Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America

by Sean Sherman, Kate Nelson, Kristin Donnelly

Overview

Uncover the stories behind the foods that have linked the natural environments, traditions, and histories of Indigenous peoples across North America for millennia through more than 100 ancestral and modern recipes from three-time James Beard Award–winning Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman.

“I’ve been completely seduced by Sean Sherman’s new book. This is so much more than enticing recipes and gorgeous photos.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry

“A collection of the stories that tell deeper truths about our country and the people who have always been here.”—José Andrés, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen

Growing up on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman understood that his people’s food was rich in flavor, heritage, and connection to the land. It was in the midst of a successful restaurant career mainly cooking European cuisines that he realized the lack of understanding about Native American foodways—a revelation that sent him on a journey to learn more about how Indigenous communities have preserved and evolved their cuisines through the centuries. Now a leading figure in the Indigenous food movement, he shares in Turtle Island the unique and diverse Native foodways of North America through both traditional and modern recipes made with ingredients that have nourished Indigenous peoples physically, spiritually, and culturally for generations.

Organized by region, this book delves into the rich culinary landscapes of Turtle Island—as many Indigenous cultures call this continent. Learn to eat with the seasons, consume meat and fish nose-to-tail, focus on plant-forward dishes, and discover how to better feed yourself. Alongside delicious recipes like Smoked Bison Ribeye, Wild-Rice Crusted Walleye Cakes, Charred Rainbow Trout with Grilled Ramps, Sweet Potato Soup with Dried Venison and Chile Oil, Sunflower Seed “Risotto,” and Sweet Corn Pudding with Woodland Berry Sauce (and so much more), you’ll see the inspiring Indigenous food scene through Sean’s eyes.

Exemplifying how Native foodways can teach us all to connect with the natural world around us, Turtle Island features rich narrative histories and spotlights the communities producing, gathering, and cooking these foods, including remarkable stories of ingenuity and adaptation that capture the resilience of Indigenous communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593579237
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	11/11/2025
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota, born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, has been cooking across the US and world for the past thirty years. His main culinary focus has been the revitalization and awareness of Indigenous foods systems in a modern culinary context. In 2014, he opened The Sioux Chef as a caterer and food educator in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area. His first book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, was published in 2017. His restaurant OWAMNI opened in 2021 and was honored on many best new restaurant lists, winning the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2022.

Kate Nelson, Tlingit, is an award-winning writer and editor based in Minneapolis who focuses on amplifying important Indigenous change makers and issues. She has interviewed such luminaries as chef Sean Sherman, model/activist Quannah ChasingHorse, and Reservation Dogs showrunner Sterlin Harjo, and written for publica­tions including The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Elle, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and others. A lifelong storyteller, she is a former magazine editor-in-chief, a two-time James Beard Foundation Media Award nominee, and an avid equestrian in her free time.

Kristin Donnelly is the author of Modern Potluck and Cauliflower from Short Stake Editions and has worked on over a dozen other cookbooks as a co-author, recipe developer, and project manager. For eight years, she was is a food editor at Food & Wine magazine and has written about food and lifestyle for many magazines, including Martha Stewart Living, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Women’s Health, and Parents. She lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with her husband and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

“You are on native land.” Walking into the entrance of my restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota, you’re welcomed with a glowing red neon sign with those words. Inside the restaurant, you’re drawn to the beautiful view of the Mississippi River, the location of a once-mighty waterfall that in the Dakota language was called Owamniyomni, roughly translating to “place of the falling swirling waters.” The waterfall is long gone, replaced by concrete skirting and a lock and dam, but the importance of the location still holds for those who know the history.

We named the restaurant Owamni to take back the original namesake of this special place, which has held significance for the Dakota community for centuries, long before the arrival of European colonists in the early 1800s. This restaurant was years in the making, and we couldn’t be prouder of creating something that not only showcases culturally important foods from Indigenous producers but also normalizes these health-sustaining foods. That was the early driving force behind my work—to help address the health issues plaguing our tribal communities, including high rates of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. I realized we needed to return to a diet of the nourishing foods we ate before contact, which helped solidify my philosophy on decolonized cuisine. Reflecting that credo, our menu at Owamni is totally devoid of Eurocentric ingredients, such as dairy, wheat, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken. Eliminating these elements introduced during colonialism also meant that we would highlight the amazing and diverse Native foods of North America, and encourage guests to embrace their beauty as well.

But we aren’t cooking like it’s 1491. With dishes like cedar-braised duck tacos, antelope tartare with aronia berries, grilled sweet potatoes with maple chili crisp, and wild foraged teas, our team serves up delicious, nutritious, modern Indigenous food, proving to the world that it’s possible to run a successful restaurant without soda and ranch dressing. I’ve been told time and again how ambitious and innovative this mission is in the American restaurant world, but in my mind, we’re just doing what Indigenous peoples the world over have been doing since time immemorial.

When I look back on the journey that got me here, I understand I was always on this path. It just took me time in life to realize it. I was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and am an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota. When I was young, running wild across the grasslands with my sister and cousins, we had so much freedom. Like most kids in the ’80s, we had sparse parental supervision and were often left to our own mischief. I remember walking along miles of barbed-wire fence lines, dogs at our sides, darting redwing blackbirds on the fence posts. The occasional curlew flew overhead, making their presence known with their shrilling high-pitched calls, and curious prairie dogs ducked into their holes that dotted the landscape. We would spend hours outside in dusty cowboy boots, our imaginations the main source of our entertainment. The prairies smelled of dust, white sage, and nearby alfalfa fields. We rode horses, wandered through shelter belts of overgrown trees, and crossed wide open grasslands on foot, always coming up with ways to keep ourselves busy.

Because we lived on a ranch, dinner consisted of lots of beef, and we eventually ate our way through the whole animal. It was normal to have tongue, kidneys, and intestines in rotation for meals. There were no restaurants on Pine Ridge during those days. My grandparents had a cabin just off the Needles Highway in the Black Hills, where we spent many a summer playing in the creek, free-climbing rock walls, and just wandering. Growing up feral had its perks. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything.

After my folks split up and my mom moved us off the reservation, a new path started. Spearfish was a town of some seven thousand people in the northern Black Hills, about fifteen miles from the Wyoming border off I-90. My mom was going back to school at Black Hills State University (where I would later attend), and I was totally outside my comfort zone. I eventually found some friends and began the transition of living in a “big city.”

My life in restaurant kitchens started in Spearfish, where I got my first kitchen job at thirteen. The Sluice, as it was called, was a mining-themed American steakhouse with a mining cart salad bar. I learned quickly and continued to work in restaurants all through high school. When I was nineteen, I worked in Deadwood, South Dakota, where legalized gambling had brought hordes of tourists. I would start my day breaking down cases of whole beef tenderloins, cleaning the silver skins, portioning and bacon-wrapping them to an exact weight of five ounces. The restaurant had a $4.99 filet mignon special that came with a baked potato and a piece of Texas toast. After making a few hundred filet mignons, I would prep for dinner service.

I’d organize my station for the fury to come and pick out my music: the Black Sabbath album Paranoid was my usual choice to get through the rush. Right before we opened, the seventeen-yearold dishwasher and I would step outside and take a couple hits off a one-hitter usually packed with low-grade Mexican brick weed that was always in my pocket back then. We went through about four hundred steak dinners a night, more on the weekends, and I was the only one running the flattop. I had a natural ability to move and learn fast, but at that point in life, I really didn’t have much exposure to good food. That would change with my next journey. After a bad truck accident that three of my friends and I were in, I got a settlement of $7,000, bought a crappy 1981 GMC pickup with mismatched doors, packed up everything I owned, and left South Dakota behind.

My first couple years in Minneapolis I lived paycheck to paycheck, leaning on cash from pawn shops to pay for food, gas, and beer. The only items I owned that had any value (and barely any at that) were a Yamaha acoustic guitar, a TV/VCR combo, and a Samsung boom box. I could usually borrow about $25 for one of those at the pawn shop down the street, whose owners I got to know pretty well. It would cost me about $35 to get them out, which I’d do on payday only to have them back in hock the next week. After a failed attempt at getting into art school (because I had no financial resources), I continued working in restaurants. Again, I wouldn’t change anything.

The scene in Minneapolis back in the late ’90s was really big for me at the time, with so many great musicians constantly coming through and artists having the freedom to be however weird they wanted to be. As I adjusted and started to find more friends, I got my first chance to be an executive chef at a small Spanish tapas restaurant (the first one in Minneapolis). I didn’t know anything about Spanish food, but I jumped on the opportunity. Because this was still before widespread Internet access, books were my main source of education. I began devouring cookbooks, but I couldn’t afford them so I would just sit at a bookstore in Uptown for hours learning about techniques, flipping through photos of dishes, and reading essays from the chefs in their own words. Rarely would I write anything down; mostly I just logged it in my memory to attempt later at work if the opportunity came up.

This hands-on self-education approach to the culinary arts was valuable, and I still love cookbooks to this day. That’s why after years of study and practice with Indigenous foods, I see it’s so necessary to create more resources about a topic that just didn’t exist in those days. I learned a lot about European foods back then, but never even had a notion to think about Native American foods.

Editorial Reviews

I’ve been completely seduced by Sean Sherman’s new book—the only thing that could get me to put it down is the invitation to go harvest dandelion capers from the field. This is so much more than enticing recipes and gorgeous photos. Each imagined bite is a story, of the people and places that nourish us, of a history of resilience and ingenuity. These pages are an expression of Indigenous identity and a pathway for reconnection to the land. Gbekte ne?”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry

“So many of us in the industry look up to Sean for his dedication to sharing the foods and stories of the Indigenous peoples of North America. This cookbook is a collection of the stories that tell deeper truths about our country and the people who have always been here.”—José Andrés, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen

“Chef Sean takes us on a journey across North America to honor and appreciate the food traditions of it’s original people. At a time when perspectives like his are being minimized, this book is a must-read for a true understanding of the beauty of the Indigenous culture and history of this land.”—LeVar Burton, actor, author, and advocate for readers

“Chef Sean Sherman is a true pioneer both in preserving and advancing the rich culinary history of Indigenous people. With Turtle Island, he brings his talent and passion to the page, sharing recipes, beautiful photos, and his thoughts on what it means to honor and promote Indigenous food systems.”—Jacques Pépin, chef and television host

“Through the voice of Sean Sherman, we’re reminded that nature is our first teacher, our deepest pantry, and our enduring inspiration. Indigenous food traditions carry knowledge not just of ingredients and techniques, but of place, season, spirit—of who we are. This book is a celebration of connection, a map of how cuisine can reflect the soul of a place—and how, in returning to these roots, we might find ourselves again.”—René Redzepi, chef of Noma

“The great Sean Sherman has done more than anyone of his generation to showcase and popularize the Indigenous, pre-colonial foods of this land. In Turtle Island, he delivers more in-depth research and fabulous recipes; it's a book that belongs in the kitchen of anyone who’s serious about some of the most important roots of ‘American’ cooking.”—Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything and founder of The Bittman Project

“Indigenous food is a complex and rich cuisine that has been overlooked for far too long. Sean’s book shines a welcomed light on the rich history of Indigenous food and its continued place in our growing communities.”—Sterlin Harjo, showrunner, Reservation Dogs

“Chef Sean Sherman shares his rich, delicious take on storytelling through food, and I’ve been fortunate enough to experience it first hand. This book serves as a testament to the powerful resilience of Native peoples across North America.”—Deb Haaland, 54th secretary of the interior

From the Publisher