By Rowen White

Rowen White, a seed-keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty, is the founder and Director of Sierra Seeds in Nevada City, CA, a non-profit that focuses on organic seed stewardship and education. Rowen is also the current National Project Coordinator and an advisor for the Indigenous Seed Keeper Network, an initiative of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, which leverages resources to support tribal food sovereignty projects. This article is an edited excerpt of a talk that Rowen White gave at a Bioneers Conference.

I’m a farmer; I’m a seed-keeper; I’m a mother; I’m a storyteller, and I’m a passionate activist for the dignified resurgence of our concentric and relational foodways as Indigenous peoples.

I come from a small community called Akwesasne, which is right on the New York/Canadian border. In fact, the border crossed us, so to speak. We have relatives to the north and south of that line, and we’ve been in relationship with the land here on Turtle Island since time immemorial. I’ve apprenticed myself to the Earth, to my ancestors, to my living elders, to my children, and to the amazing network of people that I have the honor and privilege of working with to find my way home, back to a sense of what it means to be a modern Indigenous farmer and woman who is trying hard to be both a good future ancestor and a responsible descendent.

I am a member of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, which is a national organization with many magnificent and exquisite kin-centric relational foodways. Each and every single one of these communities has endured an ongoing assault of the violence of settler colonialism that has resulted in catastrophic land and cultural memory loss, dislocation, assimilation, acculturation, and genocide. But amidst that, there have been countless courageous ancestors and foresighted elders who took seeds in buckskin pouches when they were put on trails of tears and relocated from the lands that held their umbilical cords and their ancestors’ bones and bodies. They shared the cultural memory and the seeds down through the generations in subversive and revolutionary ways. As Indigenous Peoples, we are woven into a tapestry of story and identity, and we’re nothing without a sense of who we are, the foods we eat, and the relationships that we have to those who sustain us.

Despite the countless atrocities over the last 500 plus years, these ancestors that I speak of and invoke and call in, sowed seeds of resilience and vitality into the very blood and bones and earth of our bodies. Some of those memories and those seeds and those prayers have lain dormant inside of us over the last many decades and centuries, carried down through the very marrow in our bones and the sweet water in our spines, and have animated us in this time to move towards dignified resurgence. And those seeds are finally sprouting in this time.

We’re seeing young people, old people, a multigenerational movement of Indigenous seed keepers and fishermen and foragers and hunters coming together, knowing that our strength is in our ability to restore those vital kinship and trade routes, those intertribal connections. Some of the violence of the colonial strategies was to divide and conquer, to make us in-fight to break us down in that way. It was very manufactured, but despite all of that history, we are coming together and rising up.

The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance has been around since 2015, but it is really riding on a movement that has been sprouting for generations upon generations. Our ancestors pushed up against adversities and hid knowledge in the safety of the dark soil until it was ready to sprout, and here we are: now we have vibrant Indigenous food sovereignty bubbling up.

We are working with a cartography of kinship and trade routes and connections and relationships in a vibrant seed-to-table approach to help create mentorship opportunities and to grow vibrant food sovereignty initiatives. We use a number of different tools, but our sweet spot of change is to support, empower, and uplift emerging multigenerational leadership that draws on the inherent strength of our ancestral wisdom and traditions. We embrace the innate resilience and wisdom and dynamic capacity of our peoples to adapt, so we’re working with those emerging leaders, teaching them how to host community listening sessions, how to do seed sovereignty assessments, and how to create mentorship opportunities for seed-to-table projects in which farmers can connect with Indigenous chefs. People are relearning how to grow the food, how to prepare the food, and how to share that food in community. We are looking at regenerative, Indigenous, cooperative, economic development models that align with our cultural values instead of having to mold ourselves into the extractive and exploitative model of capitalism. We are reclaiming “Indigenomics,” as my sister Lyla June likes to say.

We often say in our circles that we carry our nations as we carry our children, so, at the heart of the work that we do, we center culture, we center spirit, we center emotional, mental and physical well-being. We work together to uplift one another. We are catalyzing that inherent resilience and creativity of Indigenous peoples to dream a future of food sovereignty that is in solidarity with our Black and brown brothers and sisters.

The trellis of hope that I’m leaning on these days is around this work that we are moving towards, which is “rematriation.” Henrietta Gomez and the women from the Red Willow Farm are forging, against all odds, a beautiful, concentric, relational food system on the historical Taos Pueblo in New Mexico.

We’ve been working over the last decade on an intercultural project with white settler colonists’ organizations and living descendants of Indigenous Peoples to locate seeds lost from Indigenous communities. Many seeds are part of our cosmo-genealogies: they are our living relatives that have been with us since the dawn of time, but, through displacement and acculturation, these seeds left our communities as Native food systems were violently dismantled. Now our people are hearing the voices of our ancestors and realizing that the revitalization of our culture and the revitalization of our foods are inextricable. We’re calling on the spirits of these seeds, who are like long lost prisoners of war, and inviting them to come back home to restore a beautiful sense of continuity, care, love, and respect.

At the foundation of food sovereignty is seed sovereignty. It’s having access to the culturally significant varieties of heirloom plants that nourish our bodies in ways that modern hybrid and genetically modified varieties can’t.

So we forged relationships with the folks at Seed Savers Exchange and with the Field Museum, and with some other entities and universities, to identify the seeds and bring them home. We had a ceremony under a beautiful snow-capped mountain in the fall of 2018 at Taos Pueblo. We brought an old landrace variety of Taos Pueblo squash home and a bag of seeds and presented them to the elders at the Pueblo. The emotion was palpable: they held that squash like a baby because those plants are our relatives. In fact, many of us see ourselves as lineal descendants of those foods that give their lives so that we can have life. There is an understanding and an agreement that we’re bound in reciprocal relationship with those seeds since time immemorial, and when we bring the seeds home, those agreements become rehydrated.

A long time ago, we came into an agreement, as Indigenous Peoples, that the seeds would take care of us and we would take care of the seeds, but because of countless adversities, it’s been difficult to be able to uphold those agreements, so this rematriation is a beautiful, magnificent, healing endeavor to purposely restore the heart, the spirit, the mother back into our communities. The holy mother wild wants to nourish and feed and sustain her children and has never forgotten her agreement to do that. This is part of our people’s remembering; it’s part of us centering our culture and spirit at the heart of this work.