Decolonizing food
It’s time Chicago — and America at large — celebrates Indigenous food. Minnesota restaurant Owamni by The Sioux Chef is proof it’s possible.
In Chicago, a city that took its name and land from Native Americans, we must beg the question: Why is it so hard to find Indigenous Native American food?
Not just at restaurants but pop-ups too. You may have ventured to taste highly personal pandemic projects — from caramelized crust pizza to secret smash burgers — by professional chefs and home cooks alike. But where are the fragrant ramp celebrations by Indigenous chefs? Why, in our community, which readily embraces cuisines from far-flung places, do we still lack access to the foods that first nourished people right here?
Signs of recent progress exist, but elsewhere.
Chef Crystal Wahpehpah, an enrolled member of the Kickapoo nation of Oklahoma, just opened Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, California, on Nov. 13. Freddie Bitsoie, the Navajo chef last at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Mitsitam Cafe (temporarily closed in Washington, D.C.), released his debut cookbook “New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian” on Tuesday.
In search of answers closer to home in the Midwest, I spoke with an Oneida couple who have served as powwow food vendors for three decades, and the founders of an Indigenous food movement who opened an exquisite Native American restaurant in Minnesota a mere four months ago. What I experienced was exhilarating, embedded in a far-reaching cuisine crafted through generations of Indigenous people who have faced overwhelming adversity.
I began at the American Indian Center in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood. Established in 1953, it was the first urban Native American cultural center in the country. The center hosted its 68th annual powwow at Schiller Park the weekend preceding the Indigenous Peoples’ Day holiday in October.
There, I meet Floyd Wayne Silas Sr.
“I’m Oneida, from Oneida, Wisconsin,” Silas says. “We’ve been food vendors for over 30 years and were invited down here.”
He speaks stoically, but his wife, Estelle Silas, politely shoos me away, too busy with their food tent, Littlewind’s Favorites, named for their son. About a dozen family members flitter around, helping.
“People come to us because the one thing they love is my wife’s fry bread,” Silas says.
Ovals of stretchy dough, slipped in bubbling oil, puff up taut and golden for dressings sweet or savory. The workers are constantly busy, transforming pale dough to radiant fry bread for the snaking line of ravenous yet patient customers. Everyone seems committed to the familiar, measured pace.
“We do Indian fry bread, buffalo burgers, I make a mean wild rice casserole (and) we make corn soup,” Silas adds when he has a few more minutes to spare. “My wife makes a cherry berry sauce from scratch, and we do it in front of people so they know that it doesn’t come from a can.”
Other than the powwow and other community events, Littlewind’s remains nearly impossible to find, even on social media.
“We don’t actually believe in doing that,” Silas says, “because it’s like pushing ourselves.”
It is one of only two food vendors at the powwow. Two others canceled at the last minute.
The lines stretch to nearly three-hour waits. Hundreds of people spread out across the grove, the wide-open space chosen for that delicate balance between gathering and distancing. Nearly everyone had some connection to the American Indian Center, arriving with family or friends from near and far, some dancers driving in from across the country, as is tradition.
When I finally reached the tent, most of the menu has sold out — but not the fry bread thankfully.
I ask the teen behind the counter to dress one the way he likes it. With bravado laced with a hint of doubt, he carefully spreads Nutella, drizzles honey and dusts powdered sugar. It’s a deliciously exuberant personal expression, and shockingly not too sugary.
Throughout the day a number of organizers and attendees spoke reverently of a Native American chef in Minnesota. They’d heard something about a restaurant serving Indigenous food, one that had just opened over the summer.
There, as the first snowflakes of the year fell across the Midwest, my quest continued.
The restaurant is Owamni by The Sioux Chef. It’s one of the most stunning destination restaurants in the world right now. I say this as not only a critic but a chef who staged and dined at El Bulli in Spain when it ranked as the best restaurant in the world.
And the world is taking note. The New York Times named Owamni to its list of the best 50 restaurants in America in October, applauding efforts to “revitalize Indigenous cuisine and decolonize American cooking.” Vogue declared it a “must-visit dining destination.”
I’d last met co-owner Dana Thompson and co-owner and chef Sean Sherman four years ago, when they visited Chicago on a book tour for Sherman’s James Beard award-winning cookbook, “The Sioux Chef ’s Indigenous Kitchen.”
Now Owamni embodies the principles they’ve long held dear.
“The restaurant is fully decolonized,” Thompson says while we talk just before lunch service. “We don’t use any wheat flour, dairy or refined sugar. We even go so far as not to even use beef, pork or chicken.”
The restaurant’s name comes from a book that her grandfather worked on with his best friend Paul Durand, “Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet.” Its atlas preserves the Indigenous names of local waterways, the highway system for the Indigenous peoples there. The family members on her mother’s side are descendants of the Mdewakanton Dakota.
“The specific space that Owamni sits on was originally called ‘Owamni-amni,’ ” Thompson says. “It literally means the place of swirling waters.”
The stunning restaurant overlooks the Mississippi River. When you enter the relatively small, sleek, glasswalled dining room, a neon sign glows with a welcome and a declaration: “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND.”
Diners snap up reservations, released a month in advance, in a matter of minutes. A bar is reserved for walk-ins, who may wait nearly two hours for one of the 67 seats inside. Outdoor service has closed for the season.
Staffers may use only decolonized ingredients, but they employ global techniques, and to great effect. Bison tartare holds dollops of duck egg sumac aioli. Roasted sweet potatoes bathe in a crimson Indigenous chile crisp.
“We feature Indigenous foods in North America,” says Sherman, who is enrolled in the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe. “We look at Mexico through Alaska and the immensity of all the Indigenous diversity out there. We focus on regional cuisines featuring different tribal communities.”
They showcase wild food and Native American agricultural heirloom products, while prioritizing buying from Indigenous producers. Drinks spotlight an all-Indigenous wine list; a beer list sourced from producers who are Black, Indigenous or people of color; plus thoughtful nonalcoholic cocktails and tea. They feature flavors that Thompson calls, ironically, foreign.
“People are like, ‘Oh, I never tasted this before. This is so weird.’ And it’s the food of the land that we’re standing on,” she says. “The fact that it hasn’t been a normal part of our vernacular, and a normal part of our foodways, is super tragic.”
It’s not a normal restaurant, she likes to say. Every day they see people literally weep into their plates.
“They’re eating something that had an attempt to be systematically removed through genocide and forced assimilation. It’s an act of resistance that we exist,” Thompson says. “Sean and I have been cultivating the culture through the last seven years of our working relationship, and people sense it. They come in, and it’s not like they’re just having lunch. They’re eating culture.”
They bridge the horrors of history through food, deeply and beautifully so. Every service begins with a ritual. As Thompson and I speak, under a print of the map her grandfather drew by hand, hanging in their dining room, a young woman approaches, cupping smoke in her hands.
“Somebody takes a bundle of white sage, and we go through and we smudge every single person on the staff,” Thompson says. “We give them a moment to practice just a moment of mindfulness and to call in the ancestors to support us through our shift.”
Smoke still lingers when I receive a velvety white tepary bean and smoked Lake Superior trout dip ($12) with crackling amaranth tostadas. Crisp crickets stud a spiced seed mix ($4) that builds with slow heat. (Bugs on modern menus are almost always one of the tastiest things, simply because they have to be.)
Not nearly enough has been said about Sherman’s culinary skill that is finally fully realized. It’s taken nearly a decade for him to transition from pop-ups to a food truck to a book and now a finer dining restaurant. His bison tartare mosaic could easily be swapped into a modernist tasting menu.
The accompanying curled crackers are the most compelling edible manifestation of the smudging ceremony. Delicate yet textured and infused with lingering smokiness, it’s by far my favorite — and most foreign — bite.
“The bison tartare is something we’ve had on the menu since we started,” Sherman says. “We changed some of the ingredients to follow along with the seasons, with things like aronia berries and chokecherries.”
He garnishes the tender game meat jewels with wasna, a dried bison crumble traditionally pounded with berries and fat. A house-made game sausage ($14) with an earthy mustard green pesto could’ve used some of that fat; the lean meat was cooked a touch too dry.
“The cracker itself is wild rice and teosinte,” Sherman says. “Teosinte is this ancient grain that corn eventually came from.”
The ethereal, grainy veil seems almost the intentional opposite of fry bread.
“I grew up with fry bread, just being on Pine Ridge Reservation,” the chef says. “Our families are very proud of those recipes, and it’s very tasty.”
They chose a very different path with Owamni, however, for a reason.
“All of it comes from the U.S. government, after rounding up Indigenous peoples, and putting them into concentration and reservation systems,” Sherman says. “The government gave them staples like flour, lard and salt, but no ovens. It’s like what the cavalry and the military were cooking. It became a comfort food for us.
“But we can do better,” he says. “We can go well beyond, especially with the knowledge of our ancestors.”
Sherman and Thompson share that knowledge not only through outstanding meals, but their nonprofit NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems) and the Indigenous Food Lab, their educational and production kitchen.
I can only imagine what a confident kid who likes Nutella, honey and powdered sugar fry bread might do in the future with Indigenous chocolate, hazelnuts and the knowledge of his ancestors. What would he think about Owamni’s forest berry parfait ($8) layered with a walnut cream sauce? No actual cream, just emulsified maple syrup and walnuts, finished with candied corn that is nixtamalized, the traditional preparation of maize.
When I asked Sherman why he thinks it’s still so hard to find Indigenous Native American food, he takes a deep breath before answering.
“We haven’t even had time to catch our breath, or even identify the trauma that’s happened to us as Indigenous peoples throughout these past generations,” he said. “And we don’t have a lot of ancestral wealth to support a lot of the growth when it comes to some of these business pieces. So it’s going to take us a lot of time to grow. But we’re a new generation. And we feel like we’re a generation of evolution and revolution and reclamation when it comes to Indigenous cultures.”
In January, they plan to temporarily close the restaurant for a two-week break. When they reopen in February, a tasting menu may be added. By then a new market, kitchen and studio should be complete at their Indigenous Food Lab, among the stalls at the Midtown Global Market food hall, about 3 miles south of the restaurant, about a mile north of George Floyd Square. A food truck will return when weather permits.
Meanwhile hungry diners wait, including a couple from Chicago who stops in during my visit. “We just touched down from the airport and Googled restaurants,” says Elizabeth Smith. They really liked that it was an Indigenous restaurant.
“We’re pretty hungry,” says Daniel Smith, wearing Chicago flag socks and a Bears hat. “Most places, we probably would have left, but just seeing how excited people were, and then hearing some of the chatter, got us to stay the extra probably hour and a half.”
Despite the expectations and heavy emotions that course through Owamni, there’s humor and lightness in the tears that flow too.
“It’s sort of like an umami flavor, the tears in the food,” Thompson says, laughing. “But the fact is that it’s really an act of healing.”
Owamni by The Sioux Chef
420 1st St. South, Minneapolis 612-444-1846 owamni.com
Open: Tuesday to Sunday, 4-9 p.m.; Thursday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; closed Monday
Prices: $4 (crickets) to $38 (cedar bison pot roast, dinner only)
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on one floor