Reflections on Creating Turtle Island
A Cookbook Against Erasure
Turtle Island: The Cookbook
(PRE-ORDER Turtle Island HERE)
This November 11, 2025, the book Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America will be released into the world. A massive project that I started in 2021 finally comes to reality in a few short weeks. I can’t thank my co authors Kristin Donnelly and Kate Nelson enough for their expertise, wisdom and patience. My partner Mecca Bos for being by my side through much of the travel and for her talented recipe testing with the support of our wonderful friend Tess Bouska. Also David Alvarado for his photographic direction along with Jaida Grey Eagle, they really breathed so much life into the food featured in the book.
For me, this is not just a cookbook. It’s a reclaiming, a declaration, maybe even a reset manual for where we’re at right now in the world with how we think about food.
And the timing? Couldn’t be better. Or worse I guess depending how you look at it. But everyday Trump-ism keeps twisting American politics further toward authoritarianism and stupidness. Our national story is being rewritten and re-whitewashed again in real time. Politicians are banning books, policing classrooms, demonizing DEI, dehumanizing communities of color, and acting like telling the truth about Indigenous genocide or Black enslavement is “anti-American.” What they really mean is: history makes their fragile whiteness uncomfortable. Maybe this book will be banned in Florida right out of the gate. But I guess if you’re not banned in Florida, then what are you really doing with your life.
Turtle Island pushes the opposite direction of the fear mongering xenophobic politicians. It presents food as resistance. Not sanitized, Instagram-cute fusion plates, but food that is actually alive with culture, memory, land, and story. Food that makes you a little uncomfortable because it carries truth with it. And discomfort is where change really becomes possible.
This book is an attempt to showcase the amazing tapestry of diversity here in North America through an Indigenous lens of food, region and culture. This book can only scratch the surface of such an immense story and I can only hope many more stories from all the amazing tribal communities will continue to grow. I also hope this books serves a way to view our food systems through a non Eurocentric lens and allow others to be bold in their story telling, foods, and practices.
Dismantling Historical Amnesia with Food
When I was a kid on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we didn’t have many occasions where our Lakota food was served, we didn’t we even have restaurants at all on the reservation and there was one grocery store to cover an area the size of the state of Connecticut. A large majority of our food access came from USDA Commodity Food Boxes. We didn’t see our history as Lakota in our schoolbooks, and we definitely didn’t hear the truth about the many massacres, broken treaties, boarding schools, or land theft, except through our own families who were dealt so much generational trauma, even those topics are still hard to speak about today.
Those omissions in our schools weren’t accidents. They were by design. I’ve written about our American educational system and its architects previously. (read Your History Class was a F*cking Lie here) America thrives on historical amnesia. Columbus “discovered” a continent? Bullshit , it was already full of countless civilizations. Andrew Jackson, “man of the people”? Fuck no , that asshat was responsible for the forced removals and death marches of so many communities in the eastern United States. Thanksgiving? A national fairytale to feel good about western expansion and distract from the reality that so many tribes today rely on the USDA handing out starvation rations on our reservations still to this day.
This is why Turtle Island matters. Every recipe holds a memory. Every dish interrupts the silence. It’s history on a plate.
And yes — the trolls always show up with their same tired lines:
“Indigenous people owned slaves too.”
“Tribes massacred each other before Europeans.”
“If it wasn’t for Europeans, you’d have killed yourselves off.”
These aren’t clever arguments. They’re excuses. They’re deflections to downplay colonial violence.
Yes, Indigenous nations fought wars. So did literally every culture in human history. But comparing those instances to the industrial-scale genocide and enslavement unleashed by Europeans? That’s like comparing a fistfight to the Holocaust. The scale, the intent, the aftermath are not even close.
And the idea that “we’d have killed ourselves off”? That is so fucking ridiculous. We thrived here for thousands of years. We built agriculture that is now mainstay across the globe, managed ecosystems with controlled burns, ran continent-wide trade routes, and developed sophisticated governance. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy literally influenced the U.S. Constitution, though the US Founders conveniently ignored the parts about women holding power.
Europeans didn’t “save” us. They were the ones circling the drain, wrecking their own forests, overfishing their seas, choking in overcrowded towns. They came here desperate seeking freedom from religious persecution, and when they found abundance, they did what colonialism always does: exploited it.
So when trolls trot out their weak equivalencies, remember: it’s not about history. It’s about holding onto power. And that’s exactly what Turtle Island pushes back against. So Fuck you in advance trolls…
Decolonizing a Perspective
I’ve said it a million times, we’re not trying to cook like it’s 1491. We’re not museum curators. We’re here now. We’ve adapted before and we will continue to.
I see myself as a futurist. We can’t go back, but we can carry forward as much ancestral knowledge as possible. Food sovereignty is about people having the right to define and control their food systems, eat foods that reflect their culture, and repair relationships with land and water.
When I started The Sioux Chef, I made a philosophical rule to remove colonial introduced ingredients which meant no wheat, no dairy, no processed sugar, no beef, no chicken, no pork, no ranch dressing. Not because they’re inherently “bad,” but because they didn’t represent who we were and who we could be. Removing them gave space for the real indigenous foundations by understanding regional wild foods, diverse proteins, and heirloom agricultural products.
Indigenous people had the blueprint for sustainability, reciprocity, and balance long before the words “organic,” “climate-smart,” or “TEK” ever existed. Those weren’t buzzwords. They were daily practice.
And we have a long ways to go to get back to putting values and community into our food systems. As I walked through the Minnesota State Fair this year knowing millions of dollars in food sales happen each year, but good luck finding anything Indigenous. Most of that money flows straight to giant corporations like Sysco, Aramark, and US Foods. A giant cash cow for corporate contracts. We can and should push to redirect those dollars back into local, BIPOC, and Indigenous producers wherever possible. It’s the same for most restaurant menus also unfortunately and I get it, it can be difficult to source and can become expensive, but the more we purchase with intention, the easier it is for our local producers to have a real foothold in the marketplace.
The Food System Overhaul We Desperately Need
Let’s be real: our food system — colonial in origin, capitalist in function — it is a shitshow. It pollutes water, destroys biodiversity, makes people sick, and fattens corporations who lobby politicians to keep the racket running.
It’s monocropping. Processed sugar. Factory meat. Extraction and exploitation of labor from people of color on repeat. And it thrives by keeping people cut off from foods that make them healthy.
But we don’t have to imagine another way — Indigenous systems already modeled it. They were built on conservation, biodiversity, reciprocity, and balance. No hoarding. No waste. No corporate chokehold.
Food sovereignty means returning power to people. Imagine a food system driven by reciprocity instead of extraction. Healthier bodies. Cleaner water. Productive Land. Stronger communities.
And here’s the thing: this isn’t just for Native folks. It’s for all of us.
What I Hope People Take Away
When people pick up Turtle Island, I don’t just want them to cook. I want them to rethink.
To see Indigenous peoples not as relics but innovators. See food not just as calories but as story. See the diverse landscapes as living libraries of knowledge.
I hope readers finish the book hungry to ask: What foods grow around me where I live? Who tended them before colonization? What knowledge was stolen and how can we connect with those who have the knowledge? And how do we carry it forward for the next generations?
Because food sovereignty isn’t just an Indigenous fight. It’s everyone’s fight.
Right now politicians sell fear like it’s a product. Scapegoating immigrants. Defining “real America” so narrowly it excludes most of us unless we are a straight (but closeted) white male christian republican.
Indigenous worldviews tell us the opposite: survival comes from interdependence, not exclusion. Climate collapse won’t respect state lines. Water shortages won’t stop at the border. Our only hope is knowledge systems that already figured out how to live here in balance.
Turtle Island isn’t nostalgia. It really is a blueprint. It’s an invitation to rethink who we are and how we build a livable future.
Because water crisis is happening now on our continent and we continue to let the Nestle’s of the world control and hoard as much water as they want to make plastic bottles. And consider how much water a single golf course uses in any given year and how many golf courses do we have in areas that are facing climate the change the hardest with drought and wildfires. We need to all wake up and water and food need to be actualized as a human right, not just a commodity for the wealthy.
Closing: The Invitation
So here’s the ask: On November 11, 2025, Turtle Island drops. Yes, it’s recipes — bison and wild rice, smoked trout, roasted squash, sunflower desserts etc. But it’s also memory, story, survival and big fuck you to the colonial mindset.
Cook the meals. Share them. Post the on social media and talk about the histories politicians would rather bury. Learn from the foods that sustained people for millennia and join the challenge to create a better future that is more centered on humanity and environmentalism.
This is more than a book launch. It’s a call to action. Decolonize your kitchen. Remember what America likes to forget. Taste the future and realize: it’s Indigenous.
You are on Native land. So eat like it.
You're a terrific writer because you're a truth-teller, Sean. You're one of the most inspiring people. I can't wait to get my copy of Turtle Island. Many blessings
I checked out your new book from our Bisbee AZ library. I find it resonant with life on Earth, in scale. The heft of the book, the bio-regions and historical context are clear, concise and well presented. I will be purchasing and sharing this fine work of great truth. It is needed now. Thank you.