Sean Sherman, Jackie Kashian, and Laura Veirs

Live Wire with Luke Burbank

This episode of LiveWire features a diverse array of guest segments ranging from culinary activism to indie folk music. Host Luke Burbank in

Key takeaways

• Chef Sean Sherman discusses the 'decolonized' culinary philosophy of removing ingredients introduced by colonizers like dairy, wheat, and cane sugar.
• The Quileute tribe is utilizing funds raised by Twilight fans to support their 'Move to Higher Ground Project' in Washington state.

Main topics

• Indigenous food sovereignty
• Decolonized cuisine

Notable quotes

We're not trying to recreate European recipes because we just remove the Eurocentrism of it completely.

Conclusion

A profound exploration of how heritage, art, and community resilience

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) Hey there, welcome to LiveWire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank. This week on the show, we are enjoying some food and wine. First, when we chat with the chef and activist, Sean Sherman, he runs this restaurant in Minneapolis. It's called Awamni, where the menu is entirely designed around decolonized ingredients, which he's going to explain to us what exactly that means, and then talk about his new book, Turtle Island, Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Then we'll get some comedy from Jackie Cation, who is... Pretty angry these days by her own admission, but for good reason. Then we're going to hear music from Laura Veers, who joined us for a special performance live at a Sundappled Vineyard in Oregon's wine country. That's the wine part that I was referring to earlier. We got to have some wine, which was awesome. You're just going to have to use your imaginations. But I think you can do it. Stick around. We've got a great episode of Live Wire that starts right after this. Speaker 6 (1:00) From PRX, it's... Speaker 6 (1:10) This week, Chef Sean Sherman. So Speaker 2 (1:13) if we really look at all this massive knowledge base of indigenous peoples globally, especially with their food systems and their connection to the environment, we have so much to learn that could better all of us. Speaker 1 (1:23) Stand-up comedian Jackie Cation. But as far as I can tell, fly fishing is just sales. You're just standing on the shore going, can I interest you in this fly? Can I interest you in this fly? What about this fly? With music from Laura Veers Speaker 6 (1:39) and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello. And now, the host of Livewire, Speaker 3 (1:47) Luke Payne. Speaker 3 (1:52) Thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thanks to everybody for tuning in from all over these United States of America. We've got a heck of a show in store for you this week. All kinds of fun conversations and music and comedy. First, though, we've got to kick things off the way we always do with a little segment we call the best news we heard all week. Speaker 3 (2:15) This right here is our reminder that there is, in fact, good news happening on planet Earth. You just got to look for it. And we do. And we are presenting it to you right now. Elena, what is the best news that you heard all week? Speaker 6 (2:27) OK, Luke Burbank, I know you are a Washingtonian by birth. Uh-huh. Well, Speaker 3 (2:32) not by birth, but by majority of life lived. Speaker 6 (2:35) Does that mean that you were like contractually obligated to read the Twilight books? Speaker 3 (2:40) I'm going to be honest with you. Those ones missed me. I was a little maybe mature, let's just say. I think I was in my 30s when those came out. But I am steeped in the lore of them. I Speaker 6 (2:52) am not super familiar with it, but I do know that it's this kind of vampire story. And then there are also these werewolves. And the werewolves are in the novels and in the movies connected with this indigenous community, the Quileute. who are actually a real indigenous people that live off the coast of Washington state. And they were kind of represented in this really kind of ham-fisted way in the books. There was not a lot of legitimate research done into the practices of this very venerable community. So the Quileute tribe, 400 members of that tribe, live in a community called La Push, Washington, which is right on the Quileute River, which is a tidal river. And it is now super duper in the tsunami zone. And so they started this thing called the Move to Higher Ground Project. And in 2012, the federal government gave them additional acreage that is away from the ocean. And they are building schools, government buildings. elder care centers, parks in a much more sort of safe space. And the Twilight fan community has been supporting this move with donations. There's a Facebook group, the name of which I don't think we can say on public radio. There's just an expletive in it, but it's a very funny kind of, I think, self-aware group of adult Twilight fans, people who've loved the book since middle school, but now they're grownups. And maybe they're kind of learning a little bit about this. the storytelling of Twilight, the ways in which it might be harmful. And in the past five years, they've raised $117,000 to support this move to higher ground project. And then other, I don't know what you call it, like fantasy authors have participated as well. This one author is raffling off a character name in her next vampire novel. There's a cosmetics company called Glamlite, and they had released a Twilight-themed makeup kit. And then when they learned about this sort of story about the Quileute, The CEO, Giselle Hernandez, went to La Push and spent a lot of time with the community, made a donation, ultimately lost her license ship over it. But still, she's like, listen, these fans, they told me I needed to listen to this story that's attached to this book that they love. And I decided to do it. And there's something about this particular kind of reparative justice, reparative action that I can just really get behind. It's like the corporations aren't going to. change so the consumers have to. Yeah. Speaker 3 (5:26) And you can be a fan of something this, I mean, we're going to use the word art right now. You can be a fan of this art, but then you can also kind of like learn about the parts of it that really maybe were not really particularly well thought out. And then you can come through and try to do, like you said, some repair on that. The best news that I heard all week involved some travelers who got stranded in Calgary up there in Canada. a guy named Quinn Sedmak decided on this recent trip to violate his personal policy of being a solitary traveler. He said that normally he does that. But on this particular flight, which this leg of it was going from Calgary to Kelowna, British Columbia, he decided to start talking to his seatmate. His seatmate was a woman named Patricia Robinson, age 90. Patricia was trying to get out to visit her family. They had given her a trip to Kelowna for her 90th birthday. and they were all going to hang out together. Well, they're all on this plane, she and Quinn, when the wildfire smoke that has been sweeping through the West and really, frankly, most of America these days, basically obscured the visuals for the airport that they were trying to go to in Kelowna, British Columbia, and the plane had to turn around and go back to Calgary. So they go back, they land in Calgary. Patricia and Quinn had been hitting it off. They're chatting it up on the plane. The guy behind them, a guy named Tanner, overhears them talking about their plans for what they're going to do if their subsequent flights are canceled. Quinn and Tanner are like, we got to get back to Kelowna. It's a seven-hour drive, but they're like, we just got to do this. So they decide to rent a car. And as they're walking to the rental car place, who do they see sitting there but 90-year-old Patricia Robinson, who's also stranded. And they're like, yo, Pat, do you want to get in the ride with us? And she says, Absolutely. So Speaker 4 (7:16) the Speaker 3 (7:17) three of them jump into the rental car and embark on this seven-hour road trip together. Patricia said she just texted her family and said, I'm riding there with some guys. It'll be fine. Pretty chill family. Nobody was worried about 90-year-old Patricia. Speaker 2 (7:33) They make Speaker 3 (7:33) this trip together. They have a grand old time. One thing that was quite sweet, actually, was this was a drive that Patricia used to make pretty frequently with her late husband. So she said that just getting to see these spots and these recognizable landmarks and things was really kind of awesome for her, just as a way of reminiscing about, you know, previous version of her life. They traded stories as they went on this drive. And when they got to the destination, they dropped Patricia off with her family, who was just kind of amazed that this whole thing had happened. They took some pictures and they put it on Facebook, of course. And now it's become this whole story up in Canada. Patricia says. In her nine decades of life, this is one of the highlights of her life, was getting to ride along with these two much younger fellows. In fact, Tanner's birthday is the same birthday as Patricia, and Tanner is 45, and Patricia is 90. So on the next birthday that they each have, Patricia will continue to be turning double the age of Tanner, Speaker 6 (8:31) her new Speaker 3 (8:32) buddy from the road trip. But, you know, in these fractious times. It's always nice to hear a story about some folks kind of looking out for each other and bonding over circumstances that could otherwise be a pretty big plumber. So that right there, that's the best news I heard all week. Speaker 3 (8:56) You're tuned in to LiveWire Radio. Our first guest is a three-time James Beard award-winning chef who grew up on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, where he always understood that his people's food was rich in flavor and heritage and was really connected to the land. But actually, it wasn't until he moved to Mexico when he was an adult where he started learning about some of their ancestral food ways down there. that he actually decided to reconnect with his Lakota culinary heritage. That journey turned him into maybe the leading figure in the indigenous food movement in the U.S. He's got a new book out. It's called Turtle Island, which reveals the unique and diverse native foodways here in North America. His name is Sean Sherman. He's also known as the Sioux Chef. And he joined us live at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen. Speaker 3 (10:01) Sean Sherman, welcome to LiveWire. Thanks for having me. This book is absolutely phenomenal, and I can't wait to get into it. First, I would like to hear a little bit about your kind of origin story. Tell me about kind of where you grew up and also what the food culture was like for you as a kid. Speaker 2 (10:16) Absolutely. So I was born and raised on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which is in South Dakota, South Central. It's kind of along the Nebraska border. And, you know, it's just a big, wide open space. It's got some of the Badlands and South Dakota in that space. And, you know, we were just young kids growing up on the reservation. We lived on my grandparents' ranch. So there's a lot of cattle around us and a lot of grassland, a lot of jackrabbits and rattlesnakes and all the things. And, you know, we were pretty feral at that age back then. It's funny because reading your book, you Speaker 3 (10:45) know, I'm. from the same generation. And I think people of my generation love to tell the story like, we would just leave the house in the morning and then come back when the streetlights turned on. And then I read about your childhood. I was like, no, that was really next level. I was still in a city. adults around. You were like really just left to roam. I feel Speaker 2 (11:02) like the boomers are just like their only rule for parenting was just stay the hell outside until dark and make sure you're home by dark. Speaker 3 (11:10) And that was kind of the Speaker 2 (11:11) one parenting rule. But yeah, growing up on the reservation, we had food, of course, but I was a product of commodity food program food. So we had a lot of government foods. So there's these big cans of government vegetables packed in sodium and fruits packed in corn syrups and literally gallons of corn syrup. and big government blocks of cheese and powdered milk and all those kinds of things. And so we didn't really have a lot of Lakota food growing up because, you know, I was born and raised on a segregated, colonized community, basically. And so it wasn't until much later that I kind of found this path of really kind of trying to understand, like, why was my heritage food missing from the entire culinary scene across America? And why don't Speaker 3 (11:51) we Speaker 2 (11:51) have Native American restaurants in every single city across America on top of that? Speaker 3 (11:55) Yeah, you talk about in the book that there's this thing going around the sort of food world or the food community of people saying there's no American culinary tradition, there's no American food, because they're just thinking of like white people food that's made of French and Italian, etc. But Speaker 2 (12:12) you really push back on that idea. Yeah, because there's been, you know, generations upon generations of diverse... peoples here from all over the place. And this book explores all of North America, Mexico through Alaska, just wiping away those colonial lines and just looking at that tapestry of diversity. You know, there's so much to explore because all the food is different, whether you're in the Pacific Northwest or the Great Lakes region or the South or... Northern Alaska or southern Mexico. All of these places have amazing histories of agriculture, of understanding wild food systems, of game, seafood, wherever it might be. So there's so much to explore to really understand what is American food. Speaker 3 (12:49) You had your first restaurant job at age 13? Yep. And then you ended up, you were running