Indigenous farmers are 'rematriating' centuries-old seeds to plant a movement
Heirloom plants from museums and seed banks are being reconnected with their original tribal stewards for cultural preservation and food security.
BY KALEN GOODLUCK | PUBLISHED FEB 10, 2022 8:26 AM
It’s early July, and Jessika Greendeer moseys along a row of head-high Mandan Bride corn, carefully weeding between the stalks while their tassels poke skyward. All around her, dozens of plant varieties grasp the earth with their roots—sunflowers track the daylight, beans and chilis hang on their vines. Greendeer, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Wisconsin, manages this 30-acre farm and Indigenous seed bank for the nonprofit Dream of Wild Health in Hugo, Minnesota, a town about 18 miles northeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Many of her charges have survived over generations, making them heirlooms of sorts.
Greendeer belongs to a constellation of seed keepers and farmers from tribal communities who are cultivating traditional crops to return them to their original caretakers. Many age-old plant varieties were lost or nearly wiped out when their Indigenous stewards were forced from their homelands by settlers and troops who broke or coerced treaties, made outright land-grabs, engaged in unrestrained genocidal warfare, and enforced racist federal policies. By the end of the 19th century, anthropologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs began collecting Native American cultural belongings—especially seeds—driven by the assumption that the tribes would be annihilated. “We all deserve to be reconnected with our foods,” Greendeer says.
That sentiment encompasses more than a desire to right past injustices. One in four Native Americans suffers from food insecurity, compared to 1 in 8 Americans overall, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition. Nearly all reservations are food deserts, reports the nonprofit First Nations Development Institute. These inequities helped give rise to a movement for food sovereignty—the term for systems that enable people, as opposed to corporations—to propel the sustainable production and distribution of provisions. Advocates are trying to revive ancestral culinary and farming practices and open access to traditional foods. In particular, Indigenous archivists, farmers, and scholars are unearthing long-lost “seed relatives” in federal, private, and museum collections and reuniting them with their tribal communities like long-lost kin. The effort is known as rematriation, or the restoration of sacred resources, like plants, land, and water, to their original Indigenous stewards. The term honors Mother Earth as a life-giving force. “Seeds are tribal ancestors too,” Greendeer says. “And they need returning.”
Academic institutions and museums are often unwilling or too administratively rigid to share, much less return, whole collections of cultural objects. Yet a few, like the University of Michigan (UM), have begun partnering with Indigenous communities and organizations to do just that. And while tribes have welcomed these moves, they’ve mostly drawn the line at employing techniques like genetic analysis that might identify ancient crop varieties. In the past, the agricultural industry and research institutions have used such information for ownership patents. Instead, careful methods like hand pollination will suffice to keep the integrity of each inherited crop while tribes revive their traditional plant knowledge.
More:
https://www.popsci.com/environment/indigenous-farmers-rematriation/