All Native American reservations in Montana now have community gardens, and there are at least eight gardens on the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The tribe is teaching members to raise vegetables, some of them made into soup that is delivered to tribal elders. This year members grew 5 tons of produce to be given away.
Ancestral seeds are part of the effort. Each year the BNFSI sends out 200 packets of seeds for ancestral crops to Indigenous people in Montana.
Creating foods that appeal to contemporary tastes is critical to the project. The BNFSI is working with Sean Sherman, the “Sioux Chef,” to turn corn, meat, and other Native foods into appealing dishes.
Sherman founded the award-winning Owamni restaurant in Minneapolis and in 2020 opened the Indigenous Food Lab through his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. The lab, in downtown Minneapolis, is also a restaurant and an education and training center that creates dishes using only Indigenous foods from across the country — no dairy, cane sugar, wheat flour, beef, chicken, or other ingredients from what he calls colonizers.
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