six-course dinner at the James Beard House. In 2018 he participated in a National Museum of American History roundtable at the Food History weekend event. During the event he prepared a traditional dish, Mag˘áksic˘a na Psíŋ Wasná, duck and wild ricepemmican. In 2019 Sherman received a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, which recognizes people and organizations that " to change our food world for the better." The New York Times called his style "colorful and elegant".
Philosophy
Sherman abandoned the use of ingredients that are not endemic to North America after having "an epiphany" while working at a restaurant in Mexico that used local ingredients and realizing that the traditional foods of the Oglala were "completely unrepresented in American cuisine." He objects to indigenous cuisine being called "the next big thing", saying, "This is not a trend. It's a way of life." He told the James Beard Foundation, "We're not trying to cook like it's 1491. We're trying to take knowledge from the past and evolve it for today." Along with some other Native American chefs, Sherman rejects frybread, often associated with "traditional" Native American cuisine, calling it "everything that isn't Native American food" and writing that it represents "perseverance and pain, ingenuity and resilience." While a symbol of resilience, as it was developed out of necessity using government-provided flour, sugar, and lard, these chefs also consider it a symbol of colonial oppression, as the ingredients were being provided because the government had moved the people onto land that could not support growing traditional staples like corn and beans. Frybread's significance to Native Americans has been described as complicated and their relationship with it conflicted.
