Sean Sherman Makes ‘American Food’ a Much Bigger, Older Question
Sean Sherman’s work asks what American food looks like when Indigenous ingredients, knowledge, and food systems are treated as foundational rather than decorative history.
Any serious conversation about American food should get uncomfortable with the word “traditional” fairly quickly.
Sean Sherman makes sure it does. Through NĀTIFS, the Indigenous Food Lab, his books, and the restaurant now operating as Indígena by Owamni, he centers Indigenous ingredients and food knowledge that long predate the standard American culinary timeline. A regional food map that begins with European settlement is already missing part of the map. Native foodways are not a preface to American cuisine; they are part of its foundation.
His work also keeps food attached to everything that produces it — land, season, sovereignty, language, community. Wild rice, corn, beans, squash, game, berries, seeds, and regional plants are not a list of “heritage foods.” They belong to systems of knowledge and relationship, and those systems deserve more than a trendy garnish.
For a site interested in state and regional cuisine, that lands as research discipline. Salty & Clever should not borrow Indigenous flavor ideas because they look interesting; the obligation is to understand the source and credit contemporary Indigenous voices, because the line between respectful exploration and aesthetic theft sits exactly there.
And the work points forward, which matters. The 2025 book Turtle Island and the 2026 evolution of Owamni into Indígena both treat Indigenous food as living cuisine with a future, not a reenactment.
That reframing hands American food writing a better question. Not “what did people used to eat?” but: what knowledge has been ignored, and what changes when it moves back to the center?
Learn from the source
- Sean Sherman’s official site
- Indígena by Owamni / Owamni press and current project archive
- Sherman’s Indigenous food work in Montana and the Indigenous Food Lab
More on Sean Sherman: from Pine Ridge to NĀTIFS: the biography · how the pantry starts with the land
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