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

The beautiful Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America by Sean Sherman with Kate Nelson and Kristin Donnelly comes out November 11 from Clarkson Potter. This is a cookbook in that it has functional recipes, but even beyond that it is a gorgeous and informative record of the lifeways and foodways of native groups all over the continent. Chef Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota) presents history, geography, and his own personal experience with each region’s cuisine and current efforts to revive and preserve food traditions.

The book is organized by geographical region, and each region chapter begins with several pages of engaging information about the area and its history before the recipes. First there’s an overview of Sherman’s connection to that region, then a section about the land, one about the Native American history, and finally, one about the food. By the time the recipes start, a reader has a good sense of the historical, geographical and cultural context for them.

In many ways I feel like I was the target audience for this book. I love food and am interested in different food traditions, and I appreciate movements to eat locally and sustainably. I already knew some of the geographical and historical information in this book, especially for the northwest coast region where I grew up and the northeast coast region where I live now. Most of the information about the other regions, especially those in Mexico and near the Arctic, was new to me and all of Sean Sherman’s personal connections to the regions made for appealing framing.

The recipes, accompanied by mouth-watering photography, tell us about what foods are available natively in each region, featuring things like salmon in the northwest, maple in the northeast, and corn in various ways all over the continent. I learned about nixtamalization, various ways to process different greens, and recipes for fruit and animal fat meant to be frozen in near-arctic regions. I’m not a “read through a cookbook for funzies” person generally, but I read this one like it was narrative nonfiction, and was consistently interested and engaged.

Part of that is because there is an thread of biographical focus on Sean Sherman and his own journeys to rediscover and popularize ways to use native foods, and connect with other people around the continent doing similar work. You can read or listen to an NPR interview with Sherman from 2022, to get a sense of his vision.

Even beyond providing that biographical thread as an ongoing narrative focus, the cookbook feels literary. Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America struck resonances for me with many texts I already know and appreciate. For instance, it quotes Robin Wall Kimmerer many times, and the discussion of responsible foraging and maintenance of wilderness reminded me of what I had learned about agricultural engagement with the land from Liz Kozik’s graphic dissertation, Repeopling Prairies. The history of native peoples maintaining food traditions reminded me of how the characters eat in The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich.

I don’t know that I will be making any of the recipes in this book, because I don’t have access to all of the ingredients. I am, however, already looking forward to rereading it.