Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson
Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef, and Dana Thompson, co-CEO and cofounder of all Sioux Chef enterprises
Up the limestone-dusted stairs, in one of the many abandoned riverfront mills that even today line some of the priciest core downtown real estate in Minneapolis, I found a window covered with construction cloth. “We found the millstone,” calls Dana Thompson, behind me. She’s explaining interesting tidbits about the city’s wildly ambitious Water Works construction project, transforming this space between the Stone Arch Bridge and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge into several public spaces including Owamni by the Sioux Chef, an Indigenous-foods restaurant coming this spring from the Sioux Chef team.
“We found train tracks,” she adds. They also found something the size of a bathtub that looks like a spiral screw. Whenever they found anything, archaeologists came to determine whether the found thing was valuable. The enormous rusting spiral screw was valuable enough to keep, yet valueless enough to keep outside in the rain on the plaza planted with indigenous edible and medicinal plants. This plaza is where folks will lunch after parking bikes or docking kayaks on the river docks. It will seat 150; the restaurant will seat 65 indoors. The whole thing will be familiar to anyone who lives in Minneapolis—Owamni will look almost exactly like the Mill City Museum, barrel vaults and limestone, pale stone reclaimed ruins, and spare. Owamni will follow the park pavilion model, like Sea Salt, giving a percentage of sales back to the city. Through a slit torn in the construction cloth, I peered out at St. Anthony Falls, the rest of the view blocked. For a moment, there was nothing but Mississippi falls and me—the enormity of the moment rose up, almost too much to take in.
In the year 1700, out that gap of window on the same river, I would have seen the people we now call Dakota and Lakota under the airplane-free sky, doing the things people do, watching little kids throw rocks in the water, eating lunch. What kind of lunch? Maybe roast duck, stewed river fish, smoked bison, grilled squash, ground corn.
St. Anthony Falls was a stairstep waterfall then, as magnificent as Niagara Falls, wrote old Father Louis Hennepin, when he came paddling in to put his name on everything. (Would the old friar be mad or glad or simply puzzled to find his name on the avenue that leaps past a landmark Grain Belt beer sign as it connects gay landmarks like the Gay 90’s and the Saloon to old Ukrainian Nordeast?) Come check this out, he wrote to the world: It’s beautiful, it’s powerful, we’ll call it St. Anthony Falls, actually.
“The islands in the river were really sacred,” explains Thompson, coming to stand with me and peer at the remaining islands. “Dakota women would travel hundreds of miles to have their babies. It was a place of peace, with eagles above, and was supposed to be lucky and create a good life for your child.” Thompson, who is Dakota from northern Minnesota, likely had great-great-grandmothers who gave birth by these falls.
Photo by Dana Thompson
Duck pemmican
Duck pemmican, made with minced cooked duck and native berries, to spread on seed crackers
“My big idea is that you’ll be able to drive across the nation in any direction and experience different Indigenous foodways.”
Sean Sherman
Plenty of people listened to good old Father Hennepin. By 1800, the Indigenous people who called the Minneapolis riverfront sacred were all moved west and north. Some of these people were Sean Sherman’s ancestors. He was born on the Pine Ridge reservation in 1974, grew up to become a Minneapolis chef, had an epiphany that he knew hundreds of European recipes but no Lakota or Dakota ones, and dedicated himself to bringing Indigenous foods to wider attention.
His life-and-work partner, Dana Thompson, who had a background in branding in marketing (she worked at Target) and star-making (she booked bands for the Aster Cafe and was in half a dozen herself), helped Sherman brand and market himself as The Sioux Chef. Today they are cofounders and co-CEOs of all entities Sioux Chef–related. Sherman is charismatic and tireless. In the year before COVID hit he traveled to 28 states and countries, evangelizing the importance of Native American food, the food that is so much less familiar to most Americans than croissants (French), coffee (African), or Thai (Thai).
“How many Thai restaurants are there in the Twin Cities?” Thompson asks, pointing out where the Owamni bar will be. “How many people know Thai food really well but don’t know any Indigenous foods?”
“Dana calls Native American food ‘ironically foreign,’” says Sherman, showing me the space that will hold Owamni’s open kitchen. “It’s the food from exactly right here that’s exactly under your feet that seems foreign for some reason. People are always asking me where to get the ingredients for my recipes: Where do you buy fresh cedar for tea? You don’t. Go outside with a knife.”
The Dakota story of the sacred falls would have seemed to have reached a tragic end with the twinned 19th-century events of Minnesota statehood and the federal war against the Dakota. Nothing would tell you that a 215-seat Indigenous restaurant would ever call the Mississippi riverfront home. The people who streamed into the state in the 1800s saw the evident power of the falls and used that power to turn water wheels and millstones. Wheat, originally from Turkey, turned Minneapolis into Mill City. The seeds of current Fortune 500 companies, including General Mills, were sown.
One of the late-arriving would-be industrialists at the falls who couldn’t find a good place to plant a new water wheel thought maybe he could solve the problem with a tunnel, collapsing the sacred site in the process. (The concrete-apron falls you see today were the solution to that catastrophe.)
Thompson’s grandfather, Clem Felix, born 1892, learned all the local place names and waterway names from the last generation to live there. Felix worked with the writer Paul Durand to write them all down. “Owamni” was the name for the base of the falls, where the water swirled. Sean Sherman grew up on Pine Ridge with his dad working on various microfinance community initiatives. That’s the origin of his commitment to lifting up Indigenous farmers and producers. To say that Owamni is the work of both Thompson’s and Sherman’s whole lines would be some truth.
Owamni is only part of what Thompson and Sherman are doing here now with Indigenous food. At the Midtown Global Market, 30-odd blocks south, the team is opening the Indigenous Food Lab. Both entities live under the umbrella Thompson created called NATIFS, for North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. I also toured the Indigenous Food Lab, which should open to the public first, in December or January most likely. When it does, it will be a dozen flexible things, including: a store where you can buy Indigenous foods like heirloom hominy and Sioux Chef–branded foods; a commissary kitchen providing Owamni with things like berry sauce; a consumer-facing tea counter for native teas made with ingredients like cranberry, sumac, and cedar; a prep space for donated meals for food shelves and other sites where Indigenous foods are wanted for hungry people; a training space for a new generation of chefs, visiting chefs, and people with tribal knowledge to teach the Indigenous Food Lab crew; and more. A lot more. World-transforming, starting-here more. Once things are up and running, Thompson and Sherman plan on full Western Hemisphere expansion, with locally run, locally relevant Indigenous food spots where Indigenous cooks use Indigenous farmed, foraged, and fished foods.
What they won’t serve is: flour. Not in this old mill, not in front of the falls that flour took and destroyed—even though flour makes a lot of things that are easy to sell, like burger buns and croissants. They’ll likely never serve any of the big staples of the European kitchen at Owamni— no dairy, no chicken, no lemons. This is a decolonized kitchen.
“We feel like we have so much work we’re never going to get through it by the end of our lifetimes,” says Sherman. “We’re going to set up structure and systems for the next generation so they can take it and run with it. The next generation will have access to their foods and know what they are. My big idea is that you’ll be able to drive across the nation in any direction and experience different Indigenous foodways.”
I couldn’t taste any of Sherman’s food for Owamni on this day when working stoves and water lines were still to come. I have had his food other times—wild rice with grilled elk, sunflower seed cookies with wojape berry sauce. What’s often struck me about Sherman’s cooking is how closely it lines up with modern highbrow food trends: Paleo, low sugar, wild, clean. But not fairground food trends. Is there a world where hundreds of people crowd a waterfront and eat wild rice and duck instead of ice cream in cake cones?
I pulled open that rip in the window fabric to see a little more of the waterfront, the tall cottonwoods outside, the river gulls. I knew that, in fact, people had gathered to eat Native foods, not flour-and-sugar foods, right outside for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. The counterrevolution, the restoration, the rebirth, kicks off here, on the river, the sacred river—this coming spring?
This article originally appeared in the December 2020 issue.
