(Photo credit: https://seansherman.com)
Chef Sean Sherman was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, as were his parents and grandparents, before him. After his mother moved his family to Spearfish, South Dakota, he began working in local restaurants and cooked all through high school and college. He also worked as a field surveyor for the forest service, a job that provided him an extensive knowledge of native plants, which would prove invaluable later in his career. He moved to Minneapolis and continued working in restaurants, becoming an executive chef while still in his mid-20s, where he was immersed in the farm-to-table philosophy during a time when few restaurants were purchasing directly from local vendors.
After several years of researching Native foods, he started The Sioux Chef, a company focused on creating regional Indigenous foods utilizing products from tribal producers, Native heirloom agricultural products, regionally foraged wild foods, and protein alternatives to beef, pork, and chicken. He challenged himself to cut out colonial ingredients, particularly dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar. He also came to believe that in addition to providing comprehensive nutrition, native plants can also be powerful medicines.
By reconnecting Native Americans with traditional foodways to improve health, promoting economic development, establishing food sovereignty, preserving tribal history and culture across artificial colonial boundaries, and through development of a new food system based around cultivation and incorporation of healthy, wild, culturally appropriate, traditional ingredients and agriculture, Chef Sherman is empowering Native people to use the power of their history and culture to counter the multigenerational impacts of colonialism and dispossession and to combat systematic cultural genocide.
Through speaking engagements, community dinners, and culinary classes, along with social media and his James Beard Award-winning cookbook—The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen—he’s been able to influence many of these communities directly to affect change. Along with co-founding a restaurant in Minneapolis, Owamni, that focuses on Indigenous foods, Chef Sherman has seen the need for infrastructure to support Indigenous foodways across the United States, North America, and the globe. His nonprofit, NĀTIFS, and its Indigenous Food Lab, a professional Indigenous Kitchen and Training Center, are working to build and support an Indigenous infrastructure, create a center for Indigenous Education, and promote the creation and maintenance of healthy food access throughout Indigenous communities.
(Source: https://seansherman.com/about)