Transcript: ROWEN WHITE on Seed Rematriation & Fertile Resistance /193
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Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today, we’re joined by Rowen White, a Seed Keeper/farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty. Rowen is the Educational Director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds, an innovative land-based educational organization located in Nevada City, CA. She is the National Program Coordinator for the Indigenous Seed Keeper Network, which is an initiative of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a non-profit organization aimed at leveraging resources to support tribal food sovereignty projects. Rowen is also the chair of the Board of Directors of Seed Savers Exchange, the largest public access seed bank in North America. Follow her journeys at sierra seeds dot org. Well, welcome to the show, Rowen. I am so grateful for this time that we have together to explore the many threads you're weaving through this beautiful work of seed sovereignty, and like I mentioned earlier, the little time I was able to spend with you and your family on your farm has stuck with me. And I am just so personally excited to connect with you today. So thank you so much for being with us.
Rowen White Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for the invitation.
Ayana Young Awesome. Well, before we dig into your initiatives with Sierra seeds, and Indigenous seed keeper network, I'd like to just offer you the space to share a bit about your background and where you're coming from today. And what is the winding path that initially sparked your interest in cultivating new and ancient relationships with native seeds?
Rowen White Yeah, it's been a long and beautifully winding road that the seed path has offered me I I grew up in a multitude of places. And as you mentioned before, I'm Mohawk and my parents are from a place called Akwesasne, which is right on the New York- Canadian border. Our family was deeply impacted by all of the aspects of colonization and acculturation, you know, in the last century. And so I grew up not really deeply connected to the land or to food and seeds so much, but I did hear great and beautiful stories of, in particular, my great grandparents, Rena, and Alex White. And then also on the other side, a beautiful woman named Anna Jacobs, who used to grow these big legendary gardens that would feed their people and their families. And, but I grew up always with an affinity for being outside for being having my hands on the Earth for doing things you know, out in the woods and I found myself at seventeen, I had left home and I had found myself on an organic farm that was associated with the college that I was attending in western Massachusetts. And that was when my apprenticeship began. That was when the seeds really spoke to me. I have a very visceral memory of being in the greenhouse and for the first time watching seeds that my hands had planted, sprout into these beautiful double leaves and then grow into these vibrant plants. And my mentor Nancy at the time, she had witnessed really my joy and my enthusiasm and my wonder, and had entrusted me with a really beautiful project, which a previous intern and student had initiated on the farm, which was this heirloom tomato project where there were over 50 different heirloom tomatoes being grown on the farm. And she showed me the seed catalogs with all these pictures of tomatoes that were not only just round and red, which is what I had grown up eating. But tomatoes that were the full spectrum and prism of the rainbow in all shapes and sizes. And I remember very specifically, being that seventeen year-old young woman really searching for a sense of purpose or a sense of place, reading through those stories and making that connection, you know, twenty-three years ago, that not only did seeds have a particular place of origin, you know, a lineage a legacy of origin, but that there was this intimate and beautiful and diverse and magical connection that seeds had with people that people and seeds were intimately in relationship for, you know, many, many, many generations and as a Mohawk woman, I remember sitting there on the stuffy farmhouse floor in New England and looking at all these packs of tomato seeds and these little fuzzy time capsules. And thinking as a Mohawk woman, "What were the seeds and foods that fed my ancestors like?" It was a cornerstone moment in my life, of really having that epiphany and grappling with simultaneously the joy and wonder of agricultural biodiversity and the legacy of plants in humans, co-creating, you know, in the agricultural realms. There was this joy on one hand, and then there was the wellspring of grief and sadness and anger and all sorts of other emotions of being a young Indigenous woman who had no understanding and no relationship to the foods that really were our birthright right that were promised to us, you know, in so many ways through our cultural teachings, that I had somehow lost connection with that. And so it really opened up a wellspring of both of those, you know, that spectrum of emotion from joy to grief, and really led me again on this, been on this path for 23 years really, in a continual relationship with that inquiry of who were the foods and seeds that fed my ancestors and how can I be in right relationship to them and rehydrate these original agreements that I have with these ancestral seeds, so that way, I will have something of meaning and substance to hand down to my children and be a good, responsible descendant in that way. So I've grown a garden every season for twenty three years now and I always tell people that I apprentice myself to the seeds, and I apprentice myself to the seasonal cycles. And while I've been growing a garden for, you know, over two decades, I feel like the garden really has just been growing me as a woman and took me through a very unconventional rites of passage into understanding who I am as an Indigenous woman in this modern time.
Ayana Young I have chills as you've been transporting us with you back to your younger self, finding purpose with the seeds and their stories. Thank you so much for sharing some of those intimate moments of your past and I was imagining your garden while you're speaking and I really just am happy that we were able to introduce this conversation like that. So thank you so much.
Rowen White Yeah, indeed,
Ayana Young Yeah. Well, since the birth of agriculture on Turtle Island, it seems that seeds have been freely passed down through the hands of the generations accompanied by ceremony and prayer and reverent seed cultures and sustainable food growing practices. And then colonization and the forced assimilation, the US has waged a war against these traditional foodways through violent means, such as scorched earth policies, the capitalist culture of severance and a forced extractive agricultural model with these eras of disruption in mind, how can we understand the seeds that sustain us today as sacred gifts from Indigenous and ancestral seed keepers?
Rowen White Yeah, I think it's important to remember that each one of us, and I say this often and I think and I have had it said to me often by Elders, is that each one of us descends from people who have been in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with plants and seeds since the dawning of time. I mean, I descend from people who speak very beautifully and lovingly of our sustainers. Our original sustainers are corn and beans and squash and a multitude of other plants and seeds that have been with us since our creation story and have a very beautiful place in our cosmology. And what's important to remember and I think it harkens back at back to that moment when I had my aha moments of reintroducing myself to see it is that each one of us has these agreements, you know, these covenants, the sacred marriage, so to speak, that our ancestors came into agreement with a long, long time ago, and those agreements are written in our blood and our bones and they do run like wild rivers and they awaken and rehydrate in some unlikely places. I think what's beautiful now is that we're at a time when we are coming into a great awakening of not only the legacy that Indigenous peoples have created here on Turtle Island, the beautiful tapestry of kinship routes and trade routes and traditional foodways. And we see that awakening with the food sovereignty movement, and people understanding that the dismantling of the food system was a very specific and manufactured way to try and disempower the people because our understanding of who we are and where we draw our strength and our spiritual power, it comes from the land underneath our feet, and it comes from the foods that grow within that land. And those those foods and those medicines, they go into our body and inform us and animate us in a way that allows us to be our true selves. And the powers that be whether it was three hundred years ago, you know, during the Revolutionary War when, you know, my people, our cornfields were were being burnt, very purposefully to disempower our Haudenosaunee Confederacy as it related to, you know, the history and the dynamics in the Revolutionary War, or whether it's today with the you know, the inequities that we see in the food system that are still present today that that make access to healthy traditional foods difficult for many native and communities of color. And so I think for now, we are seeing a great awakening right now of people recognizing that revitalizing food and revitalizing our relationship to seed and to land is an integral part of the re-indigenizing that's happening and it also is an inextricable part of vibrant cultural revitalization, food and seed and land are at the center of the wellspring of culture. It's our relationship to the land and to our foods and to nourishing ourselves and sheltering ourselves as a people that have created this, you know, the multitudes of different beautiful cultures that exist here on Turtle Island and beyond. And so, if we are moving forward with a vision of health and sustainability and sovereignty and agency, within our Indigenous communities, I see no better path than to go back to these roots go back to the relationship to our seeds into our food and to reinvigorate those and I think that we've been seeing also a number of people and organizations and entities that are outside of our native communities, who really want to support and practice allyship in this movement towards reconciliation, reparations and rematriation towards Indigenous peoples being able to be in relationship again with our original Earth, you know with the with our motherland.
Ayana Young In a piece on your blog Seed Songs you share, "As it has been told to me by my Elders, the seeds are a reflection of the people. When the seeds are weak and struggling it means our communities and nations and people are struggling. And when our seeds are strong, it means our nations and communities and people are strong and in good health." Yeah, and across the so called us we know that seeds are struggling from the growing commodification and privatization of seeds, the industry now controlled by just four corporations to genetic erosion and biodiversity loss and the American food landscape is increasingly dominated by hybrid and genetically engineered seeds. So I'm thinking back to this principle that seeds are a reflection of people, and wondering what messages or cultural stories we're being asked to hear and the seeds we sow today.
Rowen White Yeah, it's a powerful statement. I think about it a lot. I have a lot of wise Elders and mentors who continue to share that message with me. And it anchors me back to the work time and time again. We all descend from people who have had at one point a culture of belonging that that surrounds the way in which we nourish ourselves, you know, there's this myth of self-sufficiency or, you know, the homestead that really, I think is perpetuated even within organic gardening circles that one person can live on forty acres and be able to sustain themselves. But it really does come back to, in order to feed and nourish ourselves, it relies on us working collaboratively and cooperatively in community, not only at the local level, but at the regional level. And when we talk about seeds being a reflection of the people, it is the fact that our life is intimately intertwined with their well-being, you know, and it goes back again to this concept of original agreements that we agreed to take care of the seeds and the seeds agreed to take care of us and we came into this beautifully, you know, reciprocal relationship for a long time and unfortunately, in the modern times, whether it's by violence or by choice, many humans have abdicated their responsibility in their relationship to seeds to other entities, including corporations and in the larger industrial food chain, supplies and I think we're at a time right now, where this collective amnesia, this collective forgetting of those agreements, has reared itself into a system of nourishment that is, at its core is fundamentally broken, is fundamentally doing quite the opposite of nourishment. It's actually poisoning our people, it's poisoning the land. And, if you look at the landscape of seed in this country, it's, again, increasingly more centralized, increasingly more privatized. We have to remember that even 150 years ago, there was no such thing as a feed company, it was all seeds being handed down from generation to generation and village to village by people just like you and me. Now we see a landscape where there's most farms in North America, and honestly on the globe, no longer practice seed stewardship as a part of a whole farm landscape and in ecology, and that creates an incredible vulnerability. Right now, especially with the work that we're doing with food sovereignty, with Indigenous communities, especially in light of what's happening right now, with the pandemic, and some of the supply chain issues that are happening in food and agriculture, is that many of the seed companies are straining under the increased demand as people realize that, oh, if we're not going to be able to get food from the stores in the way that we've had before, maybe we need to start growing a garden and that centralized infrastructure is straining and buckling under the demand of the people because people have not been stewarding and caring for seeds at the local and village level for quite a number of decades in many instances. And the result of that is that you have feeds that are a reflection of the people right now, in the United States in particular, we have a lot of human beings who have no real deep, ingrained in inborn sense of who they are as people, they have a confusion about who they are; this idea of a melting pot has turned into people who yearn for a culture of belonging and a culture of connection and don't have that. And so, in turn, we've created an agricultural system that mimics that reflects that. If you drive across the heartland of the United States, which I've done a number of times, you see corn, beautiful corn mothers growing across the hills and valleys of you know, the heartland of what used to be prairie, and those corn mothers are increasingly hybridized and also genetically modified. And so those seeds are actually a reflection of the the the people in this country and what I say is that they're brokenhearted, people planting brokenhearted seeds because they're planting seeds that look like them, they're seeds that are a mix of tattered origins kind of cut and spliced together that don't have a real taproot of understanding of legacy and lineage. And so for me, I'm always guided by the seeds in what I call seed time, you know, in the bigger, longer game, vision of the work of now, which will feed the imagination of what's possible in the future, is that we need to grow and encourage and empower the next generation of humans who love seeds as Mother and love seeds as relative as our ancestors did. And when we begin to cultivate that culture of reverence where people understand the sanctity and reverence of a handful of seeds, then we, I just feel like all of the other things that we worry about now, with the genetic modification and the glyphosate poisoning of the Earth, those things will, will be composted, they'll be composted into the past, they'll no longer be relevant. And so that's my approach. And that's many of our approach in our Indigenous communities is to cultivate that relationship and that sense of connectivity to the seeds and remind people that everyone is intimately connected to a seed that for all of us who eat, we're all in relationship to see it and it's whether we choose to abdicate that relationship to somebody else, or whether we choose to reclaim it and and to embody it and to re-engage it in ways that can nourish those beyond our time in ways that we all know in our hearts is possible.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing all that. And I was imagining those corn mothers that I've also seen when traversing Turtle Island and there is wanted to bring up this statistic that I was reading that in 2019, genetically engineered seed was planted on 92% of US corn acres, and 98% of US cotton acres and 94% of US soybean acres. So that is really staggering. To see just how much of these genetically engineered seeds are being utilized, how much land is being given to them. And I also read that over the past century, the US has lost about 93% of its food seed variety. Now that might be kind of hard to quantify, but just seeing that I'm sure it's something close to that. It's really a wake up call for us that this is huge. This is not a small issue, this is something that affects all of us. And yeah, so I was pretty shocked by that, but not even shocked, really, but just again--
Rowen White I would love to offer something, because, it's that those statistics that I began to learn about, you know, in my initial journey, and that really fueled the fire of sadness and rage and confusion about where, you know, we had gone as a nation as communities, individual communities, and what I've learned, you know, and I'm still just a humble student of the seeds and of the corn herself is that when we begin to put our energy back towards the seeds in these relationships that there's a cultural dimension of biodiversity that exists. And it's a synergy between humans and plants. And so when we as humans begin to tune our hearts and our minds back towards these relationships with food and seed and land, that that spectrum of diversity will return again, and I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen in tribal communities where certain varieties have been lost. But when other varieties of corn were grown out in substantial and bigger quantities in bigger acreage, as they began to revitalize the seeds and grow them out, that certain sacred varieties actually reemerged from other varieties. And so there's this beautiful wellspring of diversity that's always wanting to show her face and show up on the Earth, but it requires a dynamic interface with humans who see seed stewardship as just an integral part of day in and day out life and, you know, season after season and, really it is that wellspring of diversity that will be our biggest ally in the face of climate change. And when we begin to attune, when we begin to see the wealth that that seeds hold and the wealth encoded in the relationships that we have to those seeds. And those, you know, the relationship that those seeds have to the changing seasons year in year in year out. That is going to help us ride through the storm of climate change and give us the resilience that's needed. Because plants are so much more adaptive than we are as humans. They adapt so much more quickly to the changing world that we live in. And so when we ally with them, and again, not only just tend and steward them, but tune in our hearts and our minds back to that seed time. So that understanding of this intergenerational legacy work. That's going to be our greatest gift in the years ahead. And part of this pandemic and what we're experiencing right now is climate chaos meeting late stage capitalism and what are we seeing is that we're seeing people remembering that seeds are vitally important and that if we don't have seeds and gardens and a means to nourish ourselves in these ways, then times are going to be very difficult to head. So this is just another reseeding I think that is being offered in these times for people to really recognize what's most important.
Ayana Young Thank you for that balm for the brokenheartedness, I'm sure all of us are hearing what's happened. That's really-- Yeah, we got to keep chugging on and knowing that revitalization is possible. And speaking of, I'd like to turn to the powerful seed revitalization work you're doing with Sierra Seeds and Indigenous Seed Keeper Network and other communities across the country to return seeds to their original keepers and ancestral lands. So I'd love to hear a story of a Seed Restoration Initiative and how you support the work of reweaving seed back into cultural contexts and tribal communities of origin. And if there are any particular protocols for this delicate, nuanced process.
Rowen White Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's bridging work right this is intercultural work and part of my my fascination with this growing edge of of our work our collective work is that it grants us the opportunity to be able to look back in time and face, the adversities, and the pain and the trauma of colonization and acculturation, and displacement and relocation, and the traumas between different groups of people. It gives us a really beautiful shade tree to sit under, and to look at what reconciliation and reparations can be with the seeds and the foods guiding us. So as a part of Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, and also my work with Sierra Seeds, we've been engaging in this body of work that we're calling rematriation. So many of you may be familiar with the idea of repatriation, which is returning items of significance back to communities of origin, whether they be funerary objects or cultural objects that have been taken oftentimes by violent theft or force and returned back. So that's been a movement that's been happening not only on Turtle Island, but globally. You know, as part of You know, some of the reconciliation of the harms of colonization. We've made a spin on the word and using deeply inspired by the work of Martin Prechtel and his work on "The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic" where he really looks at this idea of rematriation is returning things back to the Mother, right returning the seeds back to their, you know, Motherland their communities of origin and recognizing that that many tribal communities across Turtle Island, the role and responsibility of caring for the seeds, caring for the ceremonies and songs that surround our seeds are carried by the women because we're the ones who, you know from our hand, hands and wombs, life grows. And so we've, we've looked at, you know, in our work with Indigenous communities, in listening sessions and conversations with them around building more capacity around food sovereignty. And then, in essence, seed sovereignty. We've heard a lot of needs for access to culturally significant seeds again. When people were displaced or moved or, you know, all of the impacts of colonization, many people were disconnected from the land and from the seed varieties that sustain them. And you know, seeds always have been moving and migrating. And for many reasons, seeds of Indigenous origin, have found themselves in seed banks and universities and museums and other institutions where they're away from their community of origin. I began to do some work alongside many of my colleagues and compadres to begin to build bridges and build relationships of trust with these institutions and Indigenous communities and begin to do the work,the very tender and nuanced work of bringing these seeds back home to the people who really want to be in relationship with them, you know, the seeds aren't meant to be, you know, put onto a, you know, a refrigerator seed vault, you know, in Iowa or in Michigan, or in Chicago, or in the various places where they've ended up, but they really, we see them as living breathing relatives, and that they, they are a vibrant part of our community. And so we've been taking the steps to begin to build those relationships to bring those seeds home. And we've been working largely with Seed Savers Exchange, which is a large public access seed bank, but we've also been working with the Field Museum, with a number of universities and the USDA seed bank to begin this beautiful process. And we've had dozens upon dozens of varieties that have made their way home. These homecomings have been incredibly healing. They've been emotional. I recall, two Octobers ago, we were up in Taos Pueblo. And we had found this Taos squash that had been somehow passed from hand to hand away from the community and had been lost to the community for quite a number of decades. And we were able to bring home a big old squash and a big sack of seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange vault there, and we had a ceremony under the mountains there at the historic Taos Pueblo, and the Elders and the farmers there welcomed that squash home like a baby. It was really emotional. It was incredibly touching to witness people receiving not just ancestral remains that had maybe been interned or dug up but a living breathing relative that could reconnect them and nourish their people from this moment forward. And we've seen countless times where seeds have, you know, this speckled corn of the Ho-Chunk people in Wisconsin was returned back to the tribe of origin back into seed keepers hands in loving ways and ways that we're having to come up with new ceremonies to welcome the seeds home, and ways that we're again rehydrating these responsibilities of re-enlivening people's understanding of what it means to be Indigenous means that we take care of our relatives that have been taking care of us since time immemorial. We're actually working on a short documentary in collaboration with the Cultural Conservancy, to really document and share these stories of hope and resilience in this time. And then we're also making available a paired action guide that will guide other communities and other institutions who wish to engage in this work. And it really is sometimes it's about seeds returning back to people, but it's also evolved into the possibility of land rematriation and reparations. So, ways in which non-Native land holders are are thinking in brave new ways to return stolen land back to tribes of origin and there's these unlikely relationships that are forming from these collaborations where descendants of people who were adversarial are now coming together in a collaborative partnership to heal and to plant seeds together and to nourish people. And I think it's one of the more hopeful things that I've had the opportunity to be involved in and I think that the echo and the fragrance of this work will continue to nourish those well beyond this time we're in now.
Ayana Young So beautiful. This deep relational tending and reconciliation and spirit work that is rooted within seed restoration as rematriation is so deep, and really powerful. And I also love, I've heard you say before and I love that you said that seed work is slow work. And I'm really understanding that from your last response so thank you for sharing all that with us and I love hearing about the unlikely ally ships forming and it's so deep, it's so healing on so many levels.
Rowen White Yeah, yeah, indeed. And, you know, the thing is, is that when we engage in the relationship of tending seed that work at its essence is intergenerational because seeds will outlive us. they've been with our people against all adversities and all odds since the dawning of time. I mean, I think about my own lineage of ancestors and the incredible adversities that they faced, whether it was diseases wiping out a large percentage of the people or having their land taken from them and relocated into different places. But amidst all of that, there were incredibly foresighted individuals and ancestors who kept tiny little buckskin patches of seed in safekeeping for a time that, you know, that they couldn't even see on the horizon that that they knew that the descendants would need those seeds and would nourish them and be a part of this bigger cultural matrix that we're woven into through our cosmology. My work and the work of Indigenous Seed Keepers Network pays homage and it's just an extension of the incredible work that has been done by this grand lineage of seed keepers, who understood that the seeds would outlive them. And so part of seed keeping is legacy building. So it's always making sure that you have somebody if you have these beautiful corn seeds or these bean seeds that you've been gifted. Part of that responsibility is to ensure that you have somebody else around you, hopefully somebody younger than you, who understands all of the cultural nuances and significances and aspects of keeping those seeds alive so that when we as humans, our lifespan is short. But seed work is slow work, it's intergenerational work and so it is legacy-building its lineage-cultivating and it's part of our work is to make certain that the bundle of seeds and wisdom and stories and cultural memory that we've been given to us in this generation, that we've tended it in such a way in our lifetime, that it's a more beautiful and vibrant bundle that we then give down to our children. Right. And that's one of the core fundamental teachings that my Elders share with me is that these seeds actually don't belong to us. We borrow them from our children. That's how we say it, so we are actually borrowing these seeds from future generations. And we have to tend them in such a way that we understand that, that we have to make sure that they're in really good shape for those yet to come, and so that's part of us being good ancestors, good future ancestors and also responsible descendants is making certain that all of that work that our ancestors did against incredible adversities isn't all for nothing, that we would be that generation who wouldn't allow that chain of stewardship to fall to the ground and fall unnoticed, that we would honor it and care for it in that way.
Ayana Young So, so important and so beautifully said Rowen, thank you. And as you've been describing seeds are so incredibly dynamic and I think similarly, we need to consider the constantly shifting field and changing landscape upon which this work of seed rematriation rests, whether it be Indigenous folks working to revitalize their heritage seeds on another tribes' homelands, or farmers on settler descendants cultivating native seeds on occupied land, or the many iterations in between. There seems to be an incredibly rich border in this work where ancient ways meet and mingle with the new. So I'm wondering if you have anything to share from your practice at Sierra Seeds on this dance that honors both your own traditional lineage and the history of the land, or its own wild expression?
Rowen White Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think change is the only constant right and the seeds as a student of the seeds, I'm a student of adaptation and innovation and creativity and the seeds are that talisman of adaptation and creativity, you know, embodied. Right. And so, as we apprentice ourselves to them and allow them to guide the work, I think we would be remiss to not only think about the ways in which the cultural memory and the teachings that our Elders and Ancestors have taught us about how to take care of these seeds. But we would be remiss if we didn't look to, you know, all of the tools that we have, you know, at our fingertips in this in this modern time, you know, I think that we have an opportunity right now, to remember that we're always in a change process, especially in agriculture. Change is always happening every single season and all the time. And so it's thinking about what's in the best interest of our seeds and our people, and what tools do we have now that we can adapt? You know, we've been experimenting a lot with, you know, different types of, you know, irrigation that, you know, irrigation practices here that allow the inherent strengths within the seeds to come forth, right. So when we baby seeds, or when we give them too much water, too much nutrients, we actually don't draw on their inherent strengths to adapt and to acclimate to the, to the, to the conditions that we have. And so we've been kind of playing around a little bit with implementing some different ways of growing and irrigating our crops. So that way, they are the most tenacious and resilient kind of in the face of what we see on the horizon where we may have lack of access to water, we may need to be continuing to grow on marginal lands, given land access issues. And so how are we making certain that we're really working in collaboration with the plants themselves, and the practices that we use to make sure that we're, you know, really relying on those inherent strengths in the land and the seed and that synergy that they have, instead of, you know, again, going the way of industry, which is like incredibly high input agriculture. But I think that there's new iterations of it. And I think that this younger generation that's getting involved in the food sovereignty movement, has an incredible capacity, to dream and to vision and to use their inherent creativity as young folks to think about, again, new ancient ways of growing and nourishing our communities with the tools at hand. I mean, I even just see, you know, aside from practical, components of agriculture, I see the way in which social media is being used to do community organizing around food. The way in which cultural memory and knowledge is shared through unconventional means, I think we're at a really exciting time in the world to really think about how old meets new and future. And seeds remind us of that, because seeds, they're always becoming something new again, every season. You know, they're not a stagnant static entity. Every year. They're adapting and changing slightly to adapt to the new conditions of the time. And so that's always why I talk to my students and people around me about thinking like seeds and really leaning into that idea of seed time. Because it isn't like I think sometimes in heirloom seed preservation or conservation circles, oftentimes it's people trying to always keep the seeds into the snapshot of what it was 50 years ago or 75 years ago or 100 years ago, instead of embracing this more dynamic, participatory restoration of seeds, where seeds are always their faces are always changing. They're always continuing to be renewed based on the environment that we're living in. And so I think it's, you know, I think we're at a really important time, and we really need that younger generation of creative, innovative thinkers to be involved in this work.
Ayana Young Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm happy you spoke to the evolution of seeds and not trying to restore or go back in time, but instead dancing with what is now and I think about that a lot with restoration, forest restoration with the native species nursery that I'm building out here in the redwoods And so much of restoration ecology, at least the academic restoration ecology is trying to put things back in time to a time that somebody is picking, you know, like, it's really interesting and then trying to fit into that little box. But climate isn't what it was 100 years ago, climate isn't what it was 50 years ago, and it probably won't be that and another 50 years. So there are a lot of evolutionary changes that I think we need to ride with because we can't be in control of this. We can't control the seed. We can't control weather patterns as much as we try. Some of us try. And so I appreciate you speaking to that. Because, yeah, there needs to be flexibility and deep listening and slowness, and I'm definitely seeing that a lot in my forestry work. And it's a bit frustrating to push up against the normalized industrial commercial model of reforestation and just how seeds are being worked with and cloning and it's pretty frustrating. And so what you're saying revitalizes my spirit like, "Okay, we got this. We just need to keep me to come back. Yeah, like scale back, come back to the land, keep rethinking". It's really good but I do want to talk a bit about the patenting and biopiracy of the food seed crop and I was recently reading about in Totontepec, an Indigenous community in the mountains of eastern Oaxaca, Mexico where they grow a variety of maize known as olotón. This variety has the ability to grow in nutrient-poor soil by extracting nitrogen from the air through its aerial roots. And in recent years, scientists have been trying to determine whether this trait can be bred into commercial corn, and if successful, a viable commercial application of the maize now heralded as the corn of the future. And this case raises the alarming phenomenon around the commercialization and exploitation of crops that had been nurtured by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. So I would really like if you could speak to some of these challenges facing the indigenous seed sovereignty movement and the critical work of safeguarding agricultural heritage against patterning and biopiracy.
Rowen White Yeah, absolutely. And that's a big part of why indigenous Seed Keepers network banded together in the first place, you know, that network is built upon, again, countless generations of people doing the work on their lands, in their communities. And it really became apparent in the last, you know, couple of decades that there are powers that be that seek to extract and engage in biocolonialism and take not only seeds and foods but also cultural, Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and privatize that and patent that and commodify that, and not to the benefit of the communities of origin but much to the, to the opposite of that. And so, a big part of our indigenous Seed Keepers network is to come together in solidarity, you know, across tribes, it's an inter tribal network, largely here in the United States, but we've been collaborating with a number of with an emerging network in Canada, and then have also been invited to the table in Mexico and Central America as well, to really speak about resiliency and the need for advocacy against biocolonialism and biopiracy. You know, we've been brainstorming quite a number of ways in which we can come together in solidarity in the face of that and, and it's a multitude of fronts, right. So that's why we need a diversity of people involved. It's not just the farmers and seed keepers, but it's also attorneys and public speakers and thought leaders and politicians and teachers and parents like it's a such a diversity of people who we need on this front on the seed revolution front, because we need to cultivate seed literacy, but we also need that advocacy. We've been working with a number of entities within our Indigenous communities who either have felt the threat of seeds being taken away from their communities, to be commodified or even potentially patented to those who are just starting to learn about this and wanting to know how to protect their seeds from that potentially in the future. So we've been creating a number of different tools around templates and frameworks for tribal ordinances, what can tribal communities do at their governmental level to protect their seeds? So there's that happening. There's advocacy that's happening at the state level with United States government representatives and Congress people to put those through to basically acknowledge the fact that we don't see ourselves as tribal communities as having sole proprietorship over seed. We don't have a proprietary relationship to seeds. But this is one of our collective inheritance, right? So there we're attempting to create some frameworks that acknowledge that and that can actually hold water in bigger courts, and, you know, working with organizations such as the open source seed initiative to potentially slip certain tools that, that are actually used in the patenting and commodification of seed, there's something that's called a bag tag. When there's a genetically modified seed that has a license attached to it, oftentimes just by opening the bag, you just by opening that bag of seed, you've agreed to the immense fine print that's on that's on the license of that seed. We actually have been creating seed packets for Indigenous Seed Keepers network, which actually flips it completely on its head, which has an agreement, a bag tag agreement that's written onto the seed packet that says, by nature of opening the seed packet, you agree to not engage in any form of commodification, privatization patenting, you know, and any other non consensual form of modification of these seeds. So we're trying to get creative in the face of, you know, kind of the unspeakable things that are happening to seed to really protect these seeds, as well. And I think the big first step is creating literacy at the community level about, you know, what are the risks and what are the threats. And then what are some creative means by which we can band together as a community as a region and then as a national network, to advocate for our basic birthright to be able to save, share and trade seed as well as be able to take care of those seeds who are relatives and our ancestors.
Ayana Young Yeah, and I know you've often spoken about the corporate consolidation of seeds we're witnessing today is an increasingly urgent matter in the face of our Earth changes. And we know that biodiversity not monoculture has always been the cornerstone of a resilient healthy food system. And that this will allow us to weather warming temperatures and climate uncertainty. But taking this one step further, I'd love if you could talk more about the importance of preserving biodiversity in the living context, which you'd mentioned before in our conversation, or on a local level for climate change resilience, as opposed to say, storing seeds within private collections or seed banks or refrigerated banks, like you were talking earlier. In other words, why does biodiversity require radical abundant redistribution, rather than private withholding or stockpiling?
Rowen White Yeah, that's a great question. You know, my simple answer to that and then I'll sort of elaborate on it is that every garden is a seed bank, you know every piece of land that holds wild and cultivated plants is a vibrant living seed bank. And that's what's that's the way it has been since the dawning of time, that these seeds are in a constant relationship not only with the land and the elements there, but the people who've stewarded them. And that's a vital importance that cultural memory, as it relates to biodiversity in those relationships as it relates to biodiversity is critical. There's a mentor and colleague of mine, Virginia D. Nazarea. Ria, who wrote really just some signature pieces on cultural memory and biodiversity, talks about this idea of a sensuous conservation, which means that people are intimately connected to the seeds and to the foods through their emotional landscape. It basically comes back to this premise that we love to seeds because as in the same way that we love our children that we work with smells of them remind us of home, you know that the taste of them reinvigorates our purpose for caretaking them, that there's this other element of responsibility that gets activated by the multisensory nature of the way in which we engage these foods when they're in our day to day life. Right. And Wendell Berry, I use this quote often, he says, "We exploit what we merely value but we defend what we love." And I think that when we begin to have a culture and grow the culture in a way that we see every garden as a seed bank, and we begin to re-establish that relationship back in our daily life. We begin to grow a culture of people who love the seeds of Mother and will defend them against all odds. And so that to me, I think is, that form of living seed bank, culture, that the way that they stay protected is in our relationship to them and in their relationship to the land as opposed to this false sense of security of putting seeds, you know, onto you know, into the, you know, the tundra at Svalbard beneath the permafrost in this faraway location, you know, farmers have always had kept aside little caches of seed and pots or in baskets, you know, in in all kinds of ways and jars and various things. But the ways in which we have always stewarded seeds in ways that create vibrant and vital agriculture that nourishes people is by growing them [inaudible] near year out and ensuring that we have a relationship to them and teaching. That very complex has become encoded in our stories. They become encoded in our songs, they become encoded in our ceremonies. They become encoded in motifs and visual art motifs that are on pots and baskets. In our day to day life, and that's the real security, that's real food security and food sovereignty is when our seed banks are alive and thriving all around us. And that's the vision that I hope for, you know, I think that, again, we need to get out of that mentality that seeds are static, that we can just put them in a jar and set them on a shelf and leave them. No, they're a living breathing entity that we have to be in constant communication within our Elders told us this, that if we began to forget and abdicate our relationship to those seeds, that the seeds would go away, right that they were a gift from Creator since the dawning of our Creation stories, and if we were to forget about them, then they would go away. So many of my Ancestors and Elders petitioned long and hard after you know, the hard times of relocation and displacement, to ensure that those seeds would continue to stay with us and continue to care for us. And that we made promises back to them that we would take care of them and engage that reciprocity with them. And so that's, you know my invitation for all those who are listening is to find simple ways in which you can re engage your relationship to seed because you're in a relationship to seed and she never forgot about you if you have a full belly of food. She didn't forget about caring for you. And so what are the small and beautiful ways in which you can reenliven and reconnect and oftentimes ancestry is a good place to start, you know, who were the you know, that same question I, you know, stated in the beginning was who were the foods that and seeds that fed your ancestors. It's oftentimes a really beautiful springboard to a really beautiful and nourishing relationship that will, again, live beyond your own time.
Ayana Young So beautiful. Thank you, Rowen. And to stay a bit on this topic, I know that much of your work exists within this larger paradigm of food sovereignty like we've been speaking and a critical piece of the puzzle that I'm curious to ask you about is how we might create more sustainable, regenerative economic models that support the decentralization and democratization of seeds. Do you have any thoughts to share around the revitalization of a trade economy? Maybe that might restore the currency of kinship and connection?
Rowen White Yeah it's a big part of our growing edge, especially right now, through the indigenous Seed Keepers network we're running a seed drive where we're gifting you know, thousands and thousands of seed packets back out to indigenous communities to really support the hope and resilience gardens that are emerging in this time of uncertainty. And it really is is perhaps fast tracking an idea that we've been kind of slow simmering for a while, which is that, you know, trade routes and kinship routes have existed on Turtle Island since the dawn of time that seeds have moved from, you know, places like Oaxaca all the way you know, up to just north of Winnipeg and, you know, into Maine and it's an amazing intricate migration path that seeds have taken. And so we are working as a network to begin to build the foundation of capacity for local and regional seed hubs to emerge that would be based in a cooperative model. So working together at the regional level, to grow seed, to share it with others in our region, and to share it at a local level. And recognizing that, again, it's much easier for me to envision a group of people growing out a multitude of varieties with grace and ease, versus the every man for themselves model, which is if I were to care take 200 different seed varieties on my own home farm by myself, that would be, you know, would take up all of my hours and all of my days. But if I had 20 people who would do it with me and each of us grew 10 varieties, and then we shared them amongst each other. You know, we have so much more capacity when we band together in collaboration, and in that collective effort. That existed here that existed here for, you know, since the dawning of agriculture on Turtle Island. What we're doing is trying to revitalize that and re engage that by helping to build capacity, by leveraging resources, fundraising, and in getting the tools and the seeds and the access to land to people who need it to be able to produce larger amounts of seed that then can be shared in community. So we've been seeing a lot of seed giveaways, a lot of ways in which we're doing these seed drives, to take money out of the equation. You know, I don't think seed companies and commodification of seed is the way forward actually, I think there is a deeper gift and trade economy that can be revitalized, that has existed way, way longer than the commodification of seed, which, again, I'll remind you, it's been under 200 years that seed companies and the commodification of seed has existed and before that it was a complex and beautiful trade network. And I think what it reminds us of is that we currently exist in an economy and a capitalist economy that's based on scarcity. And what we can envision when we put when we say, in seeds we trust right, when we understand the wealth of seeds and the wealth of the land, is that we route our regenerative economy in an understanding of abundance as opposed to scarcity. Because seeds themselves are the talisman of that one seed turns into 100. And then 100 of those will turn into thousands. And so the nature of life herself on earth is actually rooted in exponential abundance. But we have this manufactured economic system that is rooted in scarcity and so when we can route our Indigenous economy or natural economy back into the true nature of life herself, which is, you know, ever generous and benevolent, then I think we can create a cooperative and collective economy that isn't exploitative and extractive. And in fact, we'll just continue to share nourishment and abundance with everyone and that's what food justice looks like. And that's why we need communities of Color and Indigenous leaders to be at the forefront of food justice work, because they have a more intact understanding and memory of what that might look like.
Ayana Young Yes, absolutely agree with you. Well, as we begin to come to a close on this conversation, which I don't want to end, I do have a few other thoughts for you. I really love hearing about your visions for a different type of future than the current trajectory. And it really does give me a lot of food for thought. And in one of your blog pieces, you share this word from the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, who we've had the pleasure of having on the show before, and the word is query seed. I think I'm pronouncing it right, which means "A seed that due to social trauma stays consciously dormant, not out of oppression, but rather due to a deep intuition which senses not to seed until it finds itself in a fertile, fecund environment." So I'd love to hear more on how we can understand the unfolding of seeds in their own time. And the role we play as humans in preparing a soft home to receive them. And then maybe as a second part of that question, how do we become more human, more ourselves when we step back into accountability, and honor our consensual contract with the land?
Rowen White Yeah, I mean, I think it's a gorgeous question. And I think what it comes back down to is a starting small like a seed, right? It's like starting with ourselves. You know, I think sometimes when we look at the landscape of change and the process of change, sometimes we can get really either paralyzed or distracted, I think by the bigness of what has to happen in a changemaking landscape and we sometimes forget our own personal agency and that were a collection of little things that, that we make small, subtle changes into the way that we we move in the world, but that has such a more powerful, it's so much more of a powerful change is it then, you know, trying to rally and change like NASCAR dads and soccer moms, you know, like, it's just like, how do we start with ourselves, you know, and then have that change echo outward? And that's why I think asking ourselves those questions around, you know, what is our personal responsibility to seeds and how do we, how have we abdicated that in the past? And how can we reclaim that and reengage it even if we are not gardeners or farmers or land holders, even if we live in an apartment in New York City, like what does that mean and what small things can we do in our life that that that retune the way that we look at the world and reengage is that more reverent nature. And again, it might be starting from a place of connection and lineage and ancestry and coming into a deeper connection there. And then I think then then it's, I think it's working. You know, in my work at Sierra Seeds we have been working to create a beautiful learning spaces where people have the same heart and mind can come together across a multitude of different cultural backgrounds to talk about, you know, these things to to engage, you know, what does it mean, to be a seed keeper? What does it mean to care for seeds? What does it mean to create seed literacy in our communities, whether it's through the actual saving of seeds themselves, or through making art or poetry or creating curriculum for our students or whatever that might look Like what role do you play in generating increased seed literacy in our community. And so, I think, again, starting small, but I think through the power of cultivating creative supportive learning spaces where we can normalize this kind of conversation, I've been to a number of different conferences and spoken publicly, where normalizing the spiritual and cultural nature of agriculture has been well received. And people have come to me and thanked me and a number of my colleagues for normalizing the spiritual and cultural nature of agriculture because oftentimes in Western culture, everything is so compartmentalized, right? And it's so it's so reductionist. It's so, you know, boiled down to just science and so, ways in which we can enliven this aspect of ourselves that does have a cultural and spiritual connection to land and seed and it's the healing that needs to happen in order for us to really receive what the food landscape can look like.
Ayana Young Yes. Yes, I'm with you, Rowen. Well, there is so much to chew on here that you have given us and I personally feel really connected to everything that you've been sharing and with the seeds, they've been calling me a lot. And I'm just grateful for you for being so in your integrity and holding so many different aspects of this work together. So thank you again for your work and for sharing this time with us today on For The Wild.
Rowen White Oh, my pleasure. What an honor.
Credits. I’d like to thank our host and founder Ayana Young, as well as our podcast team I’d like to thank our podcast production team Aiden McRae, Andrew Storrs, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, and Melanie Younger.