How do we expand our “we”?

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In New York City, where this piece was written, it’s estimated that there are well over 20,000 restaurants. Collectively, these restaurants serve up a staggering culinary diversity—from bibimbap to biryani, gumbo to gazpacho, and more—reflecting foodways of the most distant corners of the globe.

Of course, local food is also represented well: New York–style pizza shops dot every other block; bagels and babkas abound; and farm-to-table establishments serve regionally-harvested ingredients to diners in every borough.

But there is a different kind of local food that is harder to find. If you're seeking a meal that is prepared using ingredients native to the land, prepared according to methods honed by people living here since time immemorial—in the case of New York City, that’s the Lenni Lenape—then the choices are few and far between.

So where is all the Native food?

It turns out that question has a better answer in Minneapolis, Minnesota—where renowned chef Sean Sherman and the organization he leads, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), are working to change the continent’s relationship to ingredients that are traditional to Indigenous cultures and histories.


Founder, Executive Director
NATIFS
“If we start to learn from diverse Indigenous communities … that have phone number list deep connections to our land, there is a future for our humanity.”
Owamni and reaching Indigenous “normalization”
Created in 2017, NATIFS has become an ambitious culinary organization whose wide-ranging programs and initiatives can make it hard to define. One way to understand the organization’s mission is to visit its award-winning Owamni restaurant, which sits on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis’s Mill Ruins Park.

Famously, Owamni refrains from using ingredients introduced by European colonizers. That excludes wheat flour, cane sugar, dairy, beef, pork, and chicken from the menu.

What’s left to compose Owamni dishes? It’s a lot more than one might think.

“In America, Indigenous foods haven’t really been a part of the conversation until recently,” Sherman says, which means that many eaters have little idea of, for example, the “immense plant diversity out there that Western diets completely ignore.” In contrast, Owamni’s 2025 winter menu features lesser-known plant additions like tepary beans, juniper maple, and sweetgrass.