They were also composed without wheat flour, sugar or dairy — the government-issued commodities that replaced many native foods on reservations more than a century ago. Mr. Sherman avoids them.

This means he does not cook fry bread, the simple deep-fried dough familiar to every tribe in the country. Fry bread was born as a food of survival, developed by ingenious cooks who needed to make the most of flour and lard, and it later became the base of the Indian taco: fry bread under ground beef and toppings like shredded cheese and sour cream.

In 2015, when Mr. Sherman was hired by Little Earth of United Tribes, a Minneapolis housing complex, to develop a menu for its food truck, he saw a chance to put everything he had learned into practice. He wanted to reach back into the history of indigenous cuisine, further back than the invention of fry bread, and surprise diners.

He tried to imagine what the Indian taco might look like if wheat flour and dairy had not become a part of the native diet. Sure, the answer would vary all over the country, but in this part of the Midwest what made the most sense to Mr. Sherman was a kind of corn cake base, maybe seasoned with juniper ash, fried in a shallow depth of sunflower oil until the edges became brown and crisp.

Instead of the usual toppings, Mr. Sherman piled on heirloom beans and lean bison meat braised with cedar fronds. He smoked turkey and tossed it with fried sage. For vegetarians, he worked with whatever was in season — beans and hominy one month, a variety of summer squash the next.

He called this simple dish an indigenous taco. On the top, he sprinkled toasted sunflower, pumpkin and squash seeds and a berry sauce called wojapi, made from fruits like chokecherries, which Mr. Sherman has picked every summer since he was a boy.

Mr. Sherman got his first shotgun when he was 7, took it down the hill at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and came home with some pheasant. It was the early 1980s, and his family’s pantry was mostly stocked with government commodities: cereal, shortening and canned hash with the slippery texture of dog food, as Mr. Sherman remembers it.