The first Lakota Food Summit is taking place in Rapid City this week. Speakers are focusing on food sovereignty, tradition, culture and community education.
Sean Sherman founded the Sioux Chef out of Minneapolis. It’s comprised of a team that works to share information about Native cuisine and make Indigenous foods more accessible to communities. Sherman hosted a cooking event at the Summit.
“We weren’t really focused on saying that ‘all we’re serving is healthy food’. We were focused on bringing out Indigenous, regional foods that happen to be extremely healthy. It’s just like one of the best diets because it’s low glycemic foods. There’s a lot of plant diversity, there’s low salts, there’s low sugars. And it’s just a perfect diet when it comes down to it. It’s like what every diet’s trying to be, basically, right now. So I feel like with the passion that we see with events like this, people get really excited and we can easily bring that excitement back onto tribal communities and create something that’s uniquely there's they can be really proud of.”
Sherman says he’s hoping to spread facts about Native cuisines so when others want to get involved, they have an easy starting point.
Linda Black Elk teaches at United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota. She’s an Ethnobotanist and makes medicine from plants. Black Elk says switching more Indigenous foods or adopting a decolonized diet can be a challenge today.
“But I really don’t look at it as making these extreme changes right away where you’re illuminating everything that’s colonial from your diet. I for one love bacon and I love cheese so I keep those things in my diet but I make sure that I’ve added a lot of really amazing, healthy, nourishing traditional ingredients and so I just eat a lot less of those colonized ingredients.”
Black Elk says growing your own foods helps build a relationship with nutrients that’s lacking in processed diets. The Lakota Food Summit continues through Thursday.