They are being
recovered from seed banks, university vaults, and museum shelves.
|
Henrietta Gomez and Gilbert
Suazo, Sr., receive a Taos Pueblo squash in 2018. ANDI MURPHY
|
THE SQUASH HAD TRAVELED A thousand miles to rest quietly on Henrietta
Gomez's arms. The elder farmer from Taos Pueblo, a 1,000-year-old
Indigenous town in northern New Mexico, held the light-green vegetable
like a baby. Before that bright October morning, it had been several
decades since the people of Taos Pueblo had seen a squash like the
one in Henrietta's arms, even though it had been part of the town's
diet since time immemorial.
Along with a seed bundle, the squash had been shipped from Decorah,
Iowa, where it had been planted in the gardens of Seed Savers Exchange,
the nonprofit that found the variety among the 30,000 kinds of seeds
in its seed bank. Rowen White, an Indigenous seed keeper and the
chair of the nonprofit's board, had personally shipped the giant
seed-and-squash-filled box a few days before.
The Taos Pueblo event, held in 2018, was the first of at least
60 rematriations organized by the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network
that have returned varieties of ancient seeds to Native American
communities that had been lost to colonialism and violence.
"To us, seeds are our relatives," says White, who was born near
Canada in the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. In 2016, she created
the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, a group of more than 100 tribal
seed-sovereignty projects whose members are looking for their missing
relatives. (They refer to the act of returning Native seeds as rematriation
rather than repatriation.) The network has found 1,000 varieties
linked to Native American tribes in the Seed Savers Exchange catalog,
a nonprofit and seed bank created in the Seventies that now has
one of the largest seed catalogs in the country. Every year since,
they've rematriated around 25 varieties.
|
Johnathan Buffalo and
Luke Kapayou, Meskwaki tribal members, sit in front of seeds
rematriated from the Field Museum. COURTESY OF DR. ELIZABETH
HOOVER
|
"People want to be connected to the seeds because it's a way of
connecting them to their ancestors, the gatekeepers who initially
developed them," says Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, a Micmac and Mohawk
descendant, and associate professor of Environmental Science and
Policy Management at UC Berkeley. It's also a way, White adds, to
heal racist wounds inflicted on Native American food systems.
The ties that bound Native seeds to Indigenous communities began
to be severed when the first European settlers arrived, and it continued
for centuries. It partially grew out of the tacticwidely used
by European settlers, and later by U.S. government officialsto
take Indigenous land by attacking tribes' food sources. In the northeast,
the French Marquis de Denoville destroyed the corn crops of the
Haudenosaunees in 1678. A hundred years later, in 1779, Major General
John Sullivan and his army, under the orders of George Washington,
burned the Haudenosaunees' crops. "That's why in most Haudenosaunee
languages, the word for president means 'town destroyer,'" Hoover
explained
in late 2019.
In the Southeast, the Indian Relocation Act of 1830 forced around
100,000 Indigenous people from five tribal nations out of their
homelands. Indigenous communities not only were forcefully separated
from their land, but from many of their seeds, says Deb Echo-Hawk,
a Pawnee seed keeper in Oklahoma. An estimated 15,000 Indigenous
people from various nations died of disease and other causes during
these forced marches. So many elderly seed keepers fell ill without
passing on their knowledge that they often put their precious seed
bundles in trees to "give them back to Aitius [the Creator] because
there wasn't anybody left that knew how to take care of them," Echo-Hawk
says.
But Native Americans didn't find peace in their new lands. Accustomed
to the wet and cold Nebraska soil, Pawnee traditional seeds wouldn't
grow in the red-clay soil of Oklahoma, says Echo-Hawk. (It was only
in 2005, when the tribe allied with a Nebraska farmer, that they
could taste again 18 traditional corn varieties). Treaties such
as the 1887 Dawes Act, which divided Indigenous lands into lots
that were mostly sold to white farmers, also reduced the ability
of tribes to grow their own food and plant their seeds.
"That's why in most Haudenosaunee languages,
the word for president means 'town destroyer.'"
By the 1930s, these policies had displaced two-thirds of Native
people from their traditional lands, with very few of those unfamiliar
acre-lots to call their own, which meant they had no place to grow
traditional foods, says Noah Schlager, a seed keeper of Mvskoke-Creek
and Catawba heritage. In addition, between 1860 and 1978, government-funded
American Indian Boarding Schools, whose goal was assimilation, prohibited
Indian languages and names and cut students off from the
generational passing down of Native American culture, including
their foodways.
In the early 1900s, the continuous attacks on Native American communities
had left many in such a fragile state that many anthropologists
assumed that they would disappear, says Hoover. This pushed Native
and non-Native anthropologists and museum curators to collect the
Indigenous seeds that are now dormant on the shelves of museums
and universities. In the 1970s, when industrialized farming was
at its prime, environmentalists and farmers also started to realize
the dangers of genetically uniform crops. Without diversity, a single
plague could destroy thousands of miles of the same plant, wrote
science historian Helen Curry. So they created seed banks, whose
contents included Native seeds.
But "the founders of these seed banks didn't completely respect
the sovereignty of Native communities," says Schlager, who works
as conservation manager at Native Seeds/SEARCH, one the biggest
seed banks of Native American seeds in the country. "Sometimes,
they would just buy seeds in a market and didn't [tell] the Native
farmer that they wanted to keep them for seed banks." The "white-savior
mentality" behind the creation of many of these seed banks, says
Schlager, didn't do anything to help struggling Native American
food systems.
|
Former Taos governor
Gilbert Suazo, Sr., receives a bundle of Taos Pueblo squash
from Rowen White, chair of the board at Seed Savers Exchange
and Indigenous seed keeper. ANDI MURPHY
|
In the late 1970s, alongside the Civil Rights movement, Indigenous
communities across the country started organizing to address their
land rights and other cultural and social issues. This eventually
gave birth to an incipient Indigenous food movement, says Clayton
Brascoupé, who in 1992 founded the Traditional Native American
Farmers Association. In those early days, says Brascoupé,
many Native farmers didn't know where or how to find their traditional
seeds. Farmers would first try to find the missing varieties in
their local communities. They'd write letters to nearby farmers,
Native and non-Native, who gave them leads to people even further
away. "And it was just this natural progression, you keep looking,
and looking, and looking," the Mohawk-Anishinaabeg farmer says.
By the late 2000s, Native farmers had cast their investigative
nets so wide that they were all talking to each other, exchanging
seeds, and planning food summits. The Indigenous Seed Keepers Network
formalized those relationships, says its director, Rowen White.
Two years later, the network was celebrating the rematriation of
the Native Taos Pueblo squash that is now growing and producing
offspring in several farms of the community.
But seeds don't always enjoy a gentle, almost ceremonial way home.
For those that have not been stored in seed vaults with controlled
temperature and humidity, returning to their community may mean
finally going back to rest under the earth.
That's what happened to the 12 bags of Mekswaski seeds that Shelley
Buffalo received in the spring of 2019. A few months earlier, Buffalo
had received a phone call from Elizabeth Hoover. She told Buffalo
that she was working with the Field Museum of Natural History in
Chicago, and that she had found a collection of Meskwaki seeds hidden
in the shelves of the Anthropology collection. The seeds had been
there for a century, and that's where they would have stayed if
it wasn't for Hoover.
|
Luke Kapayou looks at
Meskwaki objects at the Field Museum. COURTESY OF DR. ELIZABETH
HOOVER
|
"When I first brought up this idea [of rematriating the seeds],
everybody at the museum looked at me like I was crazy," says Hoover.
"They were like, 'This is a museum. It's not a seed bank. That's
not how it works here. You can't take things out of the collections
and bury them!'" Hoover slowly convinced people that a rematriation
would make an incredible story for the renovated North America Hall
that she was helping to create. Soon, everyone was on board.
But even after convincing her peers, the administrative hurdles
of deaccessioning, or taking something out of a museum permanently,
are formidable. Repatriating objects to tribes is a process that
can take months, says Eli Suzukovich, a research scientist at the
Field Museum and a professor at Northwestern University. So instead,
they filled out the paperwork to take out the seeds as part of a
"destructive analysis," a type of research that allows scientists
to take objects out of a collection without bringing them back.
The strategy worked. A week later, Suzukovich drove to Tama, Iowa,
to give Shelley Buffalo nine varieties of traditional beans and
three types of corn. Some of them hadn't been in the community for
years, while others were well-known varieties. The seeds were so
old, says Buffalo, that she had a hard time recognizing the Meskwaki
corn, a variety that she has planted over and over again as the
coordinator of the local foods branch at the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty
Initiative.
Shelley and other farmers tried their best to wake up the seeds.
They left some soaking up water overnight, as tradition calls for,
and an organic farmer in the community used a germination method
he had developed on others. They planted the seeds "hopeful that
the miracle would happen, but at the same time with a pragmatic
mindset," Buffalo says.
None of the seeds sprouted. "But I didn't care," Buffalo says,
"It was just the fact that they were back with us."
|
Shelley Buffalo signs
the document that officially rematriates seeds from the Field
Museum to the community. COURTESY OF DR. ELIZABETH HOOVER
|
Despite the bitter first try, Suzukovich kept digging. In the drawers
of the ethnobotany collection, he found a whole new section of Meskwaki
seeds. Since the ethnobotany collection is designed to store plants
and seeds, the century-old cobs still had that sweet, earthy smell
of fresh corn.
The plan to bring some of those seeds back to Tama was put on hold
due to the pandemic, but the scientific team led by Suzukovich hopes
to restart conversations and revive the seeds using methods agreed
on with the Meskwaki for the 2021 growing season. "We are really
excited. We have seeds that are a hundred-plus years old from various
plants. If this is successful, then it helps us to think about conservation
efforts at large," he adds.
"It's just really interesting seeing the kind of dynamics developing
between this big museum, which has historically just held on to
the possessions of different communities, and is now giving some
of these back," says Hoover. Only two museumsthe Field Museum
and the Science Museum of Minnesotahave rematriated seeds.
But, according to Hoover, others are interested, as well as some
universities.
Earlier this year, Seed Savers Exchange reached out to Shelley
Buffalo and told her that they had found several Meskwaki varieties
in their vault. "It's like the seeds have their agenda," says Buffalo.
"If you look at what's going on with the pandemic, if you are looking
at what's going on with the political unrest, and then also in the
longer term with climate change. It's like they are saying, 'It's
time to go home and time to reconnect with our people because our
people are going to need us.'"
|