“Oh, wait, we didn’t order that,” we said to the young man who had just set delicious looking roasted sweet potatoes with chili sauce onto our table. “You didn’t? Well, enjoy. I can’t take it back now.” The smokey creamy orange flesh and the crunchy skin were a delight. Then, a plate of smoked trout on a white bean spread with crisp corn tortillas arrived. Again, set down on our table, but not our order. Again, we enjoyed—free—the food meant for another table. Simple little mistakes from a hardworking waitstaff, and at a restaurant only open less than a month. They were understandable screwups, and our neighbors at the next table over, who’s orders kept arriving at our table, were soon noshing on their own delectable plates.
Yet as I begin a series of posts on After Laura recounting my summer 2021 trip across Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana, this first night of the trip experience somehow seemed like a parable. Parables are short stories that bear within them a moral, a teaching, a lesson. This was by any account a deeply personal trip whose main purpose was bury my father in his family cemetery in Wyoming. Though he died years ago now, my siblings and I had not coordinated around a plan for interring his ashes until a year ago, only to have our plans postponed by the pandemic.
We agreed to meet this summer around my father’s birthday, August 9th. I planned a trip driving west, visiting both family sites important for Charles and Caroline Ingalls, and for Henry and Polly Quiner, my great-great-grandparents. The itinerary also included many sites important to native peoples and including sites that mark the clashes between settlers and native peoples. In many cases, I found, the settlers built right on top of, and thereby destroyed, sacred native sites. This was the case with our first visit on the trip, to the newly opened Owamni, the restaurant started by Sean Sherman, known as the Sioux Chef.
Sherman’s restaurant, a labor of love years in the making, showcases his effort to recover the foods of his people before the arrival of Europeans—wheat flour, sugar, pork, chicken, beef, and non-native spices. The location overlooking the Mississippi River and what is now called St. Anthony Falls, is intentional. These sacred falls, called Owámníyomni by the Dakota, were the place of pilgrimage for women coming to give birth surrounded by spruce trees and bald eagles on Spirit Island located, just below the falls. The falls were nearly destroyed by thoughtless mill construction along its banks in the 19th century, and Spirit Island itself was blown up to build a now decommissioned lock and dam. In the face of what colonialism had nearly destroyed, Sherman’s restaurant is a bold reassertion.
In that sense, as a specific example of the colonial destruction and contemporary reassertion of native life and culture, the meal at Owamni was a parable on the eve of our departure for Wyoming. I felt my eyes—perhaps my soul, too—being taught to look for layers at the complicated sites we were planning to visit. And to look for layers in my own family story. Yet only in retrospect do I see another parable in the meal. This teaching comes from the multiple times delicious food ended up on our table, in our mouths, that belonged to others—to the restaurant, and to the other people who had actually ordered it. It cost Owamni—they still had to serve the correct food we—and the other table—had ordered. We just got to keep the mistakes on account of health department regulations. We were, as white settlers had for centuries, taking what was not ours, eating it, being nourished by it body and soul at the expense of others to whom it actually belonged.
When I saw Sean Sherman’s Instagram post this morning calling out South Dakota Kristi Noem for her racist efforts to remove indigenous history from the social studies curriculum in her state, my trip to his gorgeous restaurant flooded back into my mind. Noem has recently signed “The 1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools,” one initiative of 1776 Action that is seeking to push national, state, and local efforts to institute “patriotic education” called for by former president Trump’s 1776 Commission. Their tagline is “Stopping the Anti-American Indoctrination of our Children and Grandchildren,” and given Noem’s removal of standards related to Dakota history in South Dakota, I can only think Sherman is right: this is an effort by some to once again erase native life and culture, to as he put it “whitewash” the nation’s history.
As the United States moves towards its 250th anniversary in 2026, the fight over the stories we tell about our past will surely grow. The Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project at the New York Times led by journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones in some respects sparked the current round of battles over American history and identity. The 1776 Commission was a direct response to rooting America’s story squarely on the history of colonialism and slavery. The University of North Carolina board of trustees rejection of Hannah-Jones tenure offer is widely seen as caught up in these same fights, leading her to join fellow journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in founding a new Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University.
The memoir I’m working on, After Laura , will tell layers of the story in complex ways, not falling into some false binary that demonizes the other side. As Dakota scholar Gwen Westerman, author of a new history of Minnesota titled Mni Rota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, told me, some of the poor European settlers had no idea where the land they were settling and farming came from. She referenced conversations with fellow scholar, Karen V. Hansen, whose book Encounter on the Great Plains tells the story of her grandmother’s homesteading on the Spirit Lake Reservation in the early 1900s. Yet, the parable from Owamni stays with me: the erasure and reassertion of native life and culture, and the deeply problematic history of white people taking what is not ours.
As my family and I drove west, I was reading Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’ powerful volume, Postcolonial Love Poem, and at the end of a long poem about exhibits from The American Water Museum, she writes: “Let me tell you a story about water. Once upon a time there was us. America’s thirst tried to drink us away. And here we still are.” Indeed, and part of my goal is to see that continuing presence, to write about it, and to tell the truth about the horrible history of how hard we white people tried to keep that continuing presence from being so, and how hard, seemingly, some of us white people still do.