Sean Sherman at 2018 World of Flavors

the convert the context of the conference has always been to look very far for four flavors but it's also very important to look at home and to look close to home and to look at things that are happening right under our nose and that have been happening here for centuries if not even longer than that and that's what this next session will do we're going to look at Native American traditions and as something that is becoming more and more important a lot of people I think there's a there's a greater realization there's still a huge amount of work to do but there's a greater realization of this importance of understanding what started right here in America to understand the world around us - so to lead us through this session um is a muddy moderator Jodi Jodi Adi and it's through Jodi that I met Sean Sherman who will be the chef here and other Native American chefs because they are both from Minnesota and there was obviously a strong Native American population there as Jon will tell us Jodi is a Renaissance woman she leads culinary tours she's a writer for publication like Saveur magazine and vice food and wine Wall Street Journal etcetera etcetera she writes cookbooks that take her all around the world to the one she's working on right now and that she loved to tell you about because it leads to really amazing adventures is on monastery food so she's traveling all over visiting monks and nuns and researching their foods and writing about that she also consults for NGOs and does a lot of other things she was the IAC peace judge Choice Award for her cookbook North the New Nordic cuisine of Iceland where she has also spent a lot of time etc etc I could just keep going but I want you to hear from Jody directly and then from Shan also so please welcome Jody Eddy hi everyone thank you so much I as well as Ruth and very surprised at the turnout in this early hour of the morning I am really thrilled and honored today to introduce my friend Sean chairman Sean and I met years ago at a conference in the Sonora Desert in Arizona and he has always been very transparent open honest with me about a lot of conversations I think that are very difficult to have and he's really moving the conversation forward Sean is the founder and CEO of the sous-chef he's Lakota from Pine Ridge South Dakota he's been cooking throughout the US and Mexico for over 30 years and in that time his accomplishments are myriad they're countless he served the first decolonized dinner at the James Beard House recently in New York City his cookbook that was just published this year the sous-chef was recently nominated for a James Beard Award Sean will be signing that later today and I highly recommend it he's also a recent recipient of the Bush fellowship an incredible accomplishment and I'm really thrilled to see where that takes him Sean and I share a home state of Minnesota so call out to the Midwest and I've learned incredible things from him about indigenous techniques ingredients philosophies about why his mission to decolonize the native diet is so critical and I've also learned from him about how he's going about revitalizing native food ways and he'll talk all about that today I know he has a really vast thought-provoking presentation and I think these terms are words that we may not understand but that it's vital for us to explore another thing that Sean and I have talked so much about and I think is so important for us to always consider in our kitchens as writers is cultural appropriation and what this means and why why it is so critical for us to understand it and I know Shawn will be discussing that as well today these conversations can be uncomfortable and overwhelming but Shawn has really held my hand through them and he's taught me that they we have to begin somewhere and this is what we're going to be doing today and I really encourage you to reach out to Shawn and he's very open transparent and and I'm just so thrilled and honored today to introduce Shawn thank you all right thank you guys so I prepared a little bit of a dish of something really simple it's called wasps nah it's something that I grew up with it's a dried meat with the fat that's rendered down it's mixed with berries I mixed this with puffed wild rice and amaranth and some wild harvested greens weed picked some miner's lettuce and some wild fennel yesterday right around this right around campus basically don't tell the lawns keepers but but you know really what we what I really want to talk about is just our perspective with indigenous foods and where we are today and why you know why aren't there Native American restaurants all over the place because no matter where you are in the u.s. North America's history begins with indigenous histories and it's really silly to think of that there's just no Native American presence out there and that's kind of what started me on this journey because as a chef I'd been setting so many other cuisines from around the world as a lot of chefs too you know you learn a lot of French technique you learn about Italian and Mediterranean foods you learn about you know eight Southeast Asian Japanese you know you learn a bunch of stuff and then all of a sudden for me growing up having grown up on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota it was all of a sudden apparent that you know I could walk around the city and find food from all over the world but nothing that talked about the land and the history of the of the area I was standing on which was pretty much everywhere so it just kind of got me on path is to like where are all of those Native American restaurants right and you know so I just wanted to try to fully understand like what was going on because I grew up on the reservation I was thinking about the foods that I grew up with and a lot of it had been influenced by government stuff you know by the US and European influences so I wanted to find out what was out there I couldn't just go online and order joy of Native American cooking so I had to really is trying to dig deep you know so I was looking at all sorts of stuff and just trying to understand like why aren't there indigenous foods out there to the point where we have opened up our business called the sous-chef and our focus is on pre-colonial foods so what is pre-colonial foods for us it's just like what were people eating here before European influence what were those ingredients like what were migrate so for me this is the food of my great-grandfather my great-grandfather was 18 during the Battle of Little Bighorn with the Lakota and that's not a long time ago that's in the late 1800s and so for me this was just going back a couple of generations in my own family to try to understand like what was my ancestry eating back then so to understand what pre-colonial is you know first off just to get everybody on the same page like what is colonialism the easiest way to understand colonialism Google the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country occupying it with settlers and exploiting it economically so we see this happen in history a lot right we see a heavy heavily coming out of Europe during the Age of Exploration and we see you know basically going all around the world Africa India Southeast Asia Australia New Zealand Hawaii the Americas all of this area is being affected by European colonialism meat people are getting pushed around people are getting dislocate Delocated you know all sorts of bad things are happening but then we look at u.s. colonialism which is something very recent and people don't understand so at the beginning of our country in the early so in the late 1700s still over 80% of the entire part of the land was still under indigenous control at that point in time so Native American history isn't something that's ancient history right it's very recent so again this is just the era of my great-grandfather so you'll see how fast that the US government starts to push to take over and America you know indigenous people's lands and it happens really fast and especially after civil war so basically between the years of 18 and 40 in 1870 almost all of the land is taken over and during that time the same thing is happening people are being deal dislocated they're getting pushed around people are getting pushed into Oklahoma entire families are getting wiped out all of these farming communities seeds are disappearing from these and all this farming that's happening on the eastern side of the United States and it happens really really fast so for me it was just kind of an eye-opener to think about like how recent this is and how little people don't understand our own histories right because I mean if all you read about in history is from your high school textbooks you're gonna have a very skewed sense of American history since you know it's written by the US government so at the end of the 1800s we have very little of any control of our lands left so we lost a lot of things during that time period so we're kind of in the sense of kind of traumatic healing at this point we're barely getting to the point of healing we just went through a very traumatic time period in a very recent time period - so for us like how was this happening and a bigger part of this for the US government was declaring war on our foods so they were burning crops on the East Coast they're taking out food stores in the West they were wiping out bison you know anything like Kamath's they were just taking out all sorts of food people because once you destroyed food from somebody they're easier to subdue and the US government found that out and was able to utilize the system over and over and the thing that really sealed the deal of why we don't have a lot of indigenous restaurants out there and people don't know a lot about it was because the next thing that they kind of waged war on was our knowledge so thousands of years of generational knowledge of things that have been passed down about how to live within your environment utilizing only plants and animals is wiped away during this time period sir when they started the boarding school systems in the late 1800s all of that generational knowledge comes to a screeching halt because these Native children who should be learning their traditions and their ways are forced to not speak their language not to learn their songs not to learn how to forage not to learn how to farm not to learn how to hunt and taught how to do carpentry how to be house made household servants and how to you know only speak English and it was really destructive and boarding schools popped up all over the US during the 1800s so it really destroyed a lot of the indigenous cultures that were here before and this is a big part of why there isn't indigenous people so are not indigenous peoples but indigenous knowledge so it's really important just to understand the basic history because it's our history and we have to understand it to be able to move forward right so growing up and postcolonial Native America people are always asking me like what did you eat growing up you know where you know they want to have this kind of you know fantastic thing where as running around in the forest with some homemade clothes and shooting a rabbit with in a bow and arrow I made it stuff like that right but you know this is what my pantry looked like growing up and this is you know the commodity food program list and it looks actually much better than it did when I was growing up because we just had black and white cans I just said beans and you know stuff like this but the problem with this program is that it's destructive because it was never meant to be a nutritional program and so the government starts it in the 1930s as a farm supplement program to help out farmers and so these foods go to hospitals schools and Native American reservations so the problem with this is that it's high glycemic there's lots of sodium and bad salts there's bad fats there's bad sugars like you name it and that's why you see in an immense amount of problems on indigenous communities there's like upwards to 60% type-2 diabetes there's lots of obesity as heart disease there's all sorts of horrible statistics out there because a lot of people are surviving off of this government reliance food so for us we wanted to figure out more and it wasn't yeah and it wasn't even these fresh vegetables in front it's just that stuff in the back right and the other piece was Indian tacos so people think about Native American food and I think Oh native tacos you know it's awesome Navajo tacos Indian tacos whatever you want to call it fry bread tacos but when you start decolonizing this plate and getting rid of stuff like fry bread goes away right away cuz fry bread was something that the US government gave Native American people because we didn't have wheat flour so like you know when you get staples of wheat large salt sugar there's not much you can do with it especially when you don't even have an oven so the simplest thing you do is make a simple dough fry it up in a pan and it's something that we've seen the u.s. Calvary and military utilizing for a long time so it became oppression food for indigenous peoples and there's just absolutely no reason because of how much diversity we have out there that Indian taco should represent every single Native American person across the u.s. because I always thought it was weird growing up in Pine Ridge in South Dakota and be like it's weird that our native food tastes like Mexican food you know so as a chef you know I start looking into it deeper and you tried to start figuring out so we start I started asking myself what is an indigenous food system and to understand indigenous food systems just you have to understand like how much plant diversity we have out there in region diversity and terrain and terroir and everything right that so there's forests there's mountains is everything and then you layer on the indigenous people so there's still 634 tribes in Canada 567 in the US one-fifth of Mexico is still indigenous and speaks in indigenous language right and then the easier way to understand indigenous borders is you look at a language map so if you see a language map of the u.s. of indigenous languages you know the u.s. looks extremely diverse if you can imagine like driving across the country and stopping at Native American restaurants it would change in flavor and culture and mythology and history everywhere you stopped and you know but now we have the same exact burger chain and everything across the way it's so homogeneous and we should be celebrating this immense amount of diversity and culture and tradition and history that we have across the board so this is kind of the push that we're doing is trying to showcase diversity out there and for us it was more than just culinary it was about understanding wild foods permaculture need of agriculture seed saving seasonal lifestyles ethno Oceanography hunting fishing butchery salt sugar fat production indigenous crafting cooking techniques regional indigenous histories indigenous traditional medicine food preservation fermentation nutrition health spirituality all those things took a play into what is indigenous foods right so for the biggest piece for us was reconnecting with the earth around us like getting to know the plants like not being lazy and calling everything a weed if you don't know it is because indigenous peoples knew the name of all of the plants right around us right so when you start learning the names of plants you start to realize their purpose everything has a purpose out there except for ticks everything else has a purpose out there so a ticks are horrible but anyways you know you just see food everywhere people always worried about poisonous foods and things like that but a lot of those poisonous foods were just really strong medicines like people who know if people knew how to utilize them you can really use them for your benefit because for again indigenous peoples around the world shared the commonality being able to utilize only plants and animals to live sustainably within their area right so much knowledge that we should be utilizing it right around us like the first thing I did when I was here was taking my chef and we just crawled up the hillside in the back of the back of the this castle thing and just started like you know gathering food because there's all sorts of cool things out there and we'll be utilizing those foods on our plates all weekend I love this whole week so and it's thing about staples like I grew up with things like Tim Silla which is a wild prairie turnip you have things like kamas that was out of the Pacific Northwest in Northern California we have staples like wild rice where people are still harvesting today's sustainably using no petroleum they're just using canoes they're using sticks and it's something that we have so much you know and we have to be careful because we've ruined over over half of this wild rice land because wild rice used to go as far east as New York State and basically we'd have it maybe as far east as Michigan at this point because there's reclamation efforts out there trying to protect it and you see a lot of people trying to protect these natural resources because they're important oh it's just and it's completely different than the California wild rice that you see cuz that black wild rice that you see in a rice-a-roni box is something that was designed to be cultivated and into you know big Patty's and they can use machinery and combines and stuff but the real hand harvested wild rice is something so unique and it's just this grassy that just has so much nutrition and it's not such a wonderful staple where we're at and it's been making families happy for such a long time we have maple syrup maple sugars things like that even if in your in the desert where all the plants look like they want to hurt you or maim you if you know how to utilize them like the indigenous peoples do all you see is health and medicine like all around you so there should be no such word as food desert because the deserts are ripe with food if you know how to look for them when I think a food desert I think of like one of the suburbs around Minneapolis but you know if you're on the coastal like I'm jealous of the coastal tribes because they have like this whole other food system right off shore so not only did you have inland but you have coastal so you have plans you have animals you have shellfish you have all sorts of stuff to utilize digitus peoples knew how to do that because they were resourceful with everything that was around them there's so much health and medicine out there and food so you just have to know how to utilize it and identify it like again like we're so lazy as Americans because we call everything weeds right and it's unfortunate that our kids know the names of more Kardashians and they do trees right that's our fault we should be teaching them what's important you know so the other piece to look at is indigenous agriculture because it has this huge history a lot of people know about a three sisters situation where there's corns and beans and squash you should grow the corn the beans crawl up the the bean sprout the corn and the squash covers the ground area right and this is more of an Eastern but because we're such a huge area and an agriculture spreads in such a large spot because agriculture starts in southern Mexico the corn culture in particular and is followed by corns being squash sunflower seeds chilies and we see these same crops crawl most of the way like chilies kind of start stop in the southwest but throughout the entire eastern seaboard up the Mississippi and Missouri River Valley's like where I grew up in South Dakota people have been farming in those regions for over 2,000 years and there's so much awesome diversity out there even like when people first when the Spanish first first coming into Mexico they were seeing what they called floating gardens but there are these awesome raised beds and it was a beautiful agricultural system that nobody's really utilizing today the people in the desert were able to grow out agriculture and habits flourish and that's a huge human feat to be able to do this in the desert you know what high heat drought resistant seeds people up and all the way up in my area in the Dakotas you see see the same crops all over so there's so much history and we're lucky to have any of that diversity left because a lot of it went away when the westward expansion was happening and seeds were being destroyed a lot of those farming communities were being completely destroyed so you have crops of beans yes squash and then they think about indigenous food techniques you know so the NICS inhalation of corn followed that agriculture wherever it went so processing corn into hominy or passaglia whichever part of the country you might be in but it was just something as simple as making an alkaline water bath utilizing only wood ash and then processing in the corner when you process corn in that manner then you are able to get all of the put all of the benefits from corn calcium potassium magnesium iron zinc it's just a much easier way so when you look at Mexican cuisine Mexican cuisine is way more indigenous than into Spanish influence so if you decolonized it you still have mostly Mexican cuisine so you have Nixon wise corns you have chiles you got tomatoes you've got all the stuff so like for us like we've removed all European ingredients so there's no dairy no wheat flour no processed sugar no beef and a fork no chicken so like Mexican cuisine you get rid of sour cream get rid of cheese you get rid of cilantro even stuff like that you still have really strong Mexican roots there with the food so it's a great place to look at food preservation techniques drying foods out for us as chefs like saving seeds to make sure like when we're using these special heirlooms varietals we're making sure to save those seeds and get them back into the hands of farmers because up until the 1800s for indigenous peoples they didn't have to pay for food because they took care of their own food right and if you can control your food you can control your destiny so that's what we're just trying to get people that's a that's a strongest sense about food sovereignty is like if you can control your food then you can control who you are and the people who you are not be reliant on government foods that are only making you sick so for us it was trying to figure out what to do with this so we started our business we started hiring young native chefs we started training them to be a part of this as an everyday thing as part of our culinary practices getting to know the plants seeing food everywhere utilizing technology and information to help us along like being not trying to do a timepiece and cook like it's 1491 but to take all that generational knowledge that we're relearning and apply it to today to do something bigger with it right making our own pantry items grounding our own flowers using our own herbs you don't have to follow a simple you know French influenced cookbook we can utilize all of this stuff that makes food taste like where we are you know this pictures rabbit seed or wild rice cranberry maple you can see all those ingredients standing in one spot one lake in Minnesota so it's making food taste like where we were and having fun with it putting artistry on it right we can make food beautiful because the food is beautiful in humans that's something we all share is food making businesses that were serving only indigenous ingredients and doing it really for the indigenous communities that was really our passion so this work was always bigger than me it wasn't about trying to create a name for myself it was about just trying to get this knowledge out there and to share it so for our vision we knew opening a restaurant would literally lock ourselves in a box because restaurants are actually the worst business plan you can come up with you know so but they're important because one restaurant can really change an entire community so we developed a nonprofit called natives or North American traditional indigenous food systems where we have this grand vision to to reteach indigenous food ways in education and to create food access and it's kind of taking those two fronts that colonialism had against us by returning indigenous knowledge and returning our indigenous foods to the people that matters the most so we created a brand called the indigenous food lab where we're starting off in Minneapolis because that's where we're based off but the indigenous food lab is going to be a restaurant and a training center that's going to teach about a classroom to teach about all of its indigenous food knowledge that we have and also to have this restaurant to train people how to work with it and to create a lots of curriculum around it and utilizing the cookbook we just came out with as an educational tool because it has over a hundred recipes using only indigenous ingredients and all the philosophy wrapped into it our next phase is to work with tribes around us and help them to develop their own food business to create that food access in those communities that need it help them create community gardens help them permaculture design and just landscape with purpose we should just be putting food everywhere lawns are stupid you don't need lawns you should be putting food everywhere that's what we're gonna feed everybody in the future right I mean and then eventually we want to open up Thanks eventually we want to open up indigenous food labs all across North America to really revitalize that indigenous knowledge that we've been so blind to for so long because it's where it's right under our feet constantly so for us this was an indigenous food evolution and revolution all at the same time it's breaking past all that oppression and moving forward you know so for us it's all about these next generations it's about these next kids who can grow up knowing what their foods are cuz they're the ones that are going to be leaders and efficient as peoples have always been stewards of the landscape that we've lived in they've overseen these lands for you know long long generations and we've destroyed so many indigenous lives over this time period at this very short time period so it it's time that we give some respect and some knowledge back to this traditional knowledge right you know California has a horrible history where they had a bounty system between eighteen and 1850 in 1860 where you can make $25 to bring in the head of an indigenous person and $25 in 1850 is like eight hundred dollars when the cost of living is 25 cents so California itself wiped out almost 90% of its popov indigenous population back during that one stretch of ten years right it's horrible so for us we want to give back a model to people utilize all around the world to reclaim indigenous knowledge and to revitalize it because indigenous cultures all around the world hold so much strength in the knowledge of how to live sustainably within the land so we just ask people to like learn the indigenous histories of your regions you know connect with them and learn the plants directly around you respect the efforts to support you know just protecting our natural resources because they're very important you know this is our food this is our land and what we do to the land is going to affect us or affect our next generation one way or the other you know support indigenous food producers because we're trying to create a lot of economic demand for them and be aware of appropriation and in just a simple form of appropriation is just instances of a dominant culture profiting from the customs and cultures of a non dominant culture without the occurrence of any benefits to the non dominant culture so just be really careful is all because you know the word the last thing Native Americans want is for European chefs to tell them how to cook indigenous foods right but people should celebrate the indigenous foods and be aware of it because we should all be celebrating food no matter what we want everybody to enjoy we just want people to be very careful because there's a lot of damage in our history and there's a lot of repair and a healing that needs to be done but we have to start somewhere so [Applause] with that but I did in the beginning yeah thank you guys so we'll have more foods out we did this dish but unfortunately nobody gets to try it but we'll be out for lunch and we have some foods tomorrow and we'll do a book signing tomorrow too so please come see us thank you very much Sean there are I think the standing ovation speaks for itself and I'm so happy to hear how you guys are hearing Sean's message and it's probably one of the most important takeaways that of this conference and so thank you for being receptive thank you to Sean for being so powerful and so striking and so important Thank You Jodie for making this happen we are now going on breaks you

Channel: The Sioux Chef

Views: 23,989

Rating: 4.9901233 out of 5

Keywords: the sioux chef, indigneous foods, sean sherman, sioux chef, cia, Culinary Institute of America, CIAWOF#20, World of Flavors, Native American Foods, Indigneous Chefs, natifs, indigenous food lab, natifs.org, sioux-chef.com

Id: loRoy608LWA

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 22 2018