Sean Sherman - The Sioux Chefs Indigenous Kitchen

Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

For more information on the Sioux Chef and our work in bringing Native American cuisine to todays world, please visit us at www.sioux-chef.com.

Copyright 2017 Ghost Dancer, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8166-9979-7 (HC)

ISBN 978-1-4529-6743-1 (Ebook)

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

This book is dedicated to our ancestors and all indigenous people who have suffered through centuries of colonialism. We, the First Nation descendants, are living proof of courage and resilience. We offer our work to the next generation so that they may carry the flame of knowledge and keep alive our traditions, our foods, and our medicines for generations to come. We devote these pages to the earth, Turtle Island, our home, our everything, in hopes that we indigenous people will always stand strong to protect her.

Chef Rich Francis

Chef Karlos Baca

Chef Lois Ellen Frank

Chef Andrea Murdoch

Chef Brian Tatsukawa

Chef Freddie Bitsoie

Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz

Valerie Segrest

It is hard to describe the era and the area I was born intoPine Ridge Reservation, 1974wide-open prairies, scents of white sage, bergamot, tall grasses, big skies, and dry, windy, dusty heat. You can smell the weather coming on from miles away. Growing up on Pine Ridge in the 1970s was what most Americans experienced in the 1950s. No seat belts for kids: we rode in the open back of pickup trucks with gun racks in the rear windows.

My younger sister and I lived on our grandparents ranch with cousins a mile down the hill. We all were a motley and feral group of kids, as wild as the dogs we ran with, exploring the grasslands and sand hills, scouting out antelope, mule deer, pheasants, grouse, sandhill cranes, salamanders, mallards, geese, jackrabbits, bull snakes, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs, coyotes, porcupines. Our TV had just three channels, so, except for the Saturday cartoons or reruns of The Brady Bunch, Petticoat Junction, and Little House on the Praire, we were never tempted to watch.

I remember my father trying to teach me to drive a stick in his 76 Ford truck when I was just barely tall enough to stand up over the steering wheel. By age seven, Id learned to handle a rifle and was good at hunting game birds and sometimes antelope and deer, could help dig the wild turnip of the prairie, timpsula, and gather chokecherries. We all pitched in with chores like mending fences, moving cattle to pasture, checking water tanks and windmills, tracking the horses and cattle. We were dusty and gritty, but I never knew that we were dirt poor.

Sean and cousin Justin on Pine Ridge, 1982

The family ranch was about twenty miles outside the town of Pine Ridge and about ten miles away from Batesland, South Dakota, population 200, where I went to grade school in a class of about twelve. Being members of the Oglala Lakota, we attended powwows, Sun Dances, family gatherings, holiday parades, school events. Native American spirit was always present, as was the strong sense of our family. Lakota-language class was as much a part of our school curriculum as English, social studies, and math. My grandparents were both fluent in Lakota, and people from the smaller villages would stop by to visit and talk for hours in that musical language. We were proud of our tribe, proud of our heritage.

Every birthday, wedding, naming ceremony, cattle-branding day, national and traditional holiday, our extended family gathered on the ranch. Our mom, aunts, grandma, and older girl cousins bustled in the tiny kitchen cooking up hearty taniga, a traditional Lakota soup, and earthy timpsula (wild prairie turnip), and Wojape, the Lakota berry soup. Its my favorite dish, and today, as it simmers in our indigenous kitchen, the warm, sweet aroma time warps me back to my freewheeling six-year-old self.

Except for the occasional trip to see other family and shop at the one grocery store in Pine Ridge, we hardly ever left the ranch. Our freezer was stocked with the ranchs beef and the game wed bagged. Our shelves were lined with government-issued canned corn, canned carrots, canned peas, canned salmon, chipped beef, saltines, white flour, and bricks of bright orange commodity cheese. Although my grandmother tended a little garden, her fresh vegetables were a treat, not the norm.

* * *

I suppose it was my destiny to become a chef, but I couldnt have known that when my parents split up and our mom moved my little sister and me to Spearfish, South Dakota, to pursue her college degree. Spearfish is near a beautiful canyon, not far from the Needles Highway (named for the granite spires that jut out of the earth in the Black Hills) and close to our familys cabin. Its named e Spa, in Lakota, and is close to Bear Butte, a sacred place for ceremonies and origin stories, considered the spiritual center of the universe.

For me, this hardscrabble city of 7,000 residents and 11,000 university students was a big, tough placeconservative, Bible-thumping, and white. As a brown and skinny kid with a thick rez accent, I was in the minority for the first time in my life. After school, Id bike over to the university library where my mom studied and I was free to rove three full stories of books, a beautiful thing. On the rez, Id explored the buttes and sand hills and here, in the vast open library, I wandered the stacks and pulled volumes of history, geography, anthropology, and fiction off the shelves and got lost in the thrilling landscape of ideas.

My mom, a single parent going to school and working two jobs, just didnt have time to shop and cook, so she relied on my sister and me to put meals on the table. Because I knew my way around the kitchen, I got a job at the Sluice as soon as I turned thirteen. Named for the gold-mining chutes, the Sluice was a short-order, hectic joint; I bussed and washed dishes and helped prep. That next summer, I worked at Sylvan Lake resort as the youngest on staff. I was a quick study and hard worker and soon pulled up to the grill. Our crew, college-aged kids, bored with steak and potatoes, explored new items such as rattlesnake and beaver, which for me was a thrill. I knew then I loved this work.

Another summer, working for the Forest Service, I identified plants in the Black Hills, documenting their history and culinary and medicinal uses, made notes, and drew pictures in my journals. Coded in my Native DNA is a sense of their value as foodpurslane, wild yarrow, mint, bee balm, cedar, mapleall the edibles that surround us and grow under our feet.