Wampanoag chef 1st Indigenous woman to win a James Beard Award

Mashpee Wampanoag Chef Sherry Pocknett has become the first Indigenous woman to win a James Beard Award, being named Best Chef: Northeast at a ceremony in Chicago earlier this month.

"I'm from a family of amazing chefs and cooks and bakers so it's in the blood," said Pocknett.

Since 1990, the James Beard Awards recognize talent and achievement in the culinary arts, hospitality and food media.

Pocknett said she started cooking when she was about eight years old on an Easy-Bake Oven that she got for Christmas.

She opened her restaurant Sly Fox Den Too in Charlestown, R.I., in 2021. Named after her late father, Chief Sly Fox, the restaurant specializes in local Indigenous cuisine, sustainably sourced using traditional hunting, fishing and farming techniques.

"We lived by the seasons," said Pocknett.

"I grew up in the '60s and my dad was a hunter and a fisher so we always had stuff from the wild in the refrigerator."

The same fresh ingredients such as eel, venison, muskrat, quahogs and scallops that she cooked for her brothers as a girl are featured on her menu today. 

Pocknett takes local ingredients like smoked bluefish or smoked salmon and creates a hash, served with poached eggs and "a big old corn cake" for breakfast.

Summer menu items use strawberry, an important plant medicine for Indigenous people, and seafoods such as striped bass, bluefish, frog legs and soft shell crab.

More than just culinary excellence

Pocknett said she was shocked when they called her name at the awards ceremony. 

"I was up against four amazing chefs," she said.

Dawn Padmore, vice-president of awards at the James Beard Foundation, said judges' decisions aren't based solely on culinary excellence.

"It's so much more," she said.

"It's stories; it's the hospitality. It's what's happening in the community. It's ingredients. It's who you get your ingredients from. Who are your farmers? It's kind of your story as a chef."

Padmore said Pocknett's award is a testament to the mission of the foundation, "wanting to open the aperture up to make sure that anybody and everybody who is making excellent food and who's doing wonderful things in this world can be recognized."

The awards "celebrate American cuisine and we know American cuisine means a lot of representation and of course, the original foods," said Padmore.

Progressive Aboriginal food 

Zach Keeshig, an Ojibway chef who cooks out of Owen Sound, Ont., specializes in "progressive Aboriginal food." 

He runs a pop-up restaurant that showcases medicinal plants and ingredients harvested straight from the earth in a nine-course tasting menu. His cuisine also uses local, seasonal ingredients.

"We got rid of using vanilla and we use sweet grass; we use sweet woodruff," he said. 

He's also been able to swap out non-native ingredients such as lemons for sea buckthorn or unripe grapes "to bring acidity to dishes."

"We always want to sort of create a story with our food that goes along with the meal," said Keeshig.

When Keesghig heard about Pocknett being the first Indigenous woman to win a James Beard Award he said, "It's inspiring to see them win an award so prestigious like that. It gives me hope for what we're doing. That we can win."

Pocknett is recovering from cancer while she works on her first cookbook. She has plans to open the first restaurant she bought in 2019 just before the pandemic hit, and an oyster farm.