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Sherry Pocknett: "We've been here for 12,000 years and we're not going anywhere."
Catching and cleaning eels with relatives. Learning about the migratory patterns of birds and fish. Deciding that snapping turtle soup might be your favorite dish.
For renowned Indigenous chef Sherry Pocknett — who led a cooking demonstration at Gateway on Tuesday as part of the Arts & Ideas festival – the cultural and personal history is part of what makes the food so rich, and the reason she cooks it so well.
Pocknett is a James Beard award-winning chef for her food steeped in the cultures and traditions of her nation, the Mashpee Wampanoag, based in Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island.
“I had an amazing childhood — as I know now,” she said with a wry grin on Tuesday. At the time, she added, “I thought it was so rough.”
Her parents taught her everything they knew and had been handed down, about foraging, hunting, and fishing. They “made sure we knew about the seasons” and how it affected the migration of birds, fish, and other animals. Herring was “the first fish I learned about,” she said, when she was three or four years old. Her parents taught her about eating fiddleheads and wild ramps, and about identifying medicinal plants. She picked berries and dug for sassafras.
When she was eight years old, her father — Sly Fox (a.k.a Vernon Pocknett), chief and Native American rights advocate — dropped her and her siblings off with minimal supplies on an uninhabited island “to see what we could do after teaching us” how to live off the land. “It was blueberry season,” she said, and they harvested. “I went clamming” and found mussels as well. She knew medicines for wounds and for sickness. (Years later, she taught her children the same.)
The same year, her parents got her a Suzy Homemaker oven and “I knew then that I was going to be a chef,” she said. She stole food out of the refrigerator and cooked it in her oven for her brothers. “They ate every bit,” she said.
For a little while she lived in Connecticut, in Bloomsfield. “I wanted to get away from Mashpee,” she said. She lived with a cousin and got a retail job at Casual Corner, a clothing store. “I had some fun,” she said, “but I know my lifeways.”
“We’ve been here for 12,000 years and we’re not going anywhere,” she added.
Family memories abounded. Of having to “earn my keep,” she said, when visiting her grandmother, from rolling her hair to helping her clean and pickle fish. Of clambakes done on heated rocks on the beach, the clams, vegetables, sweet potato — “anything we had,” she said.
She cooked with her family from childhood until 2000, at their restaurant, The Flume, on Cape Cod. Her grandmother, Delscena Hendricks, was chef and baker there. Her uncle — Chief Flying Eagle, Earl Mills, Sr. — worked as a chef there, too. Pocknett then became a caterer for powwows and other Mashpee Wampanoag events, and worked at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard. When she arrived at that museum, she said, the cafe served hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken. “Native people didn’t have that,” she said. She added deer, smoked fish, and turtle soup, “my favorite.”
In 2019 she bought a building and land in Preston, Conn. with the idea of opening a restaurant, farm, and cultural center, the Sly Fox Den Restaurant. The pandemic threw a huge monkey wrench in those plans, which she and her family are still working on. In the meantime, she opened Sly Fox Den Too in Charlestown, R.I. It seats 30 in the winter, with outdoor seating for 30 more when it’s warmer. They serve venison, quail, rabbit, and all kinds of fish.
“This place came out of nowhere,” Pocknett said, “and then I got nominated” for the James Beard award, for best chef in the Northeast. She has gained considerable notoriety. But she’s still working on her dreams.
Meanwhile, however, she also wanted to work on the meal at hand. With three volunteers — Kristen, Melanie, and Esther — Pocknett got to work making corn cakes. She told the story of how, for the Mashpee Wampanoag, corn “came from the crow,” thanks to the children of a fishing family who were at home while their parents were out catching fish. The kids wished they had something else besides berries to eat. So Crow flew “way down south,” to Peru, where a macaw gave it a bag of corn. Crow flew all the way back and dropped the corn for the kids, but it fell into the fire and popped. Thus, corn, and popcorn.
Pocknett went on to explain that the corn cakes many Rhode Islanders know as Johnny cakes are actually journey cakes. Her people were regionally migratory with the seasons: they stayed on the coast for the summer and moved inland for the winter. The cakes were made for that move.
Pocknett instructed the volunteers to combine flour, corn meal, baking soda and salt in a bowl. They put in a little salt. Pocknett grabbed a much larger handful and threw it in. They then added water until they’d made a thick paste, out of which they could make patties.
“You want a thick pancake,” Pocknett said, as they started frying. They also made chutney from strawberries and cranberries, “so simple,” Pocknett said, and so effective.
While the cakes were being cooked, Cheyenne Pocknett-Galvin — “my business partner and my daughter” — had assembled a spread of tacos, smoked fish, stuffed mushrooms, meatballs, and assorted sweet and savory cakes. The room lined up and filled their plates, and were soon eating and talking.
“How does everyone look? They look happy, right?” Pocknett said. “Food is a common denominator.”
Pocknett has seen reasons to be discouraged about the future. Now, she said, there aren’t as many wild strawberries as there used to be. “Sometimes they go dormant” when people don’t pick them, she said. But many of the wild strawberry patches she remembers from her youth are paved over. “Right now, they’re roads,” she said. Her grandchildren can’t swim in the same water she swam in as a child due to nitrate runoff. She still makes beans with salt pork, as she did when she was younger, but “pigs were different then,” she said, healthier, less tampered with. The fisheries have declined, too, because “people over-take,” she said. “We only need to take enough for consumption, and that’s not much.”
She also thinks “people have lost the family part — the whole family.” Pocknett grew up surrounded by relatives. It’s less common now. What knowledge is lost because of that?
But she is “humbled” and “grateful.” She won a fight with cancer and “I’m going to live to see my new restaurant open.” Her children “cook sometimes better than me. They think they cook better than me.” She runs Sly Fox Den Too with Pocknett-Galvin and they have started their farm for what would have been the original Sly Fox Den, planting sassafras and a range of native berries.
She has also started Mashpee Wampanoag cultural classes, where younger members of the nation have learned what their forbears knew, “living by the seasons, eating by the seasons,” she said. They learned to make herring nets from willow branches. They learned the patterns of herring migration. “We got to go to the herring run. We got to jump in the water and scoop the herring with the net.” They learned to identify male and female, cook roe, and clean the fish.
“We don’t waste anything,” she said. The head, guts, and tail could be buried. “That’s when you start your garden,” which would be ready a few months later.
They did a chart of Western and Indigenous medicine. “We got to go out in the woods” and learn about sassafras, a good blood cleanser, and running briars, good for a stomach ache and constipation.
“I just want to teach people our ways,” she said. “Instead of making that grass green, plant some food.” The pesticides involved in maintaining lawns make the grass poisonous. “The water is sick,” she said. But it can change.
“I really believe if we all do our own part, we can fix it,” she said. “Do your part and educate people about it.”