Carved out by glaciers around 10,000 BCE, the Owámniyomni — post-colonially known as St. Anthony Falls — near present-day downtown Minneapolis have been a sacred place for Dakota people for centuries. Women would come from near and far to give birth on an eagle- and spruce-tree-filled island situated in the middle of the Mississippi River, encased by mist from the nearby falls. In the 1800s, the island was eroded by limestone harvesting before eventually being blown up by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1960 to make way for a lock and dam that was ultimately decommissioned in 2015.

Thanks to the Mill City Museum, the industrial history of the Owámniyomni has been well told and documented with its rich and far lengthier Dakota history largely absent — until now.

The Water Works park project aims to bring the indigenous history and relevance of the Owámniyomni to the forefront.

The pièce de résistance of not only the park itself but the indigenous storytelling it offers will be the first brick and mortar restaurant for a team of Native chefs, ethnobotanists, food preservationists and more, who have dedicated themselves to revitalizing Native American cuisine under the banner of The Sioux Chef. Founder, CEO and chef Sean Sherman, Ogala Lakota, launched The Sioux Chef in 2014 as a caterer and educator. His 2017 cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, won the 2018 James Beard Award.

“This is a really sacred Dakota area, [both] the land and the water,” says Dana Thompson, the other member of The Sioux Chef’s executive team. “There’s just so much history to tell… so much of the colonial history has been told, but not the indigenous [history],” she explains, adding that, “tribes would meet [on the islands] as a place of peace where they’d [make] agreements.”

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