Within Indigenous communities across North America and beyond, we have long known that food is medicine. This isn’t just theory; it’s fact. We understand that seasonal, regionally specific and culturally relevant foods are vital for nurturing, nourishing and healing both our people and our planet. And it’s high time we all embrace the Native American concept of food as medicine.

Our ancestral wisdom has ensured our survival for millennia, even in the face of unthinkable circumstances like colonialism, genocide and ongoing oppression. This ever-relevant knowledge will ensure our collective survival amid today’s unthinkable circumstances here in the United States, such as political instability, climate change and rising health issues.

So much of these lessons exist within our foodways, which in a Native worldview we recognize as inherently intertwined with our culture, land and history. Long before European arrival, Native groups across North America established robust, thriving societies undergirded by ecologically sound foodways. In stark contrast with today’s extractive, exploitative food system, these place-based traditions emphasized sustainable, climate-savvy principles – and they’re still being practiced today.

I delved deep into that knowledge during my years-long research alongside renowned Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman while co-writing the new book Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. He is perhaps best known for his Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni, which serves “decolonized” food made without European-introduced ingredients, such as beef, chicken, pork, dairy, wheat flour and sugar cane. With this book, Sean and I are shining a spotlight on the countless elders, cooks, producers and culture bearers who have helped safeguard centuries-old wisdom that’s been passed from generation to generation.

Sean’s bigger-picture mission to revitalize........

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