by David Treuer
Sean is Oglala Lakota and grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, but the family moved to Spearfish when he was thirteen. “I was working all the time, supporting the family,” he says. As a teenager he worked in restaurants around Spearfish. Right out of high school, he worked as a field surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service in the Black Hills. His job was to go to certain coordinates and take a sample of all the plants growing within a given distance from those spots. He came to know pretty much all the plants that grew in that environment and, being curious and having worked in restaurants, he learned which ones a person could eat. In 1997, he moved to Minneapolis and got a job at California Kitchen, the “nicest” restaurant in the then relatively new Mall of America. He lasted six months. “I could not wake up and drive to work at a mall anymore,” he recalled. He landed a job at Broders’ Pasta Bar, a popular spot between Minneapolis and Edina. There, too, he wondered: How did this evolve? Where did it come from? What was it like a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Three? He consulted books. He moved on from Broders’ to a variety of restaurants—Mexican, Asian, American. Each cuisine he mastered he followed down to its root. And now what he makes is not “artisanal” or “indigenous-inspired” but rather, archival food, in combinations that are delicious and inspiring—and for an Indian like me, something more.
The first concoction of Sean’s I ever tasted was cedar tea sweetened with maple syrup. One sip, and the barstools and track lighting and tile disappeared, the space rearranged itself into a snow-covered path crowded with spruce and red pine on one side and tag alder and birch on the other. This is the trail my older brother and I walked in the winter when we were kids, an old logging track known only to us. It ran straight out of our backyard through plantation pine and on between a hill and a swamp before reaching another small hill covered in old-growth pine and a sprinkling of birch. We’d walk up the hill and look down on the Mississippi. In the summer the river wasn’t much more than a rumor, but in the winter you could see it, if you looked hard, peeking out from behind the lowlands of ash and elm. We’d make a campfire and pick cedar and boil up swamp tea in an aluminum pot, while the wind scudded snow off the branches and the snow hissed at the fire’s edge and a jay called in the distance to the stuttering annoyance of red squirrels around us.
The rest of the meal was equally memorable. It included smoked walleye spread with fresh blackberries and sorrel, duck pâté and maple-bruléed duck in an apple broth, a salad of foraged greens topped with tamarack blossoms—citrusy and piney and tannic—and cedar-braised bison with a flint corn cake. Dessert was a sunflower-and-hazelnut crisp with popped amaranth. Sean’s skill rests less in the fusionary (though the combinations of flavors are astounding) than in something harder and more daring: he seems to trust in the flavor of the food itself, in the completeness of the ingredients in their own right.
Since debuting as the Sioux Chef eighteen months earlier, Sean has experienced a level of attention and success that most chefs only dream of, featured on radio and in magazines and at symposia. He’s all over the place in Minneapolis, too, cooking for summits and special events, hosting pop-up dinners. He’s helped the Little Earth housing project to establish the Tatanka food truck, developing the concept and menu and training the staff. The truck, like Sean’s own brand, is adamantly, proudly, and creatively indigenous. Among a chronically malnourished and diabetes-stricken community, to serve bison and turkey and walleye pike, cedar tea, and corn is something of a revolution. And Sean’s cooking has found a loyal and enthusiastic base not only among foodies and wild-food devotees but also among reservation and urban Indians, both rich and poor. To my mind, that’s because the politics of Sean’s food confront the private demons of pretty much every modern Indian. Whether we are urban or reservation, our story—the story of “the Indian”—has been a story of loss: loss of land, loss of culture, loss of a way of life. Yes, Indians remain—we remain across the country, as modern Americans and modern Indians. But inwardly we wonder: How much of our culture actually remains? How authentic, really, are we? At what point do we cease being Indians and become simply people descended from Indians? Sean’s food, the whole conception of it, affirms us: All is not lost, it tells us. Much remains—of our cultures, our knowledge, our values. It literally rests at our feet and over our heads; all we need do is reach out and pluck it. This is a profound politics.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard it has been to explain what indigenous food is,” he tells me. “I’ve had the same conversation over and over again, over the past year and a half. I have to go back to the beginning all the time. I was in Ohio, putting on an event, and I began talking about Native American food. This woman asks, ‘There’s food?’ Yes. ‘There are Indians?’ Yes. ‘How’d they get here?’” He smiles and shakes his head. His food is an answer to that question: it and we have always been here. And we’ve always been changing and adapting to climates and politics and peoples. As singular and exciting as Sean’s approach to cooking is, he is part of something much larger afoot in Indian country.
For so long the Indian struggle for survival was a strategy aimed outward: to cajole, scold, remind, protest, and pester the powers that be to rule the right way in court cases, to pass the right legislation to protect tribes and tribal sovereignty, to honor treaties, and to simply remember both our past and our continued existence. But the 1990s marked an inward turn. People like Sean are engaging in a new brand of activism. Instead of, say, occupying the BIA in Washington, D.C., they occupy a cultural, social, and political space where they actively remember and promote indigenous knowledge—and not just because it serves Indians but because it serves modernity. Perhaps this is why what’s happening in Indian country today is so hard to see.
Of course, every society’s present is harder to see. We are forever caught up in the flow of the current moment, not just freighted with the icy inventory of the past. And recent years have not been as distinctively marked by policy shifts or judicial decisions as have the past. Whereas we can speak of the evolution of federal policy in past eras—the treaty period, allotment, assimilation, termination and relocation, self-determination—the past thirty years seem to exist largely outside the brackets of federal policy. To be sure, there have been important legislation and policy decisions that affect tribal life, just not as many. And federal Indian policy seems to have settled into the track laid down during the Nixon administration: that of self-governance, self-determination, and a government-to-government relationship between the federal government and the tribes. It is almost tempting to believe that the era-less character of our era reflects our having fallen outside the national gaze—to take it as proof of our final, fatal inconsequence. But our numbers belie this interpretation, as do our actions. Tribes—affirmed and reaffirmed as sovereign nations—still do battle with the government. Activism is a permanent necessity. But our focus is different now: we’ve turned inward.
In the 1960s and 1970s, to be a “woke” Indian might have meant joining the Trail of Broken Treaties and caravanning to Washington to occupy the BIA. Now it just as likely means sitting in a classroom at a state university and learning a tribal language. Although Native American languages have been on the decline since 1492, and only twenty of them out of many hundreds are expected to remain viable into the twenty-second century, programs teaching these vanishing languages are on the rise. These programs are intent on bringing the Indian past into the present, and they are also intent on bringing the present into Indian lives. Manuelito Wheeler, a Diné language activist, recruited Diné voice actors from across the Southwest (there remain more than one hundred thousand Diné speakers in the United States) and dubbed Star Wars, and later Finding Nemo, into that tongue. Speakers of Ojibwe and Choctaw and a host of other Native languages are using Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to speak and promote and communicate in the languages of the First People. And increasingly, Indians are founding, controlling, and populating tribal and community col
leges on reservations—more than forty of them across thirteen states at last count—to study Native languages alongside computer science, math, English, history, and business administration. Transforming education into something that we do for ourselves, rather than something that is done to us, goes a long way toward healing the long rift between Indians and the educational system.
In its misguided efforts to solve the “Indian problem,” the United States government in a sense created Indians over and over and over again. For decades, our political and social reality was determined—usually for the worse—by the government’s approach to our existence. Allotment exacerbated reservation poverty, boarding schools disrupted family and culture; to be “Indian” was to be defined by those problems, the definition always shifting in such a way as to produce Indians with problems. But Indians like the Sioux Chef have found a way to exist outside those definitions. For him and for many like him there is no contradiction between indigenous knowledge and modern life. This, too, contributes to the invisibility of Indians in the present tense. These days, Indians aren’t out in the world only or merely “being Indian”—but they’re not, as outsiders might assume, “passing” or acculturating. The census tells a different story: more and more people are claiming Indianness than ever before. There is no longer any reason not to. I remember, back in 1991, as I and others were trying to start an American Indian studies program at Princeton, an administrator said out loud, during a meeting, that one couldn’t be both a professor and a medicine man. I had no idea what he was talking about. I couldn’t see any contradiction there. Who says? I responded angrily. You? Who are you?
Similar forces are driving one of the areas that Indians are just now beginning to address: personal and community health. The government, in doing its best to exterminate the bison, gave us flour and lard as replacements. Poor diet did damage to our culture and our health. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer—these are the products of oppression. Sarah Agaton Howes is one of those fighting not just against a system but for her community.
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WE ARE IN A BOUGIE coffee shop—actually, the only coffee shop of its kind—in Cloquet, a former logging town just off the Fond du Lac Reservation in northern Minnesota. Sarah is cheerful and funny and pretty, a mother of three and proprietor of House of Howes, a contemporary Ojibwe design, art, and lifestyle store. She is also a passionate runner who is, she says, known as “the Run Stalker” of the reservation. She pretty much lives in activewear.
“I grew up in my grandma’s house on Reservation Road, just out here,” she recalls. She lived in Cloquet for most of high school, and then in Duluth. I had first met Sarah at Ojibwe ceremonies in Wisconsin and had always thought of her as Ojibwe, but she corrects me. “My grandma’s dad built that house after the Cloquet fire in 1918. He was Creek. I’m Ojibwe and Creek.” Sarah’s dad was a cop—“The only Native cop in the whole county. He had a full-time job. That was rare for men around here back then.” Her mother is from California, of Norwegian descent. “My mom was traveling the country, she wanted to live off the land. My dad was like, ‘My grandparents’ house is out there, no plumbing, no nothing. I don’t know any woman who’d want to live there.’ And she’s like, ‘I do!’ and that was that. They met when he was an AIMster and they went to big drum ceremony. But as I grew up they got into this really weird church, so I didn’t grow up going to ceremony.” Her father’s job influenced the family, too. “That kind of job makes you see people in a certain way, one way. And so we got more and more isolated. He knew all the bad things that were happening in the community and I think that kinda pulled us away from what was going on in the community. We still lived there, but it created an isolation.” So the family kept to themselves in their two-story house. Sarah did spend a lot of time with her cousins, but her Ojibwe life withered. Surprisingly, it was their diet—or the consequences of it—that changed things. When Sarah was eleven, her father had a heart attack. The event shook him. “He completely changed his life. Again. He went back to ceremonies, he went back to our roots. Everything shifted at that point.” Her parents divorced, and Sarah stayed with her mother. Her father was secretive about his newfound ceremonial life, so she didn’t know much about it, and she never got the chance to find out much. Her father had developed diabetes, and like his own father, he died at forty-nine, when Sarah was twenty. “Average for an Indian in those days,” she says. “Unhealthy eating, too sedentary, genetics, and stress.” Now she has brothers who are into their forties, and she worries about them, too.
Despite her father’s secretiveness, his late-life connection with traditional ways “planted a seed,” as she put it. “He created the possibility of other directions for me. So in my twenties it was me trying to find that life, basically. Trying to find my way back to it.” After high school and college, she married and got pregnant. “I was five days overdue. I was having contractions. They did a stress test. They told me everything looks fine. They sent me home. I had contractions all night. I went back in the next day and everyone makes this face: We need to go to the hospital.” Her baby had no heartbeat. “This is a time in your life when the whole page turns. I remember thinking, no, no. Well . . . wake her up! Do SOMETHING. This is the 2000s. This doesn’t happen. I hadn’t known anybody who lost a baby.” Her baby was stillborn. “We don’t know why. I had to make peace with that, with not knowing. Then I had a miscarriage. It was rough. I was on this desperate mission to have a baby.” Finally she gave birth to a son. “It was both wonderful and horrible. Scary as hell. I used to stare at him breathing. I didn’t sleep. I would wake myself up because I thought it was my job to keep him there.” The experience had changed her. “I’m not the same person, I’m different in every way.”
Sarah was desperate to get pregnant again. It was all she thought about. During a checkup, a doctor tried to talk to her about her weight. “I was really heavy then. I weighed about two hundred eleven.” The doctor told her she was likely to develop diabetes within ten years if she didn’t change something. “She was a tribal doctor and she was being nice. She didn’t want to discourage me.” Her son, Rizal, had started eating real food, and Sarah was careful about his diet. “I’m feeding him organic squash and stuff like that. And me? I’m eating potato chips and grilled cheese!” Sarah came from a place where everyone was significantly overweight, and she could see that “eventually these two worlds were gonna merge. Eventually he was going to start eating chips and cheese and not eat squash and I’m gonna have diabetes. I didn’t want him to watch me take shots, or watch me in the hospital.”
That was when she started going back to ceremony. After her daughter died, people had suggested it, but she had demurred. “I thought those big ceremonies were for when you were really, really sick. Not for being sad.” But then she met someone who told her she was going to ceremony and invited her along. The friend told her what to bring, what to do. “I had no idea of even what was going to happen. But it was like . . . I had to get to a better place. A good place physically, spiritually, mentally. Even with my kid, I had anxiety and fear: that someone was going to take him away from me.” For Sarah it was as if she was waking up into her ceremonial life and life before was something that she didn’t understand: she had been a person she didn’t recognize.
Choosing to deal with her grief through ceremony was one of the first big healthy choices she’d made in her life. She began to see how her physical health was connected to her spiritual and mental health. But she didn’t know many physically healthy Indians. One woman from her reservation, who also attended ceremony, had run a half marathon in Duluth. “I’d never even run a five K! And she’s like, ‘Us Native people should be out there!’ Externally, I blew her off. I was like: No way. But internally, she must have planted a seed in me.” Sarah did the 5K. “It took me forever. It took me so long the police car had to drive behind me at the end, like I was the president!” She laughs, and it’s a great la
ugh. “I remember getting to the finish line and people were cheering for me. It was a major moment.” When her daughter died in utero, “I felt I died, a little,” but this was embracing life, saying, “I want to live. I want to be alive. I want my son to see me be a fully vibrant person. I want to, I want to . . . run. I want to move. I want my body to work. I wanted to know what it would feel like not to be a prisoner in my own body. To be overweight like I was for so long there was so much I never even tried to do. So much I never attempted. So much of my life was wasted that way.”
Sarah started out with small, realistic goals. She wanted to lose the eleven pounds she thought of as her “grief weight” and get back to her “regular” weight of two hundred pounds—though even then she recognized on some level that there was nothing “regular” about standing five-foot-five and weighing two hundred pounds. After she ran that first 5K, she joined a Weight Watchers group on the reservation. She didn’t know anything about cooking or nutrition, but she followed the program, cutting out fat and junk food and eating nothing but chicken breasts and broccoli for a month. Her husband did it with her. Soon they added other foods to their diet, trying a new healthy recipe every week. She had never been so disciplined, but she had decided to go through ceremonies in June and to have another baby, and she knew where she wanted to be for that to happen. She lost eighty pounds in six months, got pregnant, and had a healthy daughter. Then she set about losing the weight she’d gained in pregnancy. “I thought, ‘I’ve been through this, I can do it.’ And I knew how to do it.” She lost sixty pounds. “People asked, ‘Are you on meth? Are you eating?’ I had to show people I was eating and was being healthy. Those models weren’t out there.”
