In RECOMMONING, we are searching out a more open, collectively held world where, once again, land is held in common. A collaborative series with Dark Properties.
At the end of last summer, my toddler became obsessed with seed pods. As the weather chilled and our garden became crackly, we’d forage the depths of its overgrown chaos to reveal a world of treasures: Jewel-like pink-and-purple runner beans; piles of big, round nasturtium pods; densely packed bouquets of pin-like marigold seeds. With each discovery, I’d explain that an entirely new generation of plants could be born next year, if only we took care to save some seedy bounty. Lucky for us, we did just that—and now, in the spring of a fresh season, we are regrowing our old friends, eagerly awaiting their return as full-bodied plants.
Even as an adult, it’s easy to become obsessed with seeds (they are magical, after all). Each little pea, bean, or corn kernel not only contains the genetic information necessary to produce an entirely new plant—and therefore hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of new seeds—but also a fully formed embryo with a cache of stored food, a stem and root, and a miniature set of leaves. Most miraculously, all this is crammed into one tiny, shelf-stable package which, when lovingly stored, can remain viable for years.
Simply put: Seeds contain multitudes. Or, as Rowen White would say, seeds contain an infinite immensity.
Rowen White is a farmer and seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne whose friends and family call her “the seed lady.” Fittingly, she is the founder of Sierra Seeds, an Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization in Nevada City, CA. She is also the Founder of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, which is committed to restoring the Indigenous Seed Commons.
Rowen’s work centers on protecting and stewarding ancestral seeds as a life-giving force for spiritual connection, and cultural and economic sovereignty. And, she wants us all to be involved. As Rowen generously told me: “Many of us have been disconnected from what it means to be responsible for caring for the seeds, and for our food. Still, we all descend from people bound in reciprocal relationship with seeds, and when we eat, the seeds are still taking care of us. The seeds never forget us.”
I didn’t feel a familial connection to seeds until I started saving pods from my favorite plants, and re-sprouting them. With that reciprocal effort, I’ve begun to form a loving relationship with the plants in my garden, and with their offspring. As my toddler’s bean-centric fascination reminds me: We are all born with an innate relationship with seeds—all we need to do is rehydrate it.
Willa Köerner:
To start, what are you most excited to grow this year?
Rowen White:
We’re deep in our spring seeding here, and are starting a number of corn varieties that I’m excited to see return. As an Indigenous seed farm, we follow specific cycles to ensure that varieties can’t cross-pollinate, so we can save true seed. This year we’re returning to a special blue corn which is very significant in our ceremonies and cultural teachings. It’s been a few years since we’ve grown it, so I’m excited to see it sprout. It always feels like a relative coming back home.
WK:
I love saving seeds from beloved plants, and seeing their children pop up as new sprouts. I do get nervous about cross-pollinating edible plants though, because I worry I’m going to get something freaky or inedible. [Laughs]
RW:
Oh, but that’s the magic of it. It’s grandma science, or ancestor science: It’s not that hard. The powers-that-be who want to control our food systems try to make it seem so complicated, as if only people with PhDs have the know-how to save seeds. But we carry a deep knowing in our blood and bones of how to carry seeds from one season to the next.
And, the reason we have so much diversity in our food—all the colors, patterns, and full-bodied flavors—is because of these serendipitous and spontaneous crosses. There’s all this unpredictable magic that happens through plant sex.
With this in mind, I take a different approach to heirloom seed restoration. As somebody with a background in both Western plant breeding and Indigenous knowledge around seed keeping, I’ve found a playful place in the middle. I don’t want to restrict heirloom varieties to be exactly how they were in the past, because we also need to be thinking with evolutionary minds to ensure these seeds can adapt over time. Our ancestors understood that diversity is the root of our resilience; that being able to adapt to the ever-changing face of Mother Earth is crucial—so that’s the approach I take with Sierra Seeds.
WK:
Along these lines, I’d love to hear more about the work you do with Sierra Seeds and the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. Can you share a bit more about both?
RW:
I started Sierra Seeds back when my kids were just babies. I had this beautiful bundle of ancestral seeds that I had gathered during my thesis project, which was about the inextricable connection between Indigenous seed revitalization, food revitalization, cultural revitalization, and language revitalization. There’s so much fertile overlap between seeds and other areas, which shows them as the beating heart within our way of being.
Sierra Seeds emerged as a way to fully commit to starting an Indigenous seed bank here on the land. But as it has evolved, I’ve realized that it’s not just a seed company or library. Instead, our mission centers on incubating people of all types with an understanding of why ancestral seeds and foods are so important to all of us—because we’re all touched by the generosity of seeds.
The endeavor very quickly evolved into an educational farm where people could reconnect with their relationship to food in a reciprocal way. Now we host all kinds of events that immerse people back into the art of relational agriculture, with the overall goal of redefining what a nourishing food landscape looks like—while also bringing a cultural and spiritual dimension into the work.
My pathway into this work came from an inquiry: what were the seeds that fed my ancestors? I’ve used that question to find my way home to the teachings, stories, recipes, flavors, and wisdom of my Mohawk ancestors. I wasn’t raised with my ancestral seeds because my grandparents and parents were disconnected from the land, during the boarding-school era of our native people being taken away from our communities, languages, and cultures. And so, working with seeds became a practice through which I could rehydrate familial relationships alongside my children.
Then the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network naturally evolved out of wanting to create a safe space for Indigenous seed keepers from nations all over North America and Turtle Island, where we could collectively reestablish kinship routes and connections through peer mentorship. Really, the community has existed as an informal mycelial network since time immemorial, as tribal nations have organically connected with one another to trade seeds and share knowledge. But we formalized it as a nonprofit in 2014 to be able to build capacity and leverage more resources.
WK:
How did you actually trace which seeds your ancestors grew? What was that process like?
RW:
When I was apprenticing on a farm in Western Massachusetts as a young woman, a previous apprentice had started an heirloom tomato project with about 50 different varieties in one little patch. People could come pick tomatoes and learn where each one originated, and explore their stories. That was a cornerstone moment for me, as it was my introduction to the fact that seeds had stories and lineages and legacies alongside people.
Learning about how people took those tomato seeds along with them across the Atlantic to have a remembrance of home… I just remember this confluence of emotion coming up; this grief and obscure sense of nostalgia. I realized that, while I knew many of our food-related creation stories, I didn’t have a personal relationship with ancestral varieties. I didn’t even know if my people were still keeping them alive.
That curiosity inspired me to raise a grant to travel back home to my Mohawk community, as well as to other Haudenosaunee communities, and to begin looking for people who were keeping our native seeds alive. I ended up finding a 1900s-era book called Iroquois Foods, written by a white ethnologist doing what they called “savage anthropology.” There were a lot of white settler folk who, because of manufactured political and economic policies, thought that Native Americans were going extinct. There was this flush of ethnologists and anthropologists going into Native communities to document our culture, because we were basically seen as dinosaurs that would soon be gone.
So, that book contained information about Haudenosaunee foods, with all these pictures. In the back of the book there was a photo showing cobs of all different colors, and beans of all different shapes, shades, and patterns. I just came alive when I saw that. I photocopied the images, and took them to show my elders to see if they were still growing any of the pictured varieties. With this, the stories started to tumble out, like, “So-and-so still has this seed.” In that very relational, mycelial way, I was reintroduced to who was keeping these old seeds alive. Then I started to gather all the saved seeds I could find—some red corn, blue corn, multicolored corn, plus all kinds of different beans—and began to grow them again.
I always say that the seeds took me through a very unconventional rite of passage, and became my grandmas and aunties who taught me about what it means to be a Mohawk woman. I apprenticed myself to those seeds, and I’m still learning from them every season.
WK:
Were there seeds that you sourced which were really old, and you weren’t sure if they would sprout?
RW:
Absolutely. We had seeds that had very poor germination rates, or didn’t sprout at all. With one variety of red corn I was gifted, there was only one cob left on the entire planet. My elder, Steve McCumber, had rescued and revived it, and had grown it out into a little bit more than a cob. So I helped grow it out again, and eventually we got it into better health. Now we have hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of that corn seed.
Through a practice known as “Rematriation,” the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network supports groups attempting to reconnect with ancestral seeds that have been lost. Communities who have culturally significant seeds that may have migrated, or which have been traded outside of their community—their seeds often end up in museums, university labs, or private seed banks. So we’ve been in the process of sleuthing out where those varieties might have been from—mostly communities that lost connection with their seeds due to the cultural upheavals of the last couple centuries—and reuniting them with their culturally important seeds.
Some of those seeds, unfortunately, have lost their viability and vitality. But we’ve still reunited people with those nonviable varieties. For instance, the Meskwaki tribe was reunited with some seeds from the Field Museum in Chicago, which turned out to be non-viable. But there was still beauty in that, as there was some cultural information that came with some of those seeds, which is helping them to find other derivatives of the varieties. There was also an opportunity for a ceremony for those seeds, as a way to return them back home, to pray for them, and to put them in the ground in a way that honored them.
Across Turtle Island, we have 570+ different tribes, some of which were agricultural, and some which were not. But what is true about all of these diverse tribal communities in North America is that we see our relationship to seeds and food as familial. Seeds are not just food—they’re our relatives. Much of that understanding is encoded in our creation stories and our cultural teachings. And so, we take a very unique approach to seed keeping and rematriation, which is that we approach the work in collaboration with our plant relatives, and treat them with the dignity and respect that they deserve as living beings and kin.
WK:
It’s such a unique rematriation process, as opposed to other repatriation or rematriation efforts for historical artifacts or human remains. With seeds, you can literally resuscitate some of them, and bring those stories back into the living realm.
RW:
Exactly. They’re still living, and can potentially rejoin our community in a dynamic way. This makes the process a hopeful one, as opposed to many repatriation or rematriation efforts, which are just so grief-soaked and heavy. In many ways, seed rematriation is a very life-affirming way of bringing our relatives back home.
WK:
What are some of the oldest seeds that have been germinated and grown out through this rematriation process?
RW:
Decades-old seeds have germinated. In fact, there was a group of us who wrote an academic article giving best practices for sprouting old seeds. It was a way to braid emerging knowledge around the scientific techniques that can actively encourage older seeds to germinate. We also explored some of the traditional ways of making teas, and employing seed-soaking practices, to energize old seeds before attempting to sprout them.
WK:
Could we chat about how food sovereignty fits into seed keeping and generational knowledge?
RW:
While there are many different definitions for food sovereignty, for me it’s the ability to engage in a food system that’s reflective of a community’s culture.
As Native people inside of a colonial and capitalist system, many of us now live in what I would call a food apartheid. Our tribal communities have been systemically disconnected from access to common land to forage, hunt, fish, or plant on—and therefore disenfranchised from our traditional foodways. But it’s our right to engage in acts of sovereignty, and you can’t have political or economic sovereignty if you can’t feed yourself. Food sovereignty really is at the foundation of our nations’ ability to be free and autonomous in all the other ways that sovereignty encapsulates.
Historically, we see that the colonial powers-that-be understood that—which is why they aggressively and intentionally dismantled our food systems. They knew this would weaken our people, because seeds and food are a reflection of the people. When seeds and foods are strong in our community, our people are healthy, our people are vibrant. But when we’re eating foods that we are not traditionally involved with, we have higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and all other forms of diet-based comorbidities.
A big part of the food sovereignty movement is to reclaim our ability to build landscapes of nourishment, and relational agriculture systems that reflect us as a people. As somebody who’s made seeds my life’s focus, my commitment is to continue to work alongside community members to rehydrate and re-engage in time-honored skills of seed saving, and all of the cultural teachings that come along with it, because having access to seed is actually what creates a durable, sustainable, and community-based food system.
WK:
Seeds have so much wisdom that we need right now. Is there a seed metaphor that you feel is most relevant to our current times?
RW:
One that’s been coming to mind a lot lately is around discomfort in transition times. So, imagine a corn seed. It’s all pearly and beautiful, but then when it’s transitioning into the next part of its life cycle, it goes into this dark period when it’s underground. The seed coat is cracking, and it’s becoming unrecognizable—but this is the process of turning into a sprout. There’s all this push and pull, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s a true state of metamorphosis.
Like a seed in transformation, we’re living in dark times right now. A lot of old, misguided, broken-hearted ways of being need to be composted and dismantled. But I find strength in thinking about us as a collective of communities living in the darkness of the soil, getting ready to reemerge. Valerie Kaur once said, “What if this isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” The womb is the soil in this metaphor, and it reminds us to engage in our radical trust to see this dark moment as a time for reorienting and reimagining what landscapes of nourishment can look like in the future. How do we lean into the discomfort, and into our radical creativity, and have faith that something good will sprout from the compost of failing empires, failing capitalism, and the broken, cancerous systems that we live inside of?
There’s so much stuntedness in the pool of imagined possibility, and we need to break past that. Otherwise, our foodways will continue to be extractive and exploitative, and will never evolve into something relational and sustainable.
WK:
That’s one of the things that inspires me most about seeds, gardening, and growing. If you just saw what you start with—a pile of dirt and a bunch of little brown seeds—you’d think you had nothing. But to have faith in the sprouting, you need to completely trust the process, and be open to imagining how things will bloom and evolve over time.
RW:
That’s what I call the infinite immensity. The seeds contain whole, old universes inside of them, but they’re so little and unsuspecting. We need to think in seed time: in longer, deeper time than we ever have before. We need to trust in their bigger vision, and in the bigger expanse of time that they carry. A lot of the work that I do alongside my family is about making these intimate, tiny little shifts that can sprout off beyond me. I may never see the fruits of that labor, but I’m trusting in a bigger vision of deep-time diligence.
