Lee Garman uses maple in nearly everything: from sweets and sodas to soups and meats. The possibilities are endless. “Even if it’s not a main element of a dish, it’s still in there,” he said. Garman is the executive chef at Owamni, an award-winning restaurant that has been dishing up Indigenous foods in Minneapolis since 2021. “Even if we just have a little, tiny bit, maple is in 90% of every single dish that we create,” he said.
Owamni purchases most of its maple sap and other traditional foods from Indigenous purveyors, including some of its employees. But climate change is taking a toll on suppliers, making it more difficult to acquire foods like maple syrup, Garman said. To meet demand, the restaurant is buying sap from more suppliers and at higher prices. “Over the last year or so, I think all of our prices on maple have jumped up at least 25%,” he said.
Indigenous people have harvested tree saps for millennia to make medicines and food. The most well known use is breakfast’s liquid gold — maple syrup. There are 13 maple species native to North America, and more than 100 species worldwide. Globally, the maple syrup industry is worth approximately $1 billion annually.
For food sovereignty activists like Luke and Linda Black Elk, sugarbush is a family affair. Luke Black Elk and the couple’s three sons are enrolled in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Previously from South Dakota, the Minnesota family taps maple trees as a means of connecting with their community and ancestors. “We don’t have sugar maples or silver maples in the Dakotas, we have boxelder maples,” said Luke Black Elk. “Most sugar maple people laugh at us when we say that’s where we get syrup from because it takes a lot more work, but for me that’s something that my people have gathered for millennia,” he said.
