- We've been harvesting quahogs for about 12,000 years.

These are one of the first things I learned how to do, harvest quahogs.

- [Isabella] On a warm November morning.

- Can I borrow your knife?

- [Isabella] Chef Sherry Pocknett is making seafood chowder.

- So with quahogs, we used the shell for currency back in the 1600s, 1700s.

We just utilize everything in what we do as far as harvesting from the earth.

- [Isabella] At her restaurant, Sly Fox Den, quahogs aren't the only thing on the menu.

- Use the pan and get scrambled eggs.

We make our own venison sausage.

We have something called the Indigenous and we put it on fry bread or we can put it on corn cakes.

You could use duck eggs, you could use quail eggs.

Those are other different eggs that I'm trying to introduce to people.

Beautiful.

We do a duck hash, we do roasted rabbits, we do smoked salmon, smoked bluefish, all that kind of stuff.

- [Isabella] The menu is inspired by the flavors of a childhood lived close to the land.

- They grew up in the 60s, the daughter to both indigenous Wampanoag people.

My mom and my dad.

My dad was the chief of our tribe.

He was amazing.

He fought for our aboriginal hunting and fishing rights.

- [Isabella] The Wampanoag nation once included all of southeastern Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island.

They were the first indigenous people that the pilgrims met.

Contact with Europeans led to disease and war that killed huge portions of the Wampanoag population and threatened their ways of life.

But preserving those ancient traditions was something that Pocknett learned early on.

- I had parents that wanted us to learn how to live by the season, how to take care of ourselves.

We would all pile in my dad's truck, probably in the back of the truck with our dip nets, with our herring nets, and go to the river to see if there was herring in there.

And if there were, saying "Is the river black?"

means it's loaded, that means you can jump in the water and you can probably scoop up two herring in each hand.

That was like one of the highlights of our year.

- [Isabella] And at home, the catch of the day even made it into her toy oven.

- I was probably six or seven and I got a Susie Homemaker and that was the best thing that anybody could ever give me.

There would be quahogs in there.

There would be deer meat or rabbit, whatever was in that refrigerator was going in my little pan.

And I put it probably in that Easy Bake oven for an hour.

So I knew I was the chef of a lifetime I was gonna be.

- [Isabella] But by the age of nine, she began to feel differently about the food her family was eating, particularly for Thanksgiving dinner.

- We had raccoon.

And I love raccoon.

That wasn't, but no, I wanted turkey like everybody else.

And it was really embarrassing.

And when your friends are asking you, what did you have?

"Well I had raccoon or I had muskrat", stuff that my dad literally caught the day before.

- When did you come to appreciate that, oh, this is my indigenous culture and this is something to be proud of?

- Not until later, not until I ran a cultural class myself, I just didn't realize how valuable the teachings that my parents did until I could talk about it, until someone asked me about, you know what about when they ask you about your childhood and you tell them that you ate this and that and you hunted and you fished, that's not the average child.

I'm talking about a child starting at the age of three and four.

You know what I mean?

Frogging.

What?

Who don't like frog legs?

- [Isabella] Today, Pocknett sees her restaurant as a way of sharing her heritage with everyone.

- Ooh, perfect.

The venison sausage and the corn cakes.

I get this every time I come here.

- We are gonna have to come back for dinner because I would like to try the rabbit.

- [Isabella] Many of her dishes have a story behind them.

- Just throw them in.

It's gonna create a flavor of its own.

- [Isabella] Like her Three Sisters Succotash.

- So Three Sisters are corn, squash, and beans.

And they were a gift to us from the crow, the bird.

(speaking foreign language) That's how you say crow (speaking foreign language) in my language.

Thank God we haven't lost our language.

Losing the language is like losing a tribe.

- [Isabella] Another dish speaks to the history of colonization.

Fry bread was originally a Navajo dish invented when they were forcibly relocated.

- The Indians were starving.

They moved them off to a reservation where there's no water, there's no vegetation.

And you know, it was hard to survive.

So they were starving, they were getting sick, so they needed food.

So the government, they dropped off some flour and some lard and told those Indians to figure it out evidently.

- [Isabella] The problems persist to this very day.

According to the partnership with Native Americans, at least 60 reservations in the US don't have enough to eat.

The situation has helped spur a movement called food sovereignty.

The idea is revive traditional ways of growing, foraging, and cooking food.

- Saving our old recipes and cooking the old way without colonizing our food.

Like we wanna go back to before Europeans got here, how we're eating.

I'm trying to teach my people all the different things there were, like you probably never heard of a Jerusalem artichoke or a sun choke, right?

Or a ground nut.

A lot of people use that.

What is that, Roundup for weeds?

Do you know those weeds are dandelion greens that they're getting rid of?

That's food and medicine.

- [Isabella] Pocknett believes in using native plants and animals.

- Lots of good stuff out here.

- [Isabella] Because of health codes, she gets most of her ingredients from distributors.

- You can put what you want in your succotash.

- [Isabella] But Pocknett still serves some family cod fish on the menu.

- So for me, this restaurant here represents, it represents me and my family and it represents my upbringing.

And it represents like a Thanksgiving to teach people that there are more, like what's in your backyard?

You know what I mean?

I wanna teach people that there's more than chicken, steak, and pork chops.

Oh jeez.

- [Isabella] Now a grandmother, her goal is to pass down her knowledge to at least seven generations.

- Wow.

Nice throw.

You have to know how to sustain yourselves, you have to know how to teach your children.

Those are all life ways that were passed down to us through oral history, through oral traditions.

Those are the things that your child is never gonna forget.

And he's gonna be or she's gonna be happy to teach someone else.