By the end of this year, Sean Sherman’s staff will begin serving up bison brisket and ribs, smoked fish and wild game at his new Indigenous barbecue spot on Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis.
But Sherman has a much bigger vision for the Co-op Creamery building, which he purchased in January of this year with his nonprofit, NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems).
The renamed Wóyute Thipi, or “food building” in Dakota, will also house NATIFS’ headquarters, along with a commissary kitchen that will supply Indigenous meals to sites across the state — one of a network of Indigenous food hubs he is looking to seed across the country.
“I see this amazing opportunity to make some really impactful changes on the food systems,” Sherman says, like those he grew up with on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
“The kind of food that we had access to is still very prevalent, with not a lot of nutritional access, and people surviving off of gas stations and commodity [federal] food program foods,” he says.
NATIFS is in the middle of a $4 million capital campaign to launch the new hub, money the nonprofit hopes to raise through donors and grants. Sherman says the current timeline is to begin construction in the summer and open Wóyute Thipi in the fall — depending on fundraising.
One boost came in February, when Sherman received a $300,000 Elevate grant, including $250,000 that will go directly to NATIFS to support its work to make Indigenous foods more widely available.
Sherman has earned multiple James Beard Awards, including Best New Restaurant for Owamni, which offers a North American Indigenous menu at its Minneapolis riverfront location. But he says restaurants play only one part in addressing the inequality resulting from the systemic marginalization of Native peoples.
“Restaurants don’t do anything for food relief, because restaurants cost money and are a privilege to go to,” he says. “A restaurant like Owamni is busy every day, but it can only feed so many people in a day, because it takes time to come there, eat, and sit down.”
He adds that the unhealthy foods readily available at reservations relate to health disparities in the Native community, such as increased rates of diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
Revitalizing Native foodways
Sherman sees an institution like Wóyute Thipi as the other part of the solution to economically empowering Indigenous foodways and systemically normalizing Indigenous foods. He is most excited about the commissary kitchen, which will invest money towards Indigenous producers and potentially feed thousands by integrating Indigenous foods into institutions such as hospitals, schools, large corporations or penitentiaries.
He has already begun building partnerships with Minneapolis Public Schools and nearby Augsburg College. He also envisions freezing food produced by the kitchen and shipping it directly to tribal communities across the state.
“We’ll probably start off with a lot of plant-based pieces. There’ll be a lot of soups and sides like wild rice, beans, potatoes and squash dishes.” From there, these Native food ingredients can be combined in varying recipes, such as squash potato salad, maple baked beans or wild rice pilaf.
Distributing ready-to-eat foods is only one prong of Sherman’s approach; he also sees an opportunity to supply institutions with bulk Indigenous products like wild rice, corn or beans as a way to further invest in Native producers and suppliers.
NATIFS is no stranger to large-scale food relief efforts. In 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and after the killing of George Floyd, NATIFS distributed 10,000 meals a week through the Indigenous Food Lab, a marketplace, kitchen and training center housed in Midtown Global Market.
Midtown Global Market has served as a home for NATIFS since 2020, and Sherman says he loves being a part of the multicultural community there and he’s proud of what they’ve created. “I’d love to hold on to that space as long as we can. But of course, a lot of our focus will come into [Wóyute Thipi], because this will be our first official property where it’s our own and we can do what we want with it.”
Sherman currently has a staff of about 30 at Midtown Global Market. Some, especially administrative staff, will move to Wóyute Thipi, as NATIFS’ work shifts more towards food access. He says the transition creates some unknowns, including the future of the Indigenous Food Lab with its current model, location and programming.
“We’re going to be weighing everything with our whole team, including our board and trying to decide what the best steps are. My hopes and goals are to keep something activated over at Midtown Global, but we’ll just see what happens,” says Sherman.
However, he also sees Wóyute Thipi as an exciting opportunity for NATIFS, despite the transition. “There’s some unknowns in front of us, but we’re also poised for a lot of positive change. We’re setting ourselves up to be so much more impactful with these programs we’re creating,” he says.
Wóyute Thipi is the first model of this kind, but won’t be the last. Sherman is in the works of expanding this model of Indigenous food production and distribution to Bozeman, Montana.
Sherman and his partners at the University of Montana and the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative collaborated on grants to develop similar programs supporting Native food producers, preserving Indigenous culinary knowledge, and distributing Indigenous foods across the state. They recently signed a lease in Bozeman for a space to house the project. By summer, they hope to have Montana-based staff hired and trained, with operations projected to begin by the end of the year.
Additionally, he is connecting with people across the United States to build Indigenous food hubs in other places, such as Anchorage, Albuquerque, Honolulu, Portland, Ore., Seattle, California and North Carolina. The goal, he says, is to create as many centers as possible to support access to healthy Indigenous foods.
Indigenous spin on Southern barbecue
In addition to the commissary kitchen, Sherman plans to open Šhotá, the nation’s first Indigenous barbecue restaurant. Šhotá will allow NATIFS to expand into catering.
“Between this kitchen and Midtown Global Market, we’ll be able to pump out a ton of food and it’ll go directly to people that need it. … All that money that comes through the restaurant just supports everything we’re doing,” says Sherman.
Šhotá, loosely meaning “smoke” in Dakota, will follow similar principles of Owamni in the use of pre-colonial ingredients, but with a more accessible price point and casual, counter-service dining style.
Lee Garman, the executive chef at Owamni, is leading the design of Šhotá’s menu as well as the meals produced in the commissary kitchen. When Sherman and Garman saw the commissary kitchen’s smoker and walk-in sausage-making area, barbecue became an obvious choice for the new restaurant.
“It’ll be similar to traditional barbecue in the way you order your food,” Garman says. “You’ll order the brisket and ribs, a couple of sides, and bread of some sort.”
As the staff puts an Indigenous spin on Southern barbecue, the menu won’t feature the usual pork, beef, and chicken, Garman says. Diners will instead find corn-based tortillas and arepas instead of bread, and a selection of smoked local lake fish and game meat including elk, bison, and duck, all sourced from Native suppliers.
Although Indigenous barbecue may seem like a new concept, both Sherman and Garman hope to connect eaters to barbecue’s cultural and historical roots.
Several dishes associated with the American South, such as grits, succotash and gumbo, all drew inspiration from Indigenous dishes that were eaten thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists.
“The first time the word barbecue is ever mentioned, is when some Spanish explorers landed on an island in the Caribbean,” Garman says. “They saw a big barbecue rack for smoking and cooking meat over the fire. The word barbecue is a Spanish word, for what they saw those Native people doing.”
However, it is the unique exchange of foodways between enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples that created American barbecue as we know it today. “If you look at American history, a lot of people who were forcibly enslaved were doing a lot of the cooking and utilizing what was there,” Sherman says. “Barbecue is born from a blend of both Afro and Indigenous knowledge bases.”
Extending an American Indian corridor
It’s significant to Sherman and his staff that Wóyute Thipi has found a home near the American Indian Cultural Corridor, a several-block stretch of Native organizations, art galleries and businesses along East Franklin Avenue.
The Co-op Creamery was once the Twin Cities’ largest milk distributor. Since then, the building has had many lives. Most recently, the Seward Co-op ran a cafe in the building, but the cafe closed in 2020 during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Robert Lilligren, CEO of the Native American Development Institute (NACDI), says there are historical roots for the concentration of Native organizations in the area.
The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 forced many Native Americans to move off their reservations for job opportunities, education, and health care. According to urban legend, Lilligren says, when buses brought Native people to Minneapolis, they were dropped off at what is now East Phillips Park. Many eventually found housing and community in the area.
The vision for the American Indian Cultural Corridor was born from the American Indian Community Blueprint, a living document spearheaded by NACDI and other Native organizations.
The document established an asset-based community development framework, which looked to leverage the unprecedented concentration of Native peoples, organizations and property ownership along East Franklin Avenue.
They wanted to build, Lillgren says, “A cultural destination that is Native-led, predominantly Native-owned, and generates an economy in the way that Native people want to participate in an economy, rather than that of the capitalist society we live in.”
The addition of Wóyute Thipi on Franklin Avenue expands the American Indian Cultural Corridor to the east. This organic growth highlights the work of a new generation of Indigenous leaders, Lilligren says.
“Sean and other people of his generation have grown up with a much stronger sense of their cultures, languages, and traditions,” he says.
“They’re really the next stepping point for this next iteration of development.”
Lilligren is confident that Sherman’s high profile and strong voice for Indigenous food sovereignty will draw more visitors and investment to the American Indian Cultural Corridor.
“Just from my few conversations about the property since [Sean] told me he’s purchasing it, it’s synergistic. If more people come to Šhotá, then they might go down a few blocks to the Indian Center, then maybe another block to All My Relations Gallery,” he says.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Lee Garman’s last name.
