Complex Numbers

The Sioux Chef

Back for another "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] entry today.

Sean Sherman  

Gotta love a good pun, which is, by definition, also a bad pun. A bad pun that alliterates is even better. A bad pun combined with a quadruple alliteration (or close enough)? Gold. Sioux Chef, Sean Sherman. Come on. You gotta check out the link for that alone.

When I was in Minneapolis around the beginning of July, wandering around the riverfront in the vicinity of the waterfall and lock (once a civil engineer, always a civil engineer, and massive public works projects intrigue me), I discovered the restaurant, Owamni, featured in the above link.

Okay... "discovered" is a bad word in this context and obviously I should be shunned forever for daring to use it. It's kind of like the faux pas I made as I was checking into a hotel in Kayenta, Arizona, several years ago. Kayenta is in the Navajo nation in the far north of the state; tourists with an inexplicable need to be *shudder* outdoors use it as a gateway to all the cool shit in southern Utah, whereas I was just passing through. I'd planned the stop in advance, so I staggered into the hotel (I think it was a Holiday Inn Express, or maybe Hampton; one of those franchise chains) under my load of luggage, stumbled up to the counter, and said to the nice lady, "Yeah, hi, I have a reservation..." And immediately regretted it.

She didn't kick me out. This hotel, it turned out, included a restaurant run by a Navajo chef, and thus was I introduced, for the first time, to the absolute delight that is Navajo frybread.

The pre-invasion people living in North America were, of course, quite diverse, as is the country's climate and terrain. Without the benefit (and don't misunderstand me; it is actually a benefit) of international trade, people kind of have to use what food sources are available wherever they happen to be. This was, of course, true of people everywhere in the world, but today I'm talking specifically about the continent I live on.

But I also know this: humans are humans, wherever they are. When I was growing up, I got full-on indoctrinated into the whole "Indians lived off the land in harmony with nature" schtick. While there's probably some degree of truth in that, it's kind of idealist and dehumanizing all at the same time. Humans migrate, and we tend to take with us some of the food from wherever we came from. And as we saw several entries back, agriculture was most definitely A Thing in North America before the Europeans got here.

In any case, the point is, what the Sioux or Dakota people ate on the Northern plains would have been different from what the southern desert people ate. I mean, duh. It's kind of like how, now, you can't eat anywhere in New Mexico without being asked "red or green chili?" whereas in Minnesota, the idea of any sauce more powerful than mayonnaise is met with absolute shock and horror (yeah, yeah, I know, not all Minnesotans, whatever).

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to see the sign for Owamni there on the bank of the Mississippi, and how utterly devastated I was to find that it had not yet opened.

I think it's open now, but of course I'm not in Minnesota.

I did get to tour the river lock, though, and that was cool.