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Food

This Chef Is Celebrating Native American Heritage with Tacos

With no processed sugar, meat or flour, the Tatanka food truck serves healthy Native American dishes. Minneapolis chef Sean Sherman hopes the venture will help indigenous diners reconnect with their culinary heritage.
All photos by the author.

Everyone knows American food: dirty burgers with pickles, fried chicken, doughnuts, deep pan pizza. Anything carb-based, fried, and liberally doused in sugar, right?

Well, not exactly. Real American food is clean, nutritious, organic, and local.

That's if you consider, as chef Sean Sherman does, "American food" to be the dishes eaten by Native American peoples before the arrival of Europeans.

READ MORE: Native American Cuisine Turns Japanese at This Oklahoma Supper Club

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Together with Little Earth, an organisation supporting Native American tribes in Minneapolis, Sherman is bringing the original American cuisine to Minneapolis with the help of a food truck called "Tatanka," meaning "buffalo" in the Lakota language.

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Serving traditional food and locally sourced ingredients, Tatanka's dishes include a wild rice or cornmeal base with rabbit, bison, duck, turkey, walleye, or trout, and topping of wild greens.

"I got to a point where I thought it was silly that there weren't any Native American restaurants out there at all," Sherman explains.

READ MORE: Native American Cuisine Turns Japanese at This Oklahoma Supper Club

An Oglala Lakota Sioux, Sherman grew up on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the third largest Native American reservation in the US. He worked in restaurants around Mount Rushmore before becoming a chef and moving to Minneapolis. It was there that he discovered the local organic movement.

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Chef Sean Sherman preparing dishes for the Tatanka food truck. All photos by the author.

As luck would have it, it was around this time that Nathan Ratner, Director of Partnerships and Strategy at Minneapolis's Little Earth community, was looking for a chef who could make native food accessible.

"We needed a chef who had a strong sense of what indigenous food means, what it looks like and needs to taste like," he explains. "As it turns out, there was exactly one chef who fit that vision and it was Sean. It felt like it was ordained."

Given that most large US cities boast restaurants serving food from all over the world, it seems strange that Native American food is widely overlooked. You've probably dipped injera or slurped laksa, but have you ever tried a Sioux walleye dish?

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"I think a large part of why there aren't a lot of Native American restaurants is because many of these communities are still struggling and recovering from the loss of their culture, which happened in a lot of places less than 100 years ago," says Sherman.

When looking for a space in which to launch Tatanka, Sherman and Ratner needed to be sensitive to this.

"We looked into a bricks-and-mortar restaurant but we wanted to introduce native food both to the city and to native communities, to make it accessible and to de-formalise it," Ratner explains. "A food truck was the optimal way to do that."

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The food truck's signature dish is a grilled, open-face taco made with steamed cornmeal.

"We're calling it 'Indigenous Taco' and it's completely healthy," says Ratner. "Nothing's deep fried. There's no flour, no sugar, no sour cream."

Tatanka doesn't sell sodas either, just maple water and infusions of cedar, spruce, cranberry, and sage. The menu may sound simple but it represents years of research by Sherman to uncover the traditional dishes his ancestors would have made.

"I tried to find every book on Native American cooking I could, but every time it was buffalo meatloaf or wild rice risotto, and all these recipes that didn't feel authentic," he says. "I wasn't going back to 1492 or looking into prehistoric native cultures, I was just trying to find the foods of my great grandfather, who grew up traditional and never spoke a word of English."

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The foods Sherman's ancestors ate were tied closely to the land, and so Tatanka focuses on micro-regional ingredients.

"We've cut out all processed sugars, dairy, beef, pork, and chicken. We're not using processed wheat flour." he explains. This also means the food is incredibly healthy, something Sherman says is particularly beneficial for Native American people.

"By removing processed sugar and fructose syrups, it's a healthy step and no processed flours means it's great for people on a gluten-free diet," he explains. "But it's especially good for Native Americans. Genetically, they are really efficient at breaking down energy from food that doesn't have much of it to get the sugars their bodies need."

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During the 1800s, as native populations were moved onto reservations miles away from their original food sources, diets also shifted. No longer able to engage in hunting and gathering practices and introduced to European staples such as flour and lard, Native American nutritional health suffered. Today nearly one in three Native Americans are obese and half the women in this group also count as overweight.

READ MORE: The Maple Water Fad Could Be a Boom to North American Forests

"[Native Americans] were introduced to things like fried bread and the way their genes and insulin were working, it all turned into fat," says Sherman. "Native populations began to experience obesity that was never there before, and we saw a huge rise in diabetes, because their bodies aren't able to break down that kind of diet."

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As well as introducing the street food aficionados of Minneapolis to a taste of their own landscape, the Tatanka truck will be travelling to Native American reservations in Minnesota. Sherman hopes this will give indigenous populations a chance to sample native foods and learn more about healthy diet.

"People like to think that we're doing something really exotic because we're going against the grain," says Sherman. "But there's a world of knowledge and information that's been here forever. It's all around us and always has been. This is the food of my great grandfather and it just happens to be healthy because it's really clean and super-regional. You can't get more Minnesotan than that really."