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The founder of The Sioux Chef, a company devoted to Indigenous foods, created recipes to showcase tribal diversity across the lower 48 states.

Chef Sean Sherman, founder of the company The Sioux Chef, uses ingredients native to the Americas to draw attention to the long-forgotten Native culinary tradition. His research and cooking are also a way to push back against processed foods that he and others blame for grave health consequences in the U.S. today.

As I walked through the tables, an elder grasped my hand and pulled me down next to her. She looked  at me with joyful tears in her eyes and said that she remembered these flavors from her childhood. Memories began to flow out of her.

Sean Sherman, the founder and CEO of The Sioux Chef was awarded a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, which “spotlights the important and complex realms of sustainability, food justice, and public health.”

Every November, I get asked an unfortunate, loaded question: “You’re a Native American—what do you eat on Thanksgiving?” My answer spans my lifetime.

LAKE TRAVERSE INDIAN RESERVATION, N.D. — The moon was full and the chokecherries were ripe in the southeastern corner of North Dakota. “It’s the one smell that shoots me back to being young,” said Sean Sherman, as the berries boiled under a red-veined froth.

Chef Sean Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. His business, The Sioux Chef, specializes in Native American food — specifically the pre-reservation foods of the Dakota and Ojibwe people who lived on the Great Plains.

Like most chefs, Sean Sherman practically lives in the kitchen. But in his spare time, this member of the Oglala Lakota tribe has been on a quest to identify the foods his ancestors ate on the Great Plains before European settlers appeared on the scene.

Pasta, sushi, tacos, samosas, and pad thai: In the U.S., enthusiastic eaters will likely be able to name traditional dishes from a wide variety of cuisines around the world. But most of us couldn’t name a single Native American dish from any one the vast network of tribes, cultures, and cuisines that spread across the U.S. before Europeans arrived. Today, farmers, activists, and chefs are trying to change that.

In the early 1990s, when my son, Clay, and I were in the process of opening the Corn Dance Café in Santa Fe with the plan to serve only pre-contact Native American foods, we were faced with the multifaceted dilemma of what foods to serve, from which tribal groups, and where to get the ingredients.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it has been to explain what indigenous food is,” chef Sean Sherman tells me. “I’ve had the same conversation over and over. I have to go back to the beginning all the time.” For Sherman, a Sioux chef championing indigenous food, going back to the beginning means talking about the unbroken presence of Native people in the Americas, and the food systems that once nourished them.