It’s midday on a summer Tuesday, and most of the tables at the newly-opened Indígena by Owamni are starting to fill up; it’s yet to have a grand opening.
Inside, the sound of drums and chants playing on a big screen is interspersed with conversations and the clattering of utensils in the kitchen. A bright red sign in the center of the restaurant, right above the seafood bar, says “You are on Native Land.”
Indígena by Owamni — which opened its doors on June 23 and had a grand opening on July 4 — carries not just the name but also the legacy of its predecessor, Owamni, which closed at the end of April to migrate just a few blocks to the Guthrie Theater, allowing more space, almost double the crew (approximately 70 in Owamni to 140 in Indígena), and more food to serve more people.
A restaurant opening is stressful business; there are a lot of moving pieces, and a lot of things could go wrong. But Sean Sherman seemed unfazed. Perhaps even re-energized. “This is just an evolution of ourselves,” he said.
As many headlines as Indígena has already made, it is but one part, albeit an important one, of the network of enterprises Sherman, 52, has created over the years to advance his life’s mission — to popularize Indigenous culinary traditions and push back against colonialism.
Sherman grew up in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and started cooking when he was 13. He started his company The Sioux Chef in 2014; his nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or NATIFS, in 2017 in the Co-Op Creamery building; and Owamni in 2021. Sherman is a several-time James Beard Award winner.
He is slated to open Šhotá Indigenous BBQ by Owamni on Franklin Avenue — home to the city’s Native American cultural corridor — toward the end of year and is expanding a program that will provide ready-made Native meals to schools, hospitals, and other institutions across the state; Sherman said he is also set up for national as well as international expansion.
“To me, this is just the start of everything,” Sherman said. “We built so much, and we’ve been doing this now for 12 years, but I feel like we’re still starting because I see a bigger and brighter future of what’s available and what’s possible,” Sherman said.
Since the interview in June, Šhotá’s opening date had to be reconsidered as the team settles into Indígena, Patina Park, NATIFS’ chief operating officer, said. The team is hoping to do a market analysis before setting an opening date for the barbeque joint. Park added that the meals for Native organizations will be up and running by next month.
Seasonal ingredients from Native producers
A lot of “what’s available and what’s possible” are served to guests at Indígena through dishes that use pre-colonial ingredients and don’t feature flour, along with beef, pork, chicken, dairy, soy, and cane sugar.
Every ingredient, Sherman said, is intentionally and strategically sourced from Indigenous producers big and small from the state, and across the country, a practice that has been at the core of Sherman’s mission.
From roasted crickets, bison bone marrow and hand harvested wild rice to sweet potato gnocchi, elk ribs, wild caught salmon, and whole quail — the menu showcases and celebrates the produce. Even the cocktails, accented with seasonal, small-scale ingredients, show a different possibility of what great produce can do.
The menu is adjusted according to seasonality of ingredients, supplied by small-scale Indigenous producers. The network also involves big scale producers who are able to continue to supply throughout the year. In fact, there is a purchasing tier in place: local and regional Indigenous producers followed by national and international and then local BIPOC farms; big organic producers are at the bottom of the tier.
Sherman doesn’t want to “gatekeep” small producers even as he is trying to scale up his business. “We can be very flexible, and so we build our menus very carefully, knowing what we have the capacity for, and what’s out there.”
One of the newer producers to join the network his restaurant works with is Anne Whitehat, a Native herbalist who runs Miss Anne’s Maypop Herb Shop in New Orleans. Whitehat worked with Indígena to come up with a unique and custom tea blend for the restaurant consisting of blueberries, sumac, lemon balm, lemongrass and basil.
“Most plant medicines that you come across today, whether they’re in an herb store or a health food store or anything like that, they originally come from us,” Whitehat said. “We’re the original keepers of that knowledge.” To her, the collaboration allows people to know about that generational knowledge.
A 50-year-old family-run Arizona farm supplies Indígena’s kitchen with the tepary beans Native to the Southwest and Mexico which feature in at least three dishes.
“To be able to have our foods cooked in the way that they were since time immemorial is pretty amazing,” Brandy Button, the daughter of Ramona Button, and manager of special projects at Ramona Farms, said.
“To see what Sean is doing is opening the minds of people and making them see that it’s doable, and making communities realize that they can do this,” she said about educating people about Native food practices.
Sherman also works with Native Wise and Dream of Wild Health, both Minnesota-based food producers.
Owamni invested $600,000 toward sourcing from Indigenous producers during its last full year (April 2025 to March 2026); with Indígena, that number is expected to quadruple, he said.
For Dominique Miles, head chef at Indígena, learning to cook without colonial ingredients and adjusting to the in-season availability of produce was like learning a new language, one that made a lot of sense to her as an African American chef.
“Sometimes we don’t have [certain produce]. The Earth didn’t provide it for us, so let’s just find something else to replace it,” she said. “You shouldn’t have one thing all year round.”
Expanding Native food access
Eating at Indígena isn’t cheap; a meal can cost anywhere between $40 to $100 a person. It’s designed to be a fine dining experience, and an economic tool that powers Sherman’s food justice projects through NATIFS.
The organization is rooted in food access and education about Native food while addressing the economic and health crises among many Native communities. One of the upcoming projects at NATIFS is Šhotá which will offer Native barbeque at a much more affordable price point. The joint will open toward the end of this year and employ 40 to 50 people.
“Indigenous barbecue to me is just really a heartbeat of what American foods are,” Sherman said. “If you look at the history of American foods in general, it starts with Indigenous and then it becomes enriched with Indigenous peoples who are stolen from Africa and them bringing their own technique and expertise into the whole situation.
“If you look at Southern food, which is often defined as American food, you see things like succotash and cornbreads and grits and smoked meats, and all of these things are coming from a kind of interweaving of these two Indigenous cultures coming together because of colonialism.”
The former Seward Co-Op Creamery building will also house some of the Native products that were available at the Indigenous Food Lab in Midtown Global Market which was shut down last June.
Sherman is planning to expand Native food access through traditional meal kits that can be made available to educational and health institutions across reservations, not just in Minnesota but the country at large. To him, this is a way of “trying to change the way I had food when I grew up on the reservation,” referring to government commodity foods which mostly included canned foods.
Francesca Koffron, culinary program coordinator at NATIFS has been developing that program — called Tradish — since the beginning of this year. Tradish originally started as a concept when NATIFS was offering meal kits to the Native American Community Clinic in Minneapolis. The objective is similar — bring back Native nutritional and food traditions — but takes a much more educational approach.
They put together up to 100 meals a month and have been delivering to the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, the Nawayee Center School as well as the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis. The meal kits also include a recipe card as well as educational materials of the ingredients.
The meal kit Koffron has put together for August is also made up of pre-colonial ingredients: turkey burgers with sweet potato fries and buns made out of arepa dough.
“We’re trying to make these recipes accessible and also somewhat familiar to people, so that they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, I know what that is,’” Koffron said.
‘Food has always been political‘
For Sherman, food has always been political and a means of resistance. But his mission, he said, came under a new light this past winter during Operation Metro Surge when people of color were being racially profiled and targeted, including Natives. One of Sherman’s employees was detained.
In fact, it even inspired the name of the restaurant. “I gave this restaurant a colonial Spanish word as its name ‘Indígena’ because of the demonization of people who are speaking Spanish, who happen to be Indigenous, and I just wanted to open us up more to start to erase borders.”
“Some people [say] ‘just stay out of politics, just do food.’ [But] this has always been political,” he said. Perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of that resistance right now is his anti-ICE Supper Club slated for this fall. Attendees will come together for a meal at Indígena with the chef himself, followed by Wrecktangle Pizza and finally at Hai Hai; proceeds from the supper club will be donated to the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC).
“I think restaurants are a great untapped space to really engage people and to bring some energy into the whole situation and get people excited about what’s next, which is fighting this fascist regime,” Sherman said.
His business, too, is set up in a way that weathers the whims of governments and philanthropic as well as private donations. This is so designed because Sherman doesn’t feel secure under the current administration considering “what we know their intentions are with ICE raids and immigration policies and just how they view DEI practices in general, which we fall flatly into a DEI bucket.”
Indígena is operated under the nonprofit NATIFS but under a corporate arm with separate boards; the only shareholder of the corporation is the nonprofit. This is to be able to avoid dependence on grants and/or government money, have more freedom to be political and experimental, and use the restaurants as revenue engines and job creators for the mission.
Indígena currently operates as an LLC under NATIFS. But the organization’s chief of staff, Heather Leach, and Park explained that Sherman aims to operate Indígena under a public benefit corporation which will have its own board reporting to the NATIFS board.
A public benefit corporation is like a for-profit business with a mission for social commitment integrated in the structure and a legally binding social purpose in addition to its general business purpose. This structure, Sherman said, will allow more freedom to be political and experimental, and use the restaurant as a revenue engine and job creators for the mission.
Opening doors
Sherman calls Minnesota home, but his mission, he said, doesn’t know borders. He’s already expanding his meal program to Native institutions in Bozeman, Montana, focused on the culinary traditions and wisdom of Montana’s tribes. He’s secured funding to expand into Alaska, and is also eyeing Albuquerque, New Mexico,; Tucson, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Malibu, California.; Honolulu; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and New York City for Native culinary education, meal access and Indígena locations.
It’s not a surprise that he has lost count of how many hours a week he works.
But Sherman doesn’t expect this work to be fulfilled in his lifetime. In fact, that’s how he always meant it to be: to be “an instrument” and a “door opener,” to train future generations to carry on this mission beyond his time.
“I feel like I only have X amount of years in my lifetime to get it done. And I could keel over, opening up a restaurant is stressful as [expletive.] I could just die right here. But I want to do as much as I can before that happens, and that’s what keeps me going. I just want to keep pushing the envelope as far as I can.”
Indígena by Owamni
Sean Sherman’s latest entry into the Minnesota food scene brings Native foods to the Guthrie Theater location.
- Location: 806 S 2nd St, Minneapolis, MN 55415
- Hours: Open from 11am to midnight except on Mondays
- To visit: Call (612) 444-1846 or make a reservation through the website
Correction: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the location of NATIFS when it was founded in 2017; add new information about Šhotá‘s opening date; clarify the nonprofit board structure of Indigena; and update the annual amount Owamni invested in Native producers.
