The springtime heat was sweltering inside the 300-square-foot community seed bank in Unión Zapata, just outside Oaxaca, Mexico. The open door let in light and the occasional gust of wind on an otherwise still day. But neither Sean Sherman—the Oglala Lakota Sioux chef who’s a three-time James Beard Award winner and the owner of the Indigenous-focused Minneapolis restaurant Owamni—nor I minded. We were mesmerized by the dozens of heirloom varieties of maize, beans, pumpkins, and quelites (wild greens) sitting in rows of glass jars. Even Sherman, who I assumed had seen it all after working for more than a decade to revitalize Native American foodways, was impressed to see a jar of amber-hued teosinte seeds, an all-important ancient grass thought to be the ancestral wild progenitor of corn.
Sherman is leading a growing movement of Indigenous chefs, producers, land defenders, and other food-sovereignty warriors on a mission to safeguard Indigenous foodways and share them with the world. Joining him are people like chef Nephi Craig (White Mountain Apache and Diné), who founded the Native American Culinary Association; chef Crystal Wahpepah (Kickapoo and Sac and Fox), the first Indigenous chef on Food Network’s Chopped; and chef and TV personality Tawnya Brant (Haudenosaunee). The important Native food traditions, techniques, and ingredients this movement looks to preserve were all but erased during European colonialism.
Sherman’s latest book, Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America, showcases and celebrates the continent’s vast and varied Indigenous foodways. The title nods to Native creation stories in which the land was formed on a turtle’s back. Sherman tapped me, a Tlingit journalist, to coauthor it; our research took us across the continent on a multidestination, multiyear journey.
