Sean Sherman Why arent there more Native American restaurants TED
Transcriber:
Hi there, my name is Sean Sherman,
I am a chef.
Unfortunately, I don’t have food
for you guys tonight.
Food for thought, I guess, maybe.
I’m here to talk
about Native American food.
I was born and raised
in Pine Ridge in South Dakota,
and our focus are on Indigenous foods.
And, you know, it’s been
a really interesting journey so far.
I started my company
called The Sioux Chef –
S-I-O-U-X, a little play on words –
back in 2014.
But it had come from quite a few years
of trying to research and understand
because I kind of grew up in restaurants.
I grew up in Pine Ridge.
I grew up in Spearfish
and in South Dakota in the Black Hills.
And I started working
a lot of touristy restaurants.
And, you know, I had just a long career.
All through high school and college,
I worked restaurants.
After college, I moved to Minneapolis.
I became a chef
at a young age in the city.
And I’d just been cheffing
for a long time.
And a few years into my chef career,
I realized the complete absence
of Indigenous foods.
And even for myself,
I realized that I couldn’t even name –
I could name less than a handful
of Lakota recipes that were truly Lakota,
things without cream of mushroom
soup in it, right?
(Laughter)
So I was really trying –
It, you know, put me on a path
to try and understand what happened,
like where are all the Native American
foods at, you know?
And so it’s been really interesting.
So Indigenous foods, that shouldn’t be –
there shouldn’t be
a big question mark, you know,
we should know about it,
because no matter where we are
in North America, we’re –
you know, North America obviously begins,
all of its history begins
with Indigenous history, right?
And no matter where we are,
we’re standing on indigenous land.
And so we should have a really good,
strong sense of Native American food
because it’s just the land that we’re on.
It’s just the history
of the land that we’re on.
So for us, it became more
than just serving foods.
It really became talking about it
and talking about why it isn’t here.
And I think it’s a really important
story for us to know.
And it’s also really important to see
the benefit of why
understanding Indigenous foods
could really help all of us in the future.
So, you know, but where are
all the Native American restaurants?
We live in a world today,
you know, where we have –
as the US, we’re like food capitals
of the world, right?
We have some of the best restaurants
in New York City, in Chicago and LA,
and zero Indigenous restaurants
that are focused on the land
that they’re sitting on,
which is kind of insane.
You can have every other restaurants –
and Indian restaurants don’t count,
because that was
my only choice on Facebook,
because when I was trying to decide
how to describe our restaurant –
is it Indian or is it
new American or old American?
But anyways, so what we’ve done
is like we tried to focus on, first off,
just understanding what were
precontact foods, precolonial foods.
And I realized that that term didn’t even
really make a lot of sense to people.
So I think it’s really important
to go through the storyline
because to understand colonial
or what is a precolonial food,
you have to understand colonialism itself.
And to understand colonialism,
the easiest way is just to Google it.
So if you Google the word “colonialism,”
you’ll get a definition,
“it’s a policy or practice
of acquiring full or partial
political control over another country,
occupying it with settlers
and exploiting it economically.”
And this is something
that’s happened not uniquely here.
It’s happened all across the globe.
So all over the Americas,
North and South, all over Africa,
all over India, all over Southeast Asia,
Australia, New Zealand,
Hawaii, you name it,
like this has been a very common history
for a lot of areas around the globe.
For the US, which is our focus,
because we’re right here smack dab
in the middle of the United States,
it’s really important
to understand the history
because the US did a really good job
of smudging its history a little bit.
So if you’re going through high school,
the history you get on Indigenous peoples
probably isn’t the best history.
So you really should read a little bit
more about what really happened.
So let’s start with Manifest Destiny,
which is really kind of something
that was born from the idea
of what was originally
doctrine of discovery,
which basically gave European powers
their own rights to say,
if we discover it, then we own it.
Right? But that policy
doesn’t really work that well,
because if you go into an Apple Store
and you discover a brand new MacBook,
most likely you’re not going to have
the rights to walk out the door with it.
But a lot of our policies and a lot of –
like, our country was built on this notion
that we just have
this right to everything, right?
And people have to remember
how young our history is.
We’re such a young country, you know?
There’s like, barely any time has passed.
So just go back a couple hundred years
and, like, start with 1800s.
So in 1800, the United States
is still not much more
than just the 13 colonies
at that point in history.
And it’s the 1800s that are the most
deadly century for Indigenous peoples.
So a lot of really bad things happened
during this time period,
because in 1800, in reality,
almost all of what is the US
is still completely occupied
by Indigenous peoples and communities
and a huge diversity of them
across the board.
Even despite European powers
having big land claims, you know,
France has a big section
and Spain’s got big chunks
and England is holding on to chunks
and Russia is coming in
and there’s all sorts
of just big land grabs happening.
But in reality,
it’s the Indigenous communities
that have always been there.
But this century is a mass century
of change, you know.
So during this time period,
things move really fast.
So this is just a really tough time.
And for me, this is like
my great-grandfather’s era
because my great-grandfather
was born in the late 1850s
and during his lifetime,
he sees so much change so quickly,
he sees so many battles between
the Lakota and the US government.
He sees the Battle of Little Bighorn
when he’s 18 years old,
during the battle on the Lakota side.
He sees his kids having to go
to boarding school, cut their hair,
learn to speak English,
learn Christianity.
He sees his children –
some of his children even grow up
to fight for the US government.
So it’s such a crazy amount of change
to see in one single lifetime, right?
And during this time period,
people are getting pushed around.
At the beginning of that century,
over 80 percent of that landmass
was under Indigenous control.
And by the end of the century
less than two percent,
only because of the reservation systems.
And this is all just part of the story
of why there aren’t
Native American restaurants,
because we just went through
a really traumatic time in history
where we’re still – we haven’t even
had the time to heal yet,
let alone evolve, right,
when it comes down to all this.
So the US history, you know,
there’s a lot of these big movements
like the Indian Removal Act of 1830,
the Homestead Act of 1862,
the Indian Appropriation Act
that basically said
we’re wards the states,
that we’re not our own entities anymore,
the Dawes Act of 1887.
And all these pieces were very focused
and the government was really, really good
at what they did, you know.
And it all starts with
taking our food away from us.
So the loss of Indigenous food
is something that starts
from the very beginning.
George Washington, one of his
very first things that he does
is send General Sullivan out to push
all the native people outside of the US.
He wanted them captured.
He wanted them brought back.
And they went on this march
that lasts a single summer
and does just that.
So after a single summer,
there’s no more native people
in all of that New York area,
from D.C. all the way up, basically.
And they named George Washington
the president.
They gave the name for a US
president: Town Destroyer,
which is still the name
that they use today
because he just devastated a whole area.
And this is the precedent that gets set
for how the US government
treats the Indigenous peoples
throughout the next century, basically.
So here, in our area,
the very systematic destruction of bison,
which they knew would hurt
a lot of people, and it did.
And by the end of the century,
there was less than 500 on the planet.
And it was very purposeful. So …
But I think what’s most damaging for us
and why we don’t have
a lot of Indigenous restaurants out there
was the loss of our education,
because this whole generation,
like my great-grandfather’s generation
and my grandfather’s
generation especially,
like, those generations
should have been getting
the full extent of Indigenous education.
They should have been learning everything
their ancestors intended them to learn.
How to fish, how to hunt,
how to gather, how to identify plants,
how to live sustainably,
utilising plants and animals around us.
But instead, we went through
a really intense assimilation period
where we basically, you know,
the boarding school systems
stripped this whole generation
of all that knowledge and education.
And it became very traumatic
because this was not a fun situation
for these kids to go through.
This was a military-style school
and they popped up all over the US,
all over Canada.
These kids being again forced
to speak different languages,
forced to learn new religions,
forced to learn skills
that had nothing to do with them.
And being forced to is the situation.
You know, a lot of these kids perished.
We shouldn’t have to worry
about sending kids to school
to see if they’ll survive or not.
But this was a very harsh situation
for kids to go through.
And they went through
physical abuse, sexual abuse.
They went through mental abuse.
And we’re still reeling from that
in our communities today
because of this direct link
to the trauma that happened there.
And being Indigenous in the 1900s
wasn’t much better.
My grandparents were born
before they were even citizens,
which doesn’t happen until 1924.
And then in the 40s and 60s,
the US government started
dismantling a lot of tribes.
So over 100 tribes got dismantled
so they could continue
to take over more land spaces.
We couldn’t vote until 1965.
We couldn’t celebrate religions
until ‘78, you know.
So what does it look like for me
growing up in this?
I was born in the mid-70s
and growing up in postcolonial America.
Like, what kind of foods was I eating?
And I get asked that a lot
because people in the media
are always like,
“You’re native, like what kind of foods
did you grow up with?”
Because they want to hear a cool story
like, “I’d get up in the morning,
take down an elk with a slingshot,
we’d have a big family feast.”
But that wasn’t the reality,
because like I grew up
with the Commodity Food Program
because we were poor,
like a lot of people on the reservation.
And we didn’t even have the pretty cans
when I was growing up.
We just had, you know, these
black and white cans, beef with juices.
And that’s dinner, you know,
and that sucks. So …
And Indian tacos, you know,
even when I was a kid, I was like,
why does our Lakota food
taste like Mexican food?
It didn’t even make sense
to me at the time.
Because we could do better than this.
There’s so much more to learn
and more to offer with indigenous foods.
So it’s really important to understand
what Indigenous foods are.
But first, you have to understand
just like how diverse our nation is.
We’re so diverse, there’s all sorts
of plants and animals out there.
And when you layer
Indigenous peoples on it,
you can see so much
amazing diversity, you know?
This is a language map.
So just look at all those
huge color blocks
and within those color blocks
there’s all sorts of diversity
within those two, right?
Still today, we have 634 tribes in Canada,
573 in the US and 20 percent of Mexico
identifies as Indigenous.
So there’s an immense amount
of indigeneity out there today
and we should be celebrating
that diversity because it’s awesome.
You know, just compare colonial
settler states to Indigenous territories
and you can see that diversity.
It should change everywhere we go.
You know, the US, the food system
shouldn’t just be
hamburgers across the board,
or in Canada shouldn’t just be poutine.
We could do so much better
describing our foods, right?
And so we have to really focus
on Indigenous education
because it’s important for us to learn.
So when we’re looking
at Indigenous education,
it’s a study of all these pieces,
wild food, permaculture,
native agriculture, seed saving,
seasonal lifestyles, ethno-oceanography,
hunting, fishing, whole animal butchery,
mycology, salt, sugar and fat productions,
crafting, land stewardship, cooking,
metallurgy, Indigenous history,
traditional medicines, food preservation,
fermentation, nutrition, health,
spirituality, gender roles,
sustainability –
all of that stuff
is this really important education
that we need to learn, you know.
So let’s just break down
some foods real quick.
Proteins are easy.
We learn about how natives were able
to use every single part of a bison.
But that’s just because we didn’t have
the privilege to be wasteful.
We figured out how to be resourceful
with everything that we had
and we treated everything like that.
But basically, anything moving around
is literally game.
And we cut out beef, pork and chicken
because those animals didn’t exist here.
And there are other animals to eat
out there that aren’t those three.
So there’s just a ton of stuff out there.
And you shouldn’t be afraid of something
if it’s not a cow, a pig or a chicken
because there’s a lot of cool foods
out there, and even insects,
it’s so normal
in so many parts of the world
and it was normal here, too.
But for us, our biggest love
is plant knowledge
because you start to learn
the plants around us,
you just see food and medicine everywhere.
The Western diet has never
really taken the time
to learn this amazing biology
that surround us
and all these plants all around us.
Because there’s so much to learn.
There’s all sorts of staples out there,
like the timpsula,
which is the prairie turnip
which grows around these plains.
Camas root from the Pacific Northwest,
wild rice from the Great Lakes,
even just seaweed out there in the oceans,
which a lot of families were utilizing,
or in the deserts
where all the plants look like
they want to hurt you or maim you.
The Indigenous peoples
knew how to live with them.
And another piece
like the domesticated piece,
with all the agriculture,
it’s really important,
because we think of this as agriculture
but we know how damaging this is.
And it’s scary when you see headlines
like, “What should we do
if glyphosate was found in our Cheerios?”
You guys should be
really scared about that.
That stuff’s really nasty, you know.
But it’s just amazing to learn
about Indigenous agriculture
because it goes back so far
and people figured out
all sorts of ways to farm
and build sustained, huge civilisations,
whether they’re
in the middle of the desert,
whether they’re on the coastal regions,
or way up here in the Dakotas.
People were able to farm amazing things
that had an amazing amount of diversity
that we need to protect.
We are the stewards
of what’s left of this diversity.
And a lot of it got wiped off the map
in the 1800s with all that colonialism
that was going on.
So we have to be understanding so we can
protect these for the next generation
because these could disappear
if we don’t do anything about it.
So it’s really important
to understand that.
So to use Indigenous knowledge
in today’s world,
it’s just important to open up your eyes,
you know, stop calling everything a weed
because that just means
you don’t know what it is.
You know, our kids can name
more K-Pop bands than they can trees
and that’s your fault, you know?
(Laughter)
We need to teach them things
that are important.
Because, like, just look around.
There’s food everywhere
and we should be making pantries,
like our grandparents did,
and our great-grandparents.
They just used the food
that was around us.
So we should just
be making our own pantries
that tastes like where we are,
what makes us unique in our own region.
And that’s why we should have
Native American food restaurants
all over the nation,
run by Indigenous peoples.
There’s so much to explore.
There’s so much flavor.
There’s so much health.
And it’s just super healthy, you know,
and it’s fun for chefs to create
and play with all these flavors.
Chefs should be really excited
about getting to learn all of these plants
that aren’t in their diet
because they’re just going
out of a French cookbook.
And for us, we just want to get this food
back into tribal communities especially,
and make people healthy and happy
and break a lot of the cycle of, you know,
government reliance on food
and huge rates of type 2 diabetes
and obesity and heart disease
because of this low nutritional food base
that the government’s
been feeding us for too long.
And we just need to think
about how we can adjust
and make a better lifestyle.
We need to use our land spaces better.
Lawns are fucking stupid.
(Laughter)
We need to really do something better.
We could just be growing food
out there, you know?
We could just be putting
food plants everywhere.
We need more community gardens,
more permacultural landscapes.
It’s that easy.
If we can grow 30 golf courses
in Palm Springs
in the middle of the desert,
just think what we could do
if we just did that for good
and just put food everywhere, you know?
An organic food, food that wants
to grow in that certain region.
So, you know, Indigenous diet
is really the most ideal diet.
It’s healthy fats.
It’s diverse proteins,
it’s low carbs, it’s low salt.
It’s a ton of plant diversity.
It’s organic agriculture.
It’s celebrating cultural
and regional diversity.
And it’s seasonal.
It’s just really good.
It’s like what the paleo diet
wishes it was,
when it comes down to it,
because that just makes sense,
you know, and we need to protect this.
We need to get this out there.
And again, it’s not unique here.
There’s Indigenous peoples
all around the world
and there’s an Indigenous knowledge base
that’s basically untapped
because of the colonial structure
that’s been put everywhere.
We need to be protecting people
in Africa and India
and Southeast Asia and Australia,
New Zealand, Hawaii,
South America, North America.
We need to protect those.
We need to be celebrating diversity
instead of trying to build stupid walls
to keep people out.
We need to have, you know,
healthy food access,
cultural food producers,
regional food systems,
local control of food systems,
not governmental control,
access to Indigenous education
and environmental protections
to protect a lot of this
natural food that surround us.
We need to be better connected
to our nature around us
and really, truly understand
how it’s a symbiotic relationship.
We’re not above it, right?
If we can control our food,
we can control our future.
And for us, it’s an exciting time
to be Indigenous
because we are taking
all of these lessons from our ancestors
that should have been passed down to us,
relearning them
and utilizing the world today
with everything it has to offer
and becoming something different.
We’re at the stage
where we’re ready to evolve.
This is an Indigenous evolution
and revolution at the same time.
So I hope someday
that you can drive across this nation,
stop at Indigenous-run food businesses
and see this amazing amount
of diversity out there
and just think about it, you know.