Photo by Bill Phelps
Expanding Access to Indigenous Foods in Montana
As early-season nettles and morels began to emerge next to stream beds throughout the Gallatin Valley, a group of Montanans crowded together at family-style tables at Fork & Spoon to eat a delicious meal made with local ingredients and wild foods. Farmers, MSU faculty, students, and community members chattered over cups of evergreen and maple tea. The night’s menu was full of healthy, creative dishes ranging from rabbit corn dumplings to wild rice flan drizzled with chaga syrup. Between courses and conversation, award-winning Minneapolis chef, cookbook author, and Indigenous food advocate Sean Sherman discussed the culinary and medicinal value of the foods with ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk.
The seven-course meal prepared and served at Fork & Spoon was the first public event highlighting the blossoming partnership between Bozeman’s Human Resource Development Center and the Minneapolis-based nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems.
Established in 2017, NATIFS is led and staffed by Indigenous people and aims to enhance Indigenous food sovereignty and extend Native American foodways. The organization was founded by Sherman, who is a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe. Black Elk serves as the educational programming and community outreach lead for NATIFS.
Throughout his professional life as a chef, Sherman has recognized the need to support Indigenous producers by establishing new markets and providing education about healthy and traditional foods. While a wide range of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas have long cultivated and collected healthy foods, today many Native American communities deal with disproportionate levels of food insecurity and diet-related diseases due to a variety of factors including lack of food access and systemic inequities that impact access to healthcare and nutrition resources.
Currently, only 3 percent of food markets and grocery stores in the United States are Indigenous-focused. Addressing this lack of representation and access, NATIFS established an Indigenous food hub in Minneapolis. This hub is comprised of both an Indigenous Food Lab and an Indigenous Food Lab Market, offering products from over 30 Indigenous producers. Now, with an established working nonprofit model, NATIFS is expanding its operations to Bozeman by setting up another lab and market at the recently built HRDC building. The new HRDC facility at 206 Griffin Drive offers partners access to a commercial kitchen, food storage, a test kitchen, and office space, making it a natural fit for NATIFS’s expansion.
Here in Bozeman, Sherman has a wide-reaching vision for the HRDC space. One of his primary goals is to help train Indigenous entrepreneurs and culinary students. He plans to work with Native American MSU students to create educational videos in the test kitchen, which will be shared widely on media platforms. Local Indigenous leaders and NATIFS staff will host classes that cover topics such as seed saving, ethnobotany, Indigenous medicines, and Native American languages.
Sherman hopes to vastly expand markets for Indigenous producers by processing and selling Indigenous food products to larger institutions such as colleges and hospitals through his Meals for Native Institutions program. He also expects to partner with local grocery store chains and offer end-cap displays featuring locally made Indigenous goods. This market expansion may allow more Native American Montana producers to diversify what types of foods they are producing with the confidence that they will have a consistent buyer.
“We want to pay fair market value for these products to help Indigenous producers grow,” Sherman says. Currently, NATIFS purchases around $700,000 in food annually from Indigenous producers and farmers. With the Bozeman operation, that number is set to grow, and the organization hopes to have a staff of 10 operating out of HRDC by the end of 2026.
This next evolution of NATIFS will build upon the work and partnerships built with other Bozeman-based Indigenous food-sovereignty initiatives. The Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, an organization focused on providing mentorship opportunities between Indigenous young professionals and elder mentors, has long worked in partnership with Sherman to provide education and culinary events for Montana students and the surrounding communities. Sherman will also work in partnership with the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative, a program of MIFSI that seeks to strengthen communities by sharing Indigenous food knowledge and educating future generations of Indigenous food-system professionals.
“We need to continue building this type of infrastructure to come together as tribes,” says Bozeman-based Jill Falcon Ramaker, founder of the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative.
NATIF’s longer-term vision is to establish a network of regional hubs that support the expansion of Indigenous culinary traditions. The organization is actively working to open hubs in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Anchorage, Alaska. There are also plans to open an Indigenous restaurant in Bozeman that features pre-colonial foods of Montana’s Indigenous peoples.
“As we open up more Indigenous businesses,” Sherman says, “we can only imagine how many more Indigenous producers and their communities we can support.”
