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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, October 9th, and I'm Cynthia Connolly, Senior Director of Programming here at the City Club, and it is my honor to introduce today's forum.

It is part of our Authors in Conversation series, as well as our America 250 Ohio series.

Throughout the year, and in partnership with the America 250 Ohio Commission, the City Club will host conversations to commemorate America's 250th birthday.

This October, our state theme is Ohio Grows: Food and Farms.

All of the foodies here know that the United States is home to a diverse and delicious national food scene.

Walking through New York City, Chicago, LA, and Cleveland, you have your pick of some of the best global cuisine.

Yet despite this diversity, it is not common to see the cuisine of the people whose land we are currently on.

Where are all the Native American restaurants?

I know I personally have been asked this question, and I'm not even a chef.

Yet our speaker today, Chef Sean Sherman, is— it's a question he's confronted many times.

The answer, however, is bigger than you think.

Underneath this question is a deeper conversation about reclaiming culture, connecting with land, promoting health equity, and supporting tribal sovereignty.

Chef Sean Sherman is known as The Sioux Chef, Sioux as in the tribal nation.

Sean is Oglala Lakota and was born and raised in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

It's a fun play on words and has become a globally recognized name synonymous with Sean's cooking style based on pre-colonial indigenous food systems and using only ingredients that are native to North America.

Sean is here to decolonize our diets.

Sean is— oh, yes.

Sean is also a 2023 Time 100 Most Influential Person, the 2023 Julia Child Award winner, and a 3-time James Beard Award-winning chef for Best New Restaurant, Owamni in Minneapolis, which has since expanded to Indígena, And he's a James Beard— he got the James Beard Leadership Award and Best American Cookbook for The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen.

It is a long list of awards.

Congratulations, Sean.

His latest cookbook, Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of Indigenous Peoples of North America, have been praised by author Robin Wall Kimmerer of Braiding Sweetgrass, Chefs José Andrés and Jacques Pépin, and even LeVar Burton, to name a few.

If all of this isn't enough, Sean is also the founder and executive director of nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, which works to build, support, and educate both Native and non-Natives on Indigenous food infrastructure.

We will hear so much about this here shortly, but I also want to introduce our moderator for today's conversation, Michael Shaikh.

He's the author of The Last Sweet Bite, where he explores how the loss of culinary traditions can lead to the erasure of culture and identity.

He's raised in Cleveland and Karachi.

Michael has worked for nearly 2 decades as a human rights investigator, spending intensive— extensive time in conflict zones in Asia and the Middle East.

We had the privilege of hearing from Michael at our City Club Forum last fall.

You can check that forum out in our archives at cityclub.org.

A quick reminder for our livestream and radio audience, if you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Michael Shaikh and Chef Sean Sherman.

Okay, can everybody hear us?

Oh yeah, all right.

So as Cynthia said, I was born and raised here in Cleveland, and so what I'm about to say comes from a place of love.

Cleveland, I understand you don't celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day.

It's time to get with the program.

Yeah, so on that note, I want to acknowledge that there are no federally recognized recognized tribes in Ohio today, but they were— because they were forcibly removed from here.

But we are still on Native land, and for millennia Native Americans have lived here, traveled across here, drawn sustenance and care for the land and waterways of Ohio.

The state's name Ohio comes from a Seneca word meaning beautiful river.

So we respectfully recognize the Indigenous people who have lived and continue to live here in Northeast Ohio So I just want to take a moment and recognize that, that we are on Native land.

So I met Sean in early 2022 researching my book, The Last Sweet Bite, which is about how violence changes culinary traditions, and most importantly, the incredible people trying to keep them alive in real time to protect their cultures for future generations.

And Sean is one of them.

Writing my book let me meet some of the most incredible chefs around the world, from Japan to South Asia, from Europe to South America, and right here in the United States.

For me, a great chef doesn't just change how you think about food, they change how you see the world.

So in that vein, I want Edna Lewis to did that.

So did Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard Project, José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen, and the great storyteller Anthony Bourdain.

Sean belongs in that company.

He came to the national stage later than they did, but it is no stretch to say that he is one of the most important chefs in America today.

It's hard to overstate the impact of his work, not only in the culinary world, but also in the country.

And as Jeremy Umansky said last night, explaining to my little brother, Sean, you are the pinnacle of a movement pushing us to think about what America is and what it could be.

So we'll get to his work in depth, but first I just want to give you one statistic that underscores how great Sean Sherman and his team are.

Since he opened his restaurant in Minneapolis in 2021, it has been sold out every night.

So please, again, welcome and join Sean.

So let's get to the meat of our conversation.

I want to spend some of our time on your groundbreaking work, but I first want to have us all working from the same set of facts.

You're a futurist, I know, Sean, but I want to go back in time for a moment to look at the historical problem you're trying to fix.

The shorthand for all this is colonialism and genocide, but I think we need to break down those words into its constituent parts.

It also matters that we place these words and these concepts in time.

Indigenous people have been on this continent since time immemorial, and Americans tend to think that history began when Europeans arrived.

So in the grand sweep of this continent's history, a few hundred years is yesterday.

The violence is recent.

So Sean, it's one thing to read about this violence in a book, it's another to hear from someone whose ancestors, whose relatives, and someone who lives it.

So I was wondering if you could talk about what this looks like in practice, how you've experienced it within your family, and where do you see these concepts operating today?

Yeah, well, thank you.

And thank you guys.

I'm just pleased to be here and to be able to talk on the stage and to talk about some really important topics and just really happy to be here with you specifically.

Thanks, Sean.

So big fan.

And so my work really stemmed from growing up on Pine Ridge Reservation.

Pine Ridge, if you look up statistics, they're not pretty.

Extremely high unemployment rates.

We don't have a lot of nutritional food access.

When I was growing up, there were no restaurants on the reservation, which was roughly the size of Connecticut.

We had a single grocery store basically to cover that area, and we had very little— we had a lot of— I was a product of Commodity Food Program foods, USDA Commodity Foods and FDPIR program foods, so a lot of canned vegetables and sodium, canned fruits and and corn syrup, gallons of corn syrup to use for sweetener, the big blocks of American cheese, powdered milk, all these things that are pretty typical.

And we're lucky to have food, yes, but I didn't really think much about it.

But growing up, I wasn't really around a lot of my own heritage foods.

And so this work really kind of— when I found this path, I just kind of realized that it was missing.

There were no Native restaurants.

There were very few Native cookbooks out there on the topic.

And I myself, even growing up on a reservation, didn't know that much about what Lakota foods were.

And so it sent me on a path to understand all of that.

Why did that happen?

And going back in history, I didn't have to go back too far because as Lakota, we were still fighting the US government till basically the turn of the century because they discovered gold in the Black Hills in 1876.

And things turn really violent and rather quickly in a short time period.

And the reservation systems are set up really quickly afterwards, and a lot of Lakota people are pushed onto that, but we still fight.

So the Battle of— or it's like the massacre at Wounded Knee happens in 1890, and that's just not that long ago.

No, not at all.

So for my grandparents, they were born just post of that whole situation, being first generation to go through boarding schools.

To lose a lot of knowledge of what it meant to be Lakota, to be forced to learn English, be forced to learn Christianity, and to be stripped of a lot of Native culture.

And whereas my great-grandparents' generation, they were there during that cusp period of growing up on the plains as Lakota, but then seeing such a massive shift of culture and what was going on.

And I just think about witnessing all of that change in a short time period.

So my work forced me to not only think about what were my ancestors eating, harvesting, where did we get basic things like salts fats and sugars, how did we keep a nutritious diet, what kind of animals did we use, the plant knowledge, and just all of this massive food system knowledge.

So I was very curious about that from a chef perspective, but it also forced me to understand history as to what happened and why did this information go away so quickly.So why did— I knowing that gold was discovered in 1876.

So within less than a century, how did things shift so quickly?

How did we lose so much knowledge and information?

And so it forced me to learn about US history, US colonization, US colonialism, settler colonialism.

And so it turned me into a public speaker by accident.

I had no idea that was gonna be on my life bingo card.

So I had to learn how to articulate a lot of this history and to really talk about things.

And so when I'm doing my talks, I do have a TED Talk out there that was from a while back, and I do a really quick 15-minute version of an hour-long talk, but I do approach it, and typically what I do is I'll I'll explain colonialism in the very beginning, 'cause I think it's just a good point, and what you're talking about is just to get us based here to why are we using terms like decolonization?

What does that actually mean?

Why is colonialism bad?

So colonization or colonialism is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, exploiting it economically, meaning just taking --- that doesn't belong to you.

Am I allowed to say that?

Sure.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

And luckily, we have a holiday celebrating that coming up on Monday.

So I would practice that by going into your local Best Buy and say, look what I just discovered, and seeing how that goes.

But really, we have a lot of evolving to do as a human species, and we're not there by far.

We're tied up with a lot of prejudices, a lot of racism.

A lot of nationalism.

Obviously, our political system is swinging hard right right now, and we're seeing a lot of fear.

We're seeing a lot of unknowns.

you can trace a lot of this just kind of how this history has been happening.

And for Indigenous peoples, we've been feeling it this whole time.So the reason th Native American restaurants across Native America is because of this history of colonization of what happened to us.

Because it's not an old history.

The United States isn't very old.

It started in the late 1700s.

And the aggressiveness that happens in the 1800s is intense because at the year 1800, the US is just a few states which were colonies kind of hugged up against the East Coast, and the rest of the continent is really stewarded by indigenous peoples as it has been for a long time.

But within that single century, they set their eyes on— in 1800, the western frontier was Ohio, literally.

And the Northwest Ordinance in 1779 I think is really what changes that course, because that gives them the justification of taking over land spaces and how they utilize it and how they commodify it and how they become an extremely rich nation overnight almost, just by stripping indigenous peoples of their land spaces and selling it off.

On top of that, using stolen indigenous peoples from Africa to build everything.

And so the history is not very long in America, and I think it's important to know what happened to us as indigenous people.

So we see so much aggressiveness.

Against us as Indigenous peoples, especially in that one century of 1800 to 1900.

So we see Homestead Act and all of these things happening against us, justifying violence and land theft, genocides happening.

California wipes out its entire Indigenous population almost to completion with less than 2 decades, between 1850 and 1870, because of legalized bounty systems where you can make upwards to $200 for the body part of an Indigenous person in that time period, and do that math.

What's the inflation of $200 in 1860?

It's a lot of money.

And so it's really important to understand history.

And I think that's why a lot of people are afraid of history.

And we're seeing a lot of states and politicians pushing to remove Black and Indigenous histories, because it's not pretty.

It's scary.

It's awful.

But we should know it, because we don't wanna repeat it.

And it's just there.

You can try and manipulate history, but it's not gonna change the fact of it.

And so it's important to understand history.

It'll make us all better.

And I know I'm going long on this question.

No, keep going.

Keep going.

We're here to listen.

Really, the importance is to— if you really understand colonization, you can see that we've never ended it.

Colonialism is still happening in many areas of the world.

We see it happening in Ukraine.

We're seeing it happen in Gaza, in parts of Africa like Congo, of course, in South America.

It's continuous all over the planet still.

And we have, again, like I said, a lot of evolving to do, and especially when it gets to our food systems, because we have a global food system that's been a basis of— I mean, it's been a result of colonization globally.

'Cause Indigenous peoples worldwide have faced this same kind of violence and settler colonialism affecting cultures, and it's still happening in today's world right now.And s to understand the plight of Indigenous peoples here in America because it's also the plight of many people still living on the planet today.

And it's really important, and I think that's what your book really touches upon a lot of that.

And so I think it's really important for us to have these conversations because we need to change the course.

And one of the ways that we can really connect with each other as humans is through food because it's one of those things, it's a language that we all speak.

It's a language that we all share.

And if we can start to celebrate and understand the massive diversity of food systems out there and cultures out there, we can start to really connect with each other on a better scale and to start to celebrate diversities instead of homogenizing them.

And so that's kind of what this work actually does.

So my work is— less about how do you cook a wild mushroom, and it's more about how do we change the course of human history through understanding.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Yeah, let's stick on that.

Let's talk about NATIFS.

All right.

That really feels like the heartbeat of your work.

And the thing that I really appreciate about it is that it doesn't It kind of doesn't care about many of the people in this room.

It focuses almost exclusively on empowering Native American generation, younger generations.

Tell us why that is, and tell us what the work— and tell us what NATIFS does.

Well, NATIFS is a nonprofit.

It's an acronym where it's North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems is the long name.

And so whenever you get into the nonprofit world, you're forced to have an acronym for some reason.

And so I tried to pick one that says something so you can remember it a little bit better.

But really, the goal of NATIFS was really to focus on how do we get this work out there?

Because I started The Sioux Chef in 2014 with just catering.

I was starting to work on that first cookbook, a food truck that we created called Tatanka Truck.

And again, we were just trying to put out the philosophy of what we were doing, which was highlighting Indigenous foods in today's world by basically cutting away ingredients that European immigrants brought over and focusing on purchasing from Indigenous producers first.

So utilizing a lot of heirloom varieties of Native agriculture, which comes in the form of corns and beans and squash and sunflowers and chilies and a lot of diversity of those pieces, right?

But also a massive understanding of wild foods because Indigenous peoples had a massive ethnobotanical education of just knowing what was around us and how to utilize it for food, for medicine, for crafting, and just a huge knowledge of the plant world around us and how to preserve things, how to do all sorts of stuff.

And so the work that we were doing was really simply just kind of showcasing what was always here when it came to the food parts of it and trying to make modern foods.

Because again, like you said, I am a futurist.

I'm thinking about the future.

I wasn't trying to create recipes from 1491.

I was trying to showcase what's possible by including the knowledge of Indigenous peoples moving forward because the Western diet's very Eurocentric.

Our grocery store selections are very Eurocentric, and we don't really— the Western diet's never really taken into account this massive plant diversity that lives here in North America.

And there's so much more to explore regionally that's tied to culture because of all the Indigenous peoples that were living from Arctic to Tropic across the continent.

And we tried to explore that a little bit in Turtle Island, of just kind of starting to showcase this massive regional diversity and this huge tapestry of that.

Diversity that lies there.

And so NATIFS really approaches, like, how do we get foods— how do we make this more accessible to people like myself growing up on Pine Ridge Reservation and to kids that are in that same situation today where a lot of their foods are coming from government subsidies, or maybe they're getting gas station food, and they're facing a lot of foodborne illnesses because of that, a lot of high rates of type 2 diabetes in very young children, obesity, heart disease, and all these other things that are happening because of the nutritional access that they have.

So how do we get them healthy Native foods?

Because we just stripped away some of these colonial ingredients, our foods have been extremely healthy.

Because if you go to our restaurant in Minnesota— has anybody been into Owamni, just out of curiosity, in this crowd?

Just a couple of people.

But it has been very hard to get into.

And I always make this joke that people are always like, how do I get into Owamni?

Or how do I get a reservation?

I'm like, I don't know.

I just grew up on one.

But anyways— We want to get this food because a restaurant isn't going to impact a child growing up on a Native reservation because restaurants are a privileged place to go to.

You need money to go to a restaurant, especially a fancy downtown restaurant using expensive ingredients and unique ingredients and stuff.

So we had to come up with other ways.

We use the restaurant as a tool.

It's part of our nonprofit also.

The restaurant creates a massive workforce because we have about 150 workers at our single restaurant in Minnesota, and we're tracking how much food dollars are going towards Indigenous producers because we purchase from them first.

And the original Owamni, we were tracking around $600,000 a year going towards Indigenous food producers.

And now I think we're on track, because we've almost tripled in size, to pushing over $1.5 million towards Indigenous food production.

And so we focus on food sovereignty, education sovereignty, and even economic sovereignty when it comes to the nonprofit.

So we've created an online market space where we've connected Indigenous producers so people can order online, and you can go to iflmarket.com and find a lot of Indigenous ingredients from Indigenous producers on our nonprofit website.

We also created a kitchen that we just launched a couple of weeks ago, a program called Meals for Native Institutions, and that one is creating large-format foods specifically for schools and hospitals, especially in rural areas, because If you think about a rural tribal school where it takes hours to get food up there sometimes, and maybe some of these communities might be a couple of hours to the nearest grocery store.

And so there's a lot of food insecurity happening because of that situation.

And their school systems, a lot of their foods are just coming from the big box trucks, the big companies like the Syscos and US Foods of the world and stuff like that.

There's not any options for Native foods in those particular schools.

Situations, right?

And so we created a system where we can just make these large-format ready-to-eat foods for those schools because they're not cooking in— they're not cooking from scratch, but we can create these foods for them.

And we're doing that right now in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

So Meals for Native Institutions is designed just to make all of these recipes that we could distribute across our region, and those schools will have access to that.

And that's one way that we're just kind of turning from food access on.

And so education sovereignty, we have a lot of programs with it.

Um, I've been— we've just released— releasing a new project called Ring Diet.

Just gonna get that.

Yeah, please.

Um, but, uh, so if you want me to talk about that now, I can.

Yeah, please.This is an incredible— Sean, um, I want to say, what, 3 weeks ago, um, put out this entirely new concept.

It's called the Ring Diet.

Um, he wrote it on Substack.

I'm gonna let Sean explain it, but It's revolutionary, and I'm gonna let Sean explain why it's so revolutionary.

Okay, so the Ring Diet, I'm working with the nonprofit to do this, but the Ring Diet was born because back in January, the USDA released their new version of the USDA Nutritional Guide, and it came in the form of an upside-down pyramid, and it wasn't a South Park skit, it was for real.

And I didn't really think about it at that very moment because during Minneapolis and Minnesota, things were— we had a very icy winter.

And things were really, really intense.

And it was— I'm pretty sure, I can fact check, but I'm pretty sure the day they released that upside-down pyramid was the exact same day that one of our community members, Alex Pretti, was murdered by ICE just a few blocks from our kitchen.

And our city was in turmoil because we were under siege from our own government.

And so it took me some time to really process the upside-down pyramid situation.

So I feel like it was around March probably when I started really thinking about it.

And it was bugging me one night.

So I woke up in the morning with— I was like, I wanted just to write out what would a Native nutritional guide look like if I wrote one down, like an Indigenous guide, right?

And so that's what the Ring Diet was born from.

It actually is another acronym, nonprofit world, but it's Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide.

And so I created a ring diet where it's a literal ring, and I used a medicine wheel, which typically has 4 quadrants, so kind of like north, south, east, west a little bit in the quadrant size.

And so I put water in the middle because I don't know why our national guide doesn't have water in it, but it's an important part of daily consumption, I feel like, and we should consume water.

And so then on either side of the water has plants and animals, because plants, water, and animals, that's the basis for all human nutrition and consumption.

And there's some other components like mushrooms and lichen and minerals sometimes, but basically everything can land in those categories, right?

And so I set it up so there's an inner circle, and the inner circle has the indigenous So you can create a ring in any region.

So if we were doing a ring right here in this part of Ohio, it would show you— if you clicked on the Indigenous plant part of the ring, it would open up a database of all the Indigenous plant species that are here and all the ethnobotanical data of how they've been utilized, linking those ingredients to recipes or videos or whatever might be out there.

And it can be a growing thing which could be added to it.

And then on the other side is the animal and protein side of it.

So that could be broken up into— domesticated animals, wild animals, whatever.

And so it'll showcase the indigenous animals first.

And animals are a little easier than plants because anything moving can be food.

I wouldn't suggest you just eat everything moving, but I'm pretty sure humans have tried everything a few times.

But it'll show you that list of all of the animals and lots of information of what you can do with those animals.

And then the outer ring is the modern diet because we live in a modern world.

And I wanted to break free because if you think about our upside-down pyramid that's in the USDA and who actually sponsors it, it's not too hard to— you can quickly find out that it's a lot of sugar industry, the beef industry, dairy industry, hundreds of millions of dollars going not only directly into that upside-down pyramid but also the politicians to keep it together.

And so you have big sugar industries like Mars and you have McDonald's and these people are sinking a ton of money into this nutritional guide, which seems very manipulative.

Absolutely.

And so I think it's important for us to think about nutrition outside of what big industry is manipulating us to thinking we need to have on a daily basis, of what our basics— like school nutrition, because, you know, still today, like, a frozen pizza is the perfect school meal because it hits all of those components of that upside-down pyramid, right?

And we know that's not great for— that's not great nutrition for anybody.

And so the ring diet breaks free from all that corporate lobbying and large GMO farms.

And so on the plant side, it actually will start to map out all of the local farms around this area.

And so you can start to look for what's regional here, what farms are around us, what kind of seed diversities are they utilizing.

Because I also sit on a board with a group called Seed Savers Exchange where our database is around 27,000 seed varietals across the nation.

So it's really important to understand that seed diversity because we need to be protecting it because a lot of those seeds are connected to culture and to region and to families even.

And so we should be protecting that massive food diversity that's out there because it's not in our grocery stores.

We have very little diversity in our grocery stores.

And so the ring diet was set up that— and the upper ring kind of gives you a lot of information when it comes to nutrition.

So you can research which of these components are high in calcium or magnesium or niacin.

And then the bottom quadrant is all food is medicine because the Western diet has always shied away from correlating food and medicine together.

And so I think it's really important that we can eat for health, and what we put in our body does affect our health.

And you can feel it when you eat.

And so I think that with that component, it's gonna be really important because maybe you have digestive issues or skin issues or you want more immunity situations going on, but it'll help you list a lot of those pieces and help you find whatever you need to know.

And you can develop a diet.

The goal is to basically create rings globally because we can, because it doesn't see colonial lines of what is Canada or Mexico or the rest.

It just showcases regionally.

And we can build rings for specific tribes if we want to.

But the goal is once we cover the globe in rings, you could build a diet based on your ancestry and based on your region and based on your dietary preferences.

So it could be individualized for everybody.

So you could have you could be Black American living here.

You can look up your— say you have West African DNA and maybe you're mixed with Northern European DNA and you're living right here.

And you can get a huge list of all these things that could help you eat healthier for what's in your DNA, where you're living, where you can find some of these farms and ranches around you supplying all these pieces.

And you can plug in maybe you're gluten-free or pescatarian or whatever you want to be.

Be, and that diet, you could create a diet for yourself globally, and we could do that for everybody in the world.

So it's a massive project to basically map out the food systems of the planet, but it's doable because we have the information.

And I think it'll really help us connect with each other.

And that's where it was born from, is just like, what the hell is this with that upside-down pyramid?

And just trying to do something bigger and better.

So that's where it was born.

Fantastic.

I mean, Sean, one of the reasons why I was drawn to you in the first place was actually not necessarily your food, it was your human rights activism.

A lot of my career has been focused on investigating violations of international human rights, and one of the issues I worked on for a very long time was the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

And nearly 200 Rohingya refugees 2 million Rohingya have been pushed from Myanmar into Bangladesh, from this very rural landscape where they grew, farmed their own food, into this very intense, hyper-urban refugee camp situation, which is very much a modern-day analog of what happened to many Native American nations across these continents.

And so I wanna kinda, And one of the things that I saw working these refugee camps is seeing this community taken off its land and how quickly it just, it lost so much of its culture.

It lost so much of its nutrition from having to rely on UN handouts.

And so one of the, and your activism, When I first walked into Owamni, there was a big red neon sign that says Land Back.

And so I wanna talk about that and your work with Land Back, because so much of our food and so much of what you're talking about in adjusting our food systems is connected to our land, intimately tied to our land.

Often this movement, Land Back, first I'd like to explain what that is, can feel antagonistic, but it really isn't.

Can you explain what it is and how non-Natives can be allies in this movement?

If you think about indigenous food systems globally, indigenous peoples have this connection and this commonality of how deeply connected to the land spaces they were because the religions are born out of it.

They can see, they're just in it, they detail it.

And if you're a farmer and you're doing it all the time and you care about the land and the food, you create that connection.

And I think, but for Indigenous peoples, they've been protecting these seed diversities for so long.

They've been understanding how to have these diverse growing systems with all sorts of different kinds of plants and how that balance really works, and really understanding just how the soil, just by looking at it or feeling it, and that deep connection of land was really, really important.

And because of just the commodification of land that happened because of colonization, because of settler colonization, that there becomes this massive disconnect of land where people couldn't— I always tease that kids can name more Kardashians than tree species.

And so, just walking around your backyard, how many people actually can identify the plants in your own property?

And that's a massive disconnect.

And I think for Indigenous peoples, one of those things that really hurt us, of course, was this massive amount of land loss that we had, 'cause we were tending lands.

Kind of all over the place, obviously.

And we lost that.

And settler colonialism was more focused on, what can this land produce that could make me rich?

So we see deforestation happening.

We see foreign crops moving in and taking over spaces, which disrupts soil health and all sorts of stuff.

We see animals completely being disappeared in a very short time period.

And that's just a story of right here.

Here in the US, but it's also still happening in parts of the world, and it's been happening for quite a while now.

And so I think it's important to understand how important land access is and how we should be protecting things and how we should be really considering— 'cause I spend a lot of time working with advocacy for keeping mining out of places like the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota, which is this beautiful wilderness area between the US and Canada.

And it's at stake because they're trying to open up mining leases And we should be protecting these resources while we have them, and especially with the tribes that live by there because they harvest a lot of true wild rice, which is different than the black wild rice if that's all you've ever had, 'cause that stuff was modified to be able to grow in paddies.

But true wild rice, they're hand harvesting on lakes and communities are doing it every year, and Minnesota produces up to 20 million pounds a year in wild rice, not that it's all tribal, but a lot of it is.

But that's just because there's like 14,000 lakes in Minnesota.

There's just a lot of this grass that grows there on the lakes, and there's just a lot of really important food that comes out of it.

But these kinds of situations with mining and disturbing a lot of these watersheds and these pipelines that go through places, those pipelines especially, it's not a matter of if they leak, but when they leak and how much damage will they leave behind, and will the future generation have access to some of these really important foods?

Spaces, especially as we're going through challenges of climate change and we're watching things change before our eyes rather quickly.

And I think we can all feel it, like it's all, it's just there.

And so we need to be adaptive and we need to be very protective of water resources because we're already in water crisis across the US and we're not doing anything about it.

I make fun of Palm Springs all the time 'cause they have 120 golf courses in Palm Springs in the middle of the desert.

And it's like, if we have that ability to manipulate land spaces like that, we should be doing that for the purpose of feeding ourselves in a health I mean, no offense to golfers, but I just feel like there's better ways to deal with that, 'cause how much water does one golf lawn consume?

And those guys are in water crisis and water rations and stuff like that, and they're still allowing this to happen.

So again, we have a lot of— evolving to do.

I think I'm far away from your question.

No, no, it doesn't matter.

But we are at that part of the conversation where we remove me from it and bring you in for audience Q&A.

For those just tuning in via our livestream or radio audience, I'm Michael Shaikh, writer, human rights activist, and author of the book The Last Sweet Bite.

I am serving as moderator for today's conversation.

I'm here with Chef Sean Sherman, A 3-time James Beard Award-winning chef and founder of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems.

He is the author of 2 cookbooks, Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen.

We welcome questions from everyone in the room, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our livestream at cityclub.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU.

IdeaStream Public Media.

And if you'd like to text a question for Chef Sherman, please text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

And so on that note, may we have the first question, please?

Yes.

Could you talk for a second about how what you said could pertain to the immigrant experience, wanting to preserve their recipes and their culture?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to understand how we connect with people globally.

And, you know, people— a lot of immigrants have come over because of some really difficult situations happening in their homelands and trying to make a better life, you know?

And they bring a lot.

I mean, they bring a lot of culture and diversity, amazing foods.

But again, not without a lot of challenges, and they're facing a lot of challenges because in Minneapolis, especially with what we went through with Operation Metro Surge in January, it was really intense to see so many people being targeted largely because of the color of their skin or the language that they spoke.

I mean, they were targeting heavily a lot of people from south of the Mexican border, south of the US border into central Mexico and central and southern South America, but also just people from all over.

They were very just kind of anybody that didn't look American, they were kind of just going after.

And it was really intense, but we were very proud that our city really had no choice but to stand up for itself.

So we were just, it wasn't safe to take the bus, it wasn't safe to go to the grocery store, it wasn't safe to go get gas, it wasn't safe to pick up your kids from school.

A lot of schools were shutting down.

And so I think it's really important that we understand how we need to connect and protect our global diversity.And again, for us, food was one of those ways to do it.

And so I think it's just important to see a lot of— there's still this colonization happening.

There's still this aggressiveness happening.

There's still this violence happening.

And we need to be really thinking about people on a human level, because we are human, and we should be connecting with each other over humanity.

And we should be choosing humanity over politics when it comes to it.

All right, we're going to do the next question.

It's one of our text questions that we received.

Is your nonprofit addressing how to grow our own food on reservations?

We have connected a lot of people with other groups that are out there supporting, like setting up small farms.

We do a lot of videos.

We have a channel.

We have a brand called Indigenous Food Lab, and under that brand, we have a lot of videos that we're putting out there.

A YouTube channel with over 200 videos showcasing Indigenous-focused education.

And so we do what we can.

We've connected people with seed keepers all over the place too.

And I think there's just a lot of work to do because with our work, we're just trying to be a support center.

So everything we've built in Minnesota with the Meals for Native Institutions program, the restaurants, the educational program, the videos, and everything we're building just to be a support system for future Indigenous food systems that we are also working on that expansion.

So the goal was to move around, and we're getting ready to hire a team in Bozeman, Montana to be a center point for that whole region.

We're talking to— we have a team heading up to Alaska to look at certain places there.

But the goal is to basically set up support systems around the country to help people do this kind of everywhere.

And again, we can use restaurants as a tool.

We can use Indigenous restaurants to help create jobs, to help create awareness, and to help move food dollars.

Because if we're able to move that kind of money— again, I feel like we're gonna be on track for around $1.5 million of food support towards Indigenous producers from a single restaurant in Minnesota.

Imagine if we had 50 restaurants across the nation focused on Indigenous foods and how much amazing economic support would come out of that.

And so I'd really like to target touristy areas and urban populations because they could do really well.

Because imagine an Indigenous-focused restaurant in Honolulu, you know, or LA, or wherever it might be, or Grand Canyon.

Like, there's a lot of opportunity to tell a different story through food no matter where we are.

And even right here, I think we would do very well being a massive support system.

Hi, I work for a local nonprofit.

We run and operate 9 certified producer-only markets in Cleveland, meaning everything that is there is grown locally.

And there are a lot of chefs here that we work with currently, Chef Finney, Chef Jeremy Umansky, but it's not involved enough.

And my question is, how can we better bridge the gap between local growers, chefs, and schools like you've done to create more opportunities for regional producers, particularly those growing indigenous and traditional foods?

I think it's really important for restaurants, obviously.

And I think, you know, I was hanging out with Jeremy last night and I think that mentality of just trying to purchase local and really making that the challenge, 'cause we have a massive diverse purchasing situation at our restaurant because that's how we choose to do it.

'Cause we don't have the big box trucks delivering everything in one big swoop.

We're really considerate of where our food dollars are going.

And the Walmarts don't need our food dollars.

We need to be really focusing on how do we keep our food dollars locally and regionally.

And I think that's what... A lot of the creative chefs that get a lot of attention, they do consider that.

Or what are we feeding our community?

What are we feeding the people coming in our door?

And the schools should be asking themselves some questions because they have a lot of opportunity.

Or anybody who's feeding a lot of people, any kind of catering operation, they should be considering, can we support more local foods?Or even considering big fairs and things like that that come through during the seasons, how much of the food is actually coming from local?

And we should be challenging ourselves to purchase more local, to support our local food growers.

And so we attempt to just showcase how much power is in food service by tracking those dollars and sharing that amount of expenditures to the public, because we can make a difference.

And food service operations can be very powerful if we use them correctly.

Hi.

Our son works at your restaurant in Minneapolis.

All right.

He loves it.

He just loves it.

But sometimes I wonder, I imagine, let's go back 500 years and pretend that the Native peoples had built a wall and repelled the illegal aliens.

So, and the Europeans hadn't invaded and conquered this continent.

What would Turtle Island look like today?

Well, I mean, I think there was a lot of amazing advanced civilization happening, because what was going on with Mayan civilization— there's still a million Mayan speakers alive today, and they're being treated as an ancient civilization, but they're very much alive.

And I think the agricultural systems that are out there, I think that science and technology could catch up with itself just 'cause that's what happens globally.

And so I think if cultures had the ability to thrive and to work with each other, Who knows what we could accomplish?

But we should be thinking about that right now.

We shouldn't be thinking about the past because we can't— of course, I mean, understand the past, yes.

But I think we should be thinking about the future of how can we make a better future by having these better understandings and how can we work with other people?

And we should, again, be thinking about us on the side of humanity.

And we have— there's, again, so much manipulation happening to us through social media.

Through everything.

Our phones are just constantly manipulating us every time we look at them, and they're being weaponized against us.

We had to turn our phones off during Operation Metro Surge because they were being weaponized, literally, against us.

And so I think that we need to really focus on coming back to basics.

We're not teaching about how to cook foods or grow foods in our schools.

We should be because those are really basic human needs.

And so we should be really focusing on what are we teaching our kids?

And what are we teaching our children?

And why are we trusting the government to tell us what we should be teaching our kids?

We should be really thinking about other ways to, like, how can we create a generation of people who are on the side of humanity and not manipulated by all this political stuff or falling in line with the capitalism and just supporting billionaires because they think it's the way.

Hello, my name is Ursula.

I am the community food systems specialist at Food Strong, which is the community partner today, um, and we do a lot of work in schools educating children about where their food comes from.

We have a school garden program where we teach the kids how to grow food and preservation and cooking, um, and my question is, I'm curious about barriers to entry into a more healthy and indigenous diet that you have found as a result of palate.

Um, I know that especially in inner-city Cleveland, kids are used to those like scientifically engineered flavors.

Um, and even just the more healthy Western diet can be something totally new.

But to go further and it be an indigenous diet, it seems like a big change.

Um, and especially just simple flavors like using spicebush instead of cinnamon, you crave that old cinnamon flavor that you grew up with, even if it's not what the majority of your ancestors had.

You've learned that flavor to be associated with positivity.

I'm just wondering what solutions you have found to encourage youth especially to adopt a new palate.

I think that it's important to understand that palates change over time and can be changed and can be manipulated, and we've seen it happen in our I'm in my early 50s right now, but I've seen it in my lifetime.

And so I feel like we should be putting all of our effort towards that younger generation.

And that's why we created something like Meals for Native Institutions to really target especially that younger generation to make it normal for them to see some of these flavors that are regional, are seasonal, are cultural, and are right there because they're going to grow up with that being normal.

And they're going to grow up with that's the way food should taste like.

Not McDonald's, and they should be really— that's how we should be really leaning into it, is feeding that next generation because they can grow up stronger to be better humans.

And we can pour into them all of that important nutrition and education around their foods and just giving them that opportunity to have that normalization where that's not normal for us right now, but we can change their future by just doing it.

We're just putting it out there for them.

Go ahead.

Hi, I'm an 8th grade student, and I've noticed that in class when we learn about Indigenous history, we tend to just look at numbers and facts.

Do you think that we need to change how we teach culture in classrooms?

Absolutely, I think.

Absolutely.

I mean, our educational system needs a lot of work.

And I think it's important because a lot of times, if you're Black or Indigenous in America, our histories are told from not our perspectives.

And I think that we need to be able to share perspectives.

If you wanna learn about Native histories, then bring a Native in to talk about it.

If you wanna learn about Black histories, bring somebody in who has that experience to be able to share, and we should be sharing from those perspectives because there's many perspectives out there and there's a lot to learn, and we shouldn't be afraid of books.

I came from a generation where we read books and that was great.

And I think that we should really kind of share, like it's fun to learn, and learning can be painful sometimes because you can learn about things that can be really difficult to process, but I think it's important for us to know the whole story.

It doesn't help us if we're just hiding truths.

And so I think we really need to put it out there.

Good question.

Mom?

Sean, I was intrigued by the program of delivering food to institutions.

Particularly, you mentioned hospitals.

Can you talk about how you're connecting with clinicians and healthcare providers to use that program as they're working with their patients and clients?

I think that everybody can agree that the food in the hospital system in America is awful.

Can I add just one thing here to our friends at the Cleveland Clinic?

Your food is a disaster.

I mean, we have so many studies to even consider, are we even using local food?

But can we just get real food into those systems?

And so I think that part of it is just putting it out there because it's a lot of work.

The healthcare system is under constant pressure and the workers there are doing the best that they can.

And I think we have to empathize with how difficult of a situation that they're in.

But I think that we, instead of, We can blame them that their food sucks, but we can also just say there are actually solutions to make this better because if we get people to eat healthier, and if you can have better selections, the people who are recovering, they shouldn't be getting orange Jell-O or whatever.

We should be getting them some really healthy, and especially can we help them support the local food system?

'Cause how many food dollars are they spending and how much of that is local?

And it's gonna be almost nothing.

But I think that just by creating that system, system of giving the hospitals the opportunity and their food services to start working with us to create healthy recipes.

And they could be very dietary specific because of our focus of just removing colonial ingredients.

If you go to Owamni, everything there is gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, soy-free, pork-free.

It's just not free.

But it's a really healthy food system, and you feel really good.

I think that we should be serving clean food, especially in the healthcare system.

So it's going to take some time because it's probably going to be a very slow boat to change course a little bit.

But again, we're just starting that process of just making it available and just knowing that they can.

And hopefully we'll get a few spots that will start to order from us and start to implement it.

And hopefully that starts to create more.

But universities could be doing this.

The school system's going to be doing this.

Anybody who's feeding large amounts of people, that's kind of what we're targeting.

That's why it's institutional foods, because so many people are using institutional foods on a daily basis, but they're not even considering what they're putting in our body.

And we're all microdosing glyphosate because of that.

Yeah.

First of all, thank you so much, both of you, for being here today.

Given the history of mistrust mistreatment, especially of Indigenous people.

How do you maintain such a positive outlook toward the future and hope that things will actually get better?

I just see a path for change.

I see hope throughout this.

I see it through action, not just talking about it, but actually doing something.

It took a lot of effort to open up a big restaurant, to build a huge team of people who want to help make change alongside me.

It's not a one-person show.

It takes a massive team to be able to pull this stuff off.

But again, the more we unite together, the more that we can have a common goal, then change can be possible.

But we have to move that dial.

We have to connect with each other.

And we have to, again, find that humanity again somehow.

And we have to celebrate our immigrant communities, protect them when we can.

And I think that we just have to see, like, everybody should have access to food and water.

And I think that if you're Black or Indigenous in the Americas, we should get a passport to travel and work wherever we want to because of the history that happened to us.

We shouldn't be so focused on these borders of things because those are made-up lines and they crossed over us as Indigenous peoples.

They don't really mean anything.

We should be focused more on on feeding people and making sure we have clean water and better healthcare systems and better education than just whatever's going on right now.

Like, we have a lot of change to do, but we can do it if we do it together, 'cause it's a people's movement and it's us waking up, you know?

And maybe that's why people are afraid of being awoke.

I don't know, but we have to wake up.

I mean, it's important to say that food is a human right, and it's also important to point out that the United States is one of the only countries that doesn't recognize that as a right.

Thank you so much for being here, Chef Sherman, and all of your invaluable work.

My name's Josh, and I'm Southern Cheyenne.

I'm an enrolled citizen of Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, and I'm one of many Native people that live here in Northeast Ohio.

My question is, what does processed food mean to you?

What are processed foods, and how ubiquitous are they?

Well, I mean, that's a big question, of course, because processing food can mean literally anything if you want to go deep into it.

But we're talking more about industrialized foods, or they're adding chemicals, they're adding dyes, they're adding— they're manipulating it, you know, for flavor profiles, and it's got too much sugar.

And, you know, because they're trying to hit a flavor profile to make it popular.

But I think that, you know, we need to really go back to just real food, you know.

And I think that Again, the more that we are just celebrating local and regional foods, we're going to start to see a lot more just regional flavors come out of this using more plant diversity.

Because I haven't tracked all the plant diversity in our restaurant or even in Turtle Island, the cookbook, but it's pretty large.

Because I could probably stack my restaurant against— in Minnesota, we have the Mall of America, which is this monstrosity of a mall situation.

And there's many different foods things.

But again, if we tracked plant diversity comparatively, we would blow that entire mall out of the water because we just have so much more stuff to share.

So it might seem limiting to cut away things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken, because those are the ingredients we removed because they didn't exist here on this continent.

And we just focused on wild animals and birds and fish and insects and seafood and things like that and all sorts of plant diversity of wild foods and seed diversities of heirloom varietals.

And there's just so much more.

And that's what we should be considering is just— I mean, that's the kind of food we should be processing is the local regional food and creating kitchens to do that.

Kitchens hold a lot of power, and we should be investing in them.

Friends, Michael Shaikh and Chef Sean Sherman.

Thank you once again to Michael and Chef Sean Sherman, and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, and this forum is now adjourned.

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