5/28/2023 0 Comments Tribal seedIn 1845, the Meskwaki were forced to move hundreds of miles southwest to Kansas. Many elders didn’t survive the mandated migrations, and older seed keepers often died before passing down their knowledge. government began forcing tens of thousands of Native Americans off their lands. With the passing of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, however, the U.S. Those seeds, in essence, represent the intellectual property of tribes that grew and cultivated them. Up until the past two centuries or so, seed saving was the norm in Native American communities, and many had dedicated members tasked with passing seeds from one generation to the next. Meskwaki growers, for instance, harvest seeds from the plants with the longest ears of corn, the plumpest kernels, or the most vibrant shades of yellow, red, or purple. The plants that emerged usually thrived in specific conditions or geographic locations, and farmers chose to keep the seeds that gave them the most return on their investment, in the forms of plant hardiness, size, or flavor. In societies all over the world, growers thrashed and winnowed these tiny kernels from their protective envelopes and placed them in the earth, anxiously awaiting for sun-seeking shoots to poke through the soil. Since the dawn of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, humans have been promoting their survival and their culture through farming. Stephanie Foden for NRDC A Century of Disruption And those same seeds also contain a genetic legacy-traits that allow plants to thrive without the artificial inputs of toxic chemicals and a diversity of genes that could help them, and us, survive the climate crisis. Saving seeds helps that cultural legacy to live on, not only in traditional planting and culinary practices and ceremonies but also in the forms of food sovereignty and healthy bodies. “What you see here represents a legacy,” she says. At the lunch table, Buffalo gestures to the steaming soup and piles of corn. Now other groups are also helping tribes get those heirloom seeds back to the communities that once cared for, grew, and saved them-an effort some call “rematriation,” in acknowledgement that tribal seed savers were traditionally women.īuffalo worked for MFSI before becoming a seasonal seed saver at Seed Savers Exchange, an organization that has been preserving America’s heirloom plant varieties since 1975 and recently began returning seeds cultivated by tribes to Native growers. The museum returned those seeds to the Meskwaki in 2019. In 1909, an ethnobotanist named William Jones, whose grandmother was Meskwaki, brought seeds from the tribe to the Field Museum in Chicago for preservation. Tribes also gave seeds to groups that preserved them. They wanted, she says, “to get Native artifacts into the museums, because there was a universal expectation that the Indigenous People of the Americas would cease to exist.” “A lot of it was pretty underhanded and aggressive on the part of the white collectors,” says Meskwaki member Shelley Buffalo. During the early 1900s, museums and other institutions began collecting seeds from Native Americans. Once satisfied with the results, they would save the seeds the plant produced and pass them down, season after season, century after century. Their ancestors cultivated the corn variety by selecting plants that displayed desirable traits and crossing them with other well-performing plants. And the happier they are.”įor thousands of years, the Meskwaki people have been eating a-ta-mi-ni. They want to be cooked together, and they want us to do it.The better you take care of them, the better they grow. They want to be planted together, they want to be grown together and be around each other. He explains that the crops, known as the three sisters, are “good friends with each other. “I've always been told that the corn and the beans, and the squash, they're like our ancestors,” says Luke Kapayou, the ancestral farming manager at the settlement who has been keeping seeds since the 1990s. Here, tendrils of bean plants curl around tall corn stalks, while squash vines snake through the ground below. In addition to tomatoes and kale, the farm yields some of the Meskwaki’s historic staples. Throughout the growing season, tribal members tend to crops in fields and greenhouses, then distribute the bounty to the community in boxes. Much of the produce offered is very locally grown, having sprouted in the Red Earth Garden just behind the packed picnic tables. Tribal members mingle as they check out containers filled with fry bread, wa-bi-ko-ni (squash), and Tama Flint a-ta-mi-ni (corn). It’s the Tuesday after Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative (MFSI) is hosting a grab-and-go lunch to celebrate the occasion. The smell of campfire wafts through the air at the Meskwaki settlement in central Iowa, as a giant pot of corn soup simmers above open flames and smoldering gray ashes.
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