The jagged northern coast of the Dampier Peninsula, in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, is an ancient and geologically wondrous place. Its rough, sea-hewn edge is lined with weathered red cliffs and pale, rolling sand dunes. Thousands of estuaries and tidal creeks weave through the landscape, their clear water spilling out into the turquoise sea. By all accounts, it is beautiful, but I’m told the monsoon vine thickets are what make this place truly remarkable. They are full of plants and animals, and they are also full of songs and stories.
Monsoon vine thickets (MVTs) of the peninsula are areas of dry rainforest strewn along the coastline from Broome all the way up to One Arm Point and down again to a place called Goodenough Bay. There are more than 2600 hectares fragmented into nearly eighty narrow patches, often hemmed between grassy eucalypt woodlands and the coastal dunes, and separated from each other by estuaries, rocky outcrops, and the embrace of all those eucalypt forests. A few of the more imposing MVTs extend for hundreds of hectares, but most are not so big. The majority are smaller than 100 hectares in area, and many of these are around just 10 hectares. Yet, despite comprising a total land area less than 0.01 per cent of the Dampier Peninsula, MVTs account for a great deal of its biodiversity.
Almost a quarter of the region’s plant species live in MVTs, including dense tangles of woody vines like the crab’s eye creeper (Abrus precatorius), with its vivid but exceptionally toxic seeds; the flowering monsoon hibiscus (Hibiscus peralbus); and the shady, fruiting Grewia breviflora. There are many species of fruiting trees, and where fruit is plentiful, there are animals: wallabies, bats, sugar gliders, bandicoots, possums and native tree rats. There are endemic pythons and lizards, skinks and tree snakes, and native insects such as green tree ants, butterflies and moths. There are native species of land snails that have probably been in the area for the better part of 3.5 million years. Numerous species of birds make the vine thickets their home, too, moving from one patch to another as the fruit comes and goes in different seasons. They carry and disperse seeds and, in so doing, turn what appears to be hundreds of isolated thickets into an intimately connected ecosystem within the peninsula, and beyond that, part of a large migratory wildlife corridor that extends all the way up into South-East Asia.
An abundance of life requires an abundance of water, and in the MVTs there are freshwater springs, streams and pools. Tree roots help to filter and channel the water, while the canopy provides shade and good shelter, especially during fierce seasonal monsoons, which is why monsoon vine thickets have the name they have.
But it is not their only name.
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The peninsula’s monsoon vine thickets are found on the traditional lands of the Bardi Jawi, the Nimanburru, the Nyul Nyul, the Djabera Djabera, the Jabirr Jabirr, the Goolarabooloo and the Yawuru peoples. If language tells a tale – and it always does, in more ways than one – the vine thickets have been an important part of the world of these peoples for a very long time. In the Bardi language the name for monsoon vine thickets is budan or boordan boroo. They are also called mayi boordan, which means ‘bush fruit country’ or ‘places of plenty bush foods’. Further south, the Yawuru people call these places mayingan manja balu, which means ‘plenty of fruit trees’.
If endemic snails tell a tale – and believe it or not, they do – the MVTs have been here for eons. Of course, it’s not just the snails telling this story. It’s also the fossils and many of the living species that reveal these ecosystems to be remnants of the vast supercontinent of Gondwanaland, which began to break apart 180 million years ago. It fractured into ever-drifting continents, one of them being Australia. The first humans arrived on the Australian landmass at least 65,000 years ago, and their descendants reached the Kimberley by around 50,000 years ago.
For the people who came to the peninsula, the thickets became a vital source of shelter, fresh water and nutrition, providing a wide range of seasonal bushfruits, good hunting grounds, and ample fishing in the streams and estuaries. Nyul Nyul woman Devena Cox has known these unique forests since childhood, and now spends a lot of her time working to protect them as leader of the Nyul Nyul Women’s Rangers. ‘It’s a resting area, it’s shady and the foliage is nice and green,’ she tells me, adding that in the heat of the day you’ll see dunnarts and kangaroos sleeping beneath the trees. ‘It’s a haven for animals and humans.’ The MVTs are a source of healing, too. Over thousands of years, the people here learned which leaves, when warmed and wrapped around joints, would help relieve rheumatism; which infusions of certain tree barks could be applied to wounds or sore teeth; and which leaves of which plants could be soaked and drunk to ease headaches or sickness. The people of the peninsula came to know the local rhythms, the subtle ecological pulses far more nuanced than anything so binary as wet season, dry season. The MVTs still provide many varieties of fruit, says Cox. She tells me there are subtle botanical signals that indicate what fruits are available for foraging, as well as what to hunt and when. ‘You’ve got certain trees like wattles, when they are in season you know the mullets are in season. And for the stingrays, you’ve got the paperbark in flower. Any trees around us that would flower, we would use that as a sign.’ Further north, the Bardi people recognise six seasons which are marked by the presence, intensity and direction of the wind and rain, the ripening of certain fruits and nuts, the appearance and condition of certain animals, as well as the arrival or absence of big tides.
This is based on many millennia of observation and is tightly interwoven with an understanding of the life cycles of the native plants. The Bardi people have passed this and a wealth of other knowledge down through generations and in the past few decades they have shared it more broadly with anthropologists, botanists and ecologists, both directly and, in recent years, via their own publications.
For the Indigenous peoples of the peninsula, knowledge of what foods to find and where, which seeds could be eaten and how to prepare them, of when the hunting was good for wallaby or dugong, was passed along in stories and songlines as people gathered in the thickets to commune and feast, sing and play. There are Law Grounds, where councils met and held ceremonies. At other sites there were marriages, family gatherings, and, when the time came, burials. For those who lived here for generations, it was and still is a place of spirits.
It is difficult to grasp how long this went on for, but it is worth a try. Up in the traditional lands of the Bardi, up towards One Arm Point, but not quite that far, there is a place called Chile Creek. Near its bank are several fossilised footprints, at least two people heading west, by the sizes most likely that of an adult and perhaps a child. There is uncertainty about their age, but some estimates suggest they were formed at least 2000 years ago. Think for a moment about how much has happened in 2000 years, and about how all of that time represents a vanishingly small fraction, perhaps just one-twenty-fifth, of the time that has passed since humans arrived on the peninsula and began to notice the shifts in winds, the arrival of turtles, the change in fruits, the bloom of that flower but not this one.
There is an incredibly ancient cultural connection between the MVTs on the Dampier Peninsula and the Bardi Jawi, the Nimanburru, the Nyul Nyul, the Djabera Djabera, the Jabirr Jabirr, the Goolarabooloo and the Yawuru peoples. This connection was profoundly wounded by European colonisation. Communities were further fragmented as many people were forcibly removed from their traditional lands and, particularly during the time of the Stolen Generations, from each other. Vast interruptions to chains of generational knowledge occurred across Australia, including for those who lived on the north-western coast of the continent. But the stories continued, and songs, whispered or sung at times in secret, still endure, and are now an important part of the ongoing revival of traditional cultures linked with the monsoon vine thickets. There are still many sacred areas, says Cox.
However, the MVTs are not safe, and they have not been for quite a while. Until Europeans arrived, the thickets had been cared for by the people of the peninsula for generations. During this time, they acquired an intimate knowledge of the ecosystem and its rhythms. They developed and practised fire regimes that protected the vine thickets from intense mega-fires, and gave plants and animals time to recover. Just as the thickets became central to their culture, so too did their culture become important to the health of these ecosystems. But as the communities of the peninsula were impacted by colonisation, traditional fire practices lapsed, lands were cleared for agriculture and development, and introduced species from weeds to grazing livestock found their way into what remained.
Work is underway to increase legal protection for the MVTs. This is addition to other efforts to safeguard and regenerate the thickets, because invasive weeds and feral cows tend to pay notoriously little heed to legal agreements. Fast-growing weeds such as siratro and merremia creep into the thickets and grow over the native trees, effectively strangling them. The weeds and dead trees become tinder, increasing not only the risk of fires but also their intensity.
In recent years, Environs Kimberley, an environmental NGO based in Broome, has teamed up with Indigenous ranger groups of the Dampier Peninsula to conduct an analysis of fire history in the MVTs. The work, involving Nyul Nyul rangers and Bardi Jawi rangers, has revealed that the frequency of fires has indeed been increasing. As they explain in the Environs Kimberley report Valuable and Endangered, this is not good news, because native trees of the MVTs are slow-growing and are not fire-tolerant. After fire has come through, the thickets need far more time to recover than what they’ve been getting. The thickets, those involved have concluded, face the very real risk of extinction. ‘Bushfire is one of the major threats on Country now,’ says Devena Cox, explaining that the past five years have been particularly bad. ‘We do fire management every year, a lot of burning,’ she adds. By combining traditional techniques with modern fire science they aim to prevent or minimise the impact of intense, uncontrolled fires that could threaten vulnerable species and culturally important areas.
Women ranger groups have also joined forces with Environs Kimberley in a concerted effort to manage and protect these areas by identifying and removing invasive weeds and grasses. They’re also focusing their energies on regenerating areas damaged by those weeds and fires, as well as areas degraded by unlawful clearing and feral animals. And for this, they need seeds.
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The peoples of the Dampier Peninsula have been collecting and using seeds in the MVTs for many generations, but as the need to regenerate increased, it became clear that a formal seedbank would be beneficial to these efforts. In 2015, Environs Kimberley began to work with the women ranger groups of the peninsula to embark on seed-collecting missions. As part of this joint endeavour, the rangers have shared traditional knowledge of the flowering, fruiting and seed-dispersal patterns of the plants of the MVTs, so that the searchers know where to find the seeds and when. ‘When it started it was random picking of seeds from Country,’ says Cox. ‘But then we started to establish and prioritise what type of seeds we wanted to keep in storage.’ They chose to focus on fruit trees in the MVT, as well as plants used for medicine, she says.
The Nyul Nyul and Bardi Jawi rangers also have their own growing seed collections, and these are now duplicated in a new, central facility at Environs Kimberley where seeds are stored at cool temperatures and their viability monitored. Ecologist Louise Beames and Project Officers Kylie Weatherall and Ayesha Moss have been coordinating the management of the Kimberley Community Seed Bank facility at Environs Kimberley. Meanwhile, in addition to seed collection and preparation, the ranger groups have established their own plant nurseries where the seeds are germinated and young plants tended until they are ready for re-introduction.
It’s not a moment too soon, because fires over the past few years have caused a great deal of damage, says Cox. ‘I was very lucky I collected seeds back in 2015 to 2017. I actually propagated some of the seeds last year, which have sprouted.’ She tells me that, not long ago, she and her colleagues planted seeds in an effort to regenerate one of the sites, but recent months haven’t brought as much wet weather as hoped. Now she’s worried about how seeds are faring. ‘Hopefully they’ve sprouted. It’s been pretty sad with our rain.’ Any seedlings that do emerge still have a long road ahead of them, says Weatherall. ‘Up here, the big challenge is getting plants through their first two years. You have to water them through the dry seasons.’ This is no mean feat for the rangers, she adds. ‘Some of the revegetation sites are quite remote, you know, they take half an hour, forty minutes for the rangers to get to while carting water.’
Part of the project, and something that everyone involved is delighted to support, involves a training program for new rangers. These new members, often a younger generation, go out into the MVTs with senior rangers and learn traditional knowledge entailing the interwoven patterns of plant life cycles and seasonal changes, where and when to find the seeds, how to prepare them and how to store them. They’re also involved in germinating those same seeds and returning with the seedlings to the MVTs to revitalise damaged areas. It is an important step in the long path towards healing both the vine thickets and the traditional communities.
‘It’s just life-changing,’ says Cox. She tells me how she spent her childhood on Country, spending dawn to dusk playing with her sisters. But eventually the family moved over 2200 kilometres away to the state capital, Perth. The transition to city life was difficult. ‘Me and my sisters, we’ve always had Country calling us home,’ she tells me. ‘You can’t take the bush away from the bush kids.’ So when they were older they returned to Nyul Nyul Country. What was it like to leave the city and come back? ‘Freedom!’ she says with a laugh. Having had the experience of being away from Country she understands how kids who have grown up in towns and cities haven’t had the chance to connect with the environment. By working with young women rangers, Cox sees an opportunity to help them make that connection and to ensure the next generation can continue this work.
‘Our history is one of the one’s dying out,’ she tells me, explaining that this is why it’s so vital ‘to collect seeds from those trees that we use as medicine and use as cultural purposes as well: the wood, the bark – everything has its purpose’. She loves growing these plants and loves teaching others to do the same. ‘I feel I have to do this job,’ she says. ‘For me it’s keeping the knowledge and tradition going for the future.’
The seed collection and conservation work being done by these ranger groups highlights something incredibly important. Plants feed us, shelter us, and provide us with access to fresh water and oxygen to breathe, but they do even more than this. Plants play a central role in human culture. That plants are so inexorably woven into sacred stories all around the world reveals our collective curiosity about them, an ancient hunch that plants hold secrets about this world – how it works, where it came from and perhaps what the future holds. We observe, take note. We remember, and share. Plants mark the passage of time, the coming and going of seasons. They are an integral part of every culture’s food, distinguishing one dish from another, this cuisine from that one. In this way, plants bring humans together to sit around a table to eat and talk, or to rest beneath the branches of an old eucalypt to tell stories, and smile and remember.
We teach our children how that dish is made, with these spices and that rice. This is how you grind the flour. These are the best nuts to pick, these the best berries. It’s an old family recipe, perhaps, or one learned from a close friend. We use plants to decorate our homes and ourselves, and to make our art. They provide pigments and dyes, subject matter and inspiration. Plants appear again and again in sacred myths, traditions and ceremonies, some of which have scarcely altered for thousands of years. A palm frond is held aloft on a hallowed day, a small child carries flowers down an aisle, another child is birthed beside the same tree as her mother was, her mother before her, and her grandmother, too. Plants became medicine as humans learned the traits and benefits of the species around them: which would quell an illness or heal a wound, and which could be used to ease the pain of menstruation, facilitate childbirth or hasten recovery from illness or injury.
In these varied ways, plants entered the human lexicon, perhaps as soon as the first languages formed. What to eat, how to heal, what to avoid – this was vital knowledge shared via verbal communication. Languages all over the world, from the most widely spoken to rare dialects on the edge of extinction, contain words and phrases for individual plant species and their varieties, their distinguishing features, where and when to find them, and what their uses are. Indigenous people’s knowledge of plants and their ecosystems is sophisticated and vast, so much so that the loss of languages and cultural erosion – tragic in their own right – will also involve the loss of knowledge that has taken thousands of years to amass.
It is anticipated that, by the end of this century, more than 30 per cent of global languages will no longer be spoken. This is a crisis for many reasons, a prime one of which was spelled out in a recent paper in the journal PNAS by University of Zurich researchers Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte: ‘Indigenous languages contain the knowledge that communities have about their surrounding plants and the services they provide.’ Cámara-Leret and Bascompte analysed threatened languages in three regions: North America, north-west Amazonia and New Guinea. In particular, they were looking for languages containing information about the medicinal uses of certain plants. They found thousands of examples, as well as a worrying trend: most of the medicinal knowledge they discovered was ‘linguistically unique’. In other words, they explained, in most cases a specific piece of medicinal information relating to a plant was known only in a single language: ‘Each indigenous language is therefore a unique reservoir of medicinal knowledge – a Rosetta stone for unravelling and conserving nature’s contributions to people.’
Conversely, plant species extinction erodes languages and the cultures that use them. Kawika Winter is a multidisciplinary ecologist in Hawaii with a particular interest in biocultural restoration, which, as he explains in his recent article in The Revelator magazine, ‘focuses on restoring relationships between Indigenous people and their places, as well as between them and the biodiversity that shaped the language and identities of their ancestors’. Winter says that ‘Biocultural restoration is built on the notion that everything in the system is interconnected, as are the problems we perceive and the solutions to them’. Among his concerns relating to species extinction on Hawaii is the far-reaching impact on indigenous Hawaiian culture: ‘With each species extinction there was an extinction of a word in our language, and quite often an extinction of a practice and a story that we used to teach our grandchildren.’
Saving seeds is a means by which to save a species, a source of nutrients, or even a fragile ecosystem. It is also a means by which to help save cultural traditions, ancient knowledge, and perhaps the very words that are spoken by a grandparent to a grandchild. The collection of seeds, the preservation of seeds and the sharing of seeds are acts of human connection quite unlike any other. They also represent an opportunity to learn, writes Winter. ‘Now’s the moment for us to learn from our eco-civilizations of the past to ensure we can have a civilization in our future.’
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There are five species of the ‘Ōhi‘a tree on the Hawaiian islands, of which ‘Ōhi‘a lehua, the viability of which was discussed in Chapter 13, is the most widespread. It is a canopy tree species that forms dense forests and scattered groves, but individual trees are also quite happy on their own. In fact, it is often the first species to grow in a cooled lava field, when tiny windblown seeds, none bigger than an eyelash, fall into the cracks in the newly hardened surface. A tree of this species can grow some 20–30 metres high. It produces sturdy wood, leathery green leaves, and flowers, called lehua, that emerge as bright tufts ranging from vivid scarlet to yellow, and sometimes white. It’s not that lehua lack true petals. It’s just that those petals are small compared to the plethora of hair-like pistils and stamen that erupt outwards in a colourful fluff.
Native insects and birds love these flowers, says Michael DeMotta, head curator of Living Collections at the National Tropical Botanical Garden: ‘[It’s] a primary food source … if you look at the top and you look down on it, it looks like a little powder puff, it glistens. There’s so much nectar in there and the birds can feed, leave, and come back and feed again, because the flower continually produces nectar.’ Indeed, ‘Ōhi‘a lehua is central to many of the islands’ ecosystems, from its role as a food source to the vast root structures that hold the soil to the mountains, DeMotta explains. ‘Ōhi‘a has always been a really important part of the forest.
‘Ōhi‘a lehua also holds a special place in Hawaiian culture. ‘There are many chants and songs that always talk about the lehua flower,’ says DeMotta. Listen closely at a hula dance and you’ll hear it mentioned time and time again. He tells me that hula is precisely how he became interested in Hawaii’s native ecosystem: ‘I started to be involved in the hula in 1973 when I was still in high school, and my interest in native plants also began at that time because Hawaiian culture, the ancient stories and chants are really heavily based on nature.’ They feature plants, birds and insects, says DeMotta, and they relay the stories of an entire pantheon of Hawaiian deities said to have control over the various forces of nature. ‘As opposed to living in fear of the Gods, the Hawaiians believed that they needed to live in concert with the gods. They had to make sure that they did what would appease and appeal to the gods to continue the functioning of the natural world.’
DeMotta explains that many native plants and animals are still seen as kinolau, a sacred physical manifestation of the Hawaiian deities. The cultural importance of ‘Ōhi‘a is tied to its status as kinolau. It is believed to be the manifestation of several Hawaiian goddesses and gods, including Kū (god of war), Pele (volcano goddess), as well as Kāne (god of water) and Laka (goddess of hula). As such, ‘Ōhi‘a lehua are associated with many ancestral legends, and the flowers are used in leis and other examples of ceremonial dress, while the wood is used in the construction of statues and sacred temples. Yet, ‘Ōhi‘a lehua also pervades daily life, too. It is used to make bowls and pounding boards, cloth beaters, and the seats of outrigger canoes. The leaves were traditionally used in medicinal tea, while the flowers were used to ease the pain of childbirth. As a result, ‘Ōhi‘a lehua became a fundamental part of the Hawaiian language. For example, the word kanilehua refers to the unique sound of the rain that falls on the ‘Ōhi‘a forests high in the Hilo mountains on the island of Hawaii. It is said there is no other sound in the world quite like it.
The cultural importance of ‘Ōhi‘a lehua is a good example of what DeMotta calls ‘an inseparable bond’ between Hawaiians and the native plants of their islands: ‘People are fiercely proud of the areas where their ancestors have come from, even if they don’t live in those areas anymore.’ This extends from a Hawaiian value called Aloha ‘Āina. ‘It means love of the land,’ he says. ‘Aloha means to love and ‘Āina, literally, is the land.’ This highlights why it’s all the more galling that this tree species is being decimated by Rapid ‘Ōhi‘a Death. As the disease spreads and more ‘Ōhi‘a lehua die, there is an increasing risk that the vital ecosystem services these trees provide will be lost, to say nothing of the cascade of extinctions that could follow. There are also looming cultural impacts in which a unique natural beauty is no longer witnessed, a connection with the sacred is severed, and vital pieces of language are lost. As goes ‘Ōhi‘a lehua, so too goes kanilehua, the sound of the Hilo rain, and perhaps in time, the word itself.
This is another reason why the ‘Ōhi‘a lehua seed collection and conservation initiative is critical. The effort not only seeks to protect Hawaii’s ecological landscape but also its cultural landscape. Multiple programs are working in tandem, some aimed at rehabilitating affected forests, others focusing on preventing the spread of ROD, and still others investigating ways of eradicating the pathogenic fungi entirely. Alongside these efforts is the collection of millions of ‘Ōhi‘a lehua seeds, which offers another chance of preventing the disappearance of not just alleles but words and language, ceremony and connection.
On 25 February 2020, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was briefly opened to accept seeds from depositors around the world. Among them was a particularly special deposit – just nine accessions in all – which contained traditional heirloom crop seeds sent by the Cherokee Nation. It was the first Seed Vault deposit made by a North American indigenous tribe.
These nine crop species and varieties have been farmed by the Cherokee for many generations, predating European contact by centuries, and they represent ‘a core part of Cherokee identity’, writes Cherokee principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr in the Cherokee Nation publication Anadisgoi. Four varieties of corn were sent to Svalbard, including Cherokee White Eagle, a rare variety of Zea mays with beautiful blue and white kernels – it is the tribe’s most sacred corn. Also sent were seeds of Cherokee Candy Roaster squash, Cherokee Long Greasy beans, Turkey Gizzard black and brown beans and Cherokee Trail of Tears beans.
The Trail of Tears refers to the expulsion of several Native American tribes from their ancestral homelands in the southern and south-eastern US during the 1800s. This included the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Muscogee (Creek) tribes. The arrival of Europeans on the North American continent from the fifteenth century led to a massive population decline across all North American Indigenous tribes through ensuing centuries of disease and conflict. Yet, right up until 1838, the Cherokee had occupied their homeland – which originally extended over a vast area covering regions of what is now Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. Then, the discovery of gold prompted the US military to forcibly remove the Cherokee, along with other tribes including the Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Muscogee (Creek). The people of these tribal nations were forced to march many hundreds of kilometres away from their homelands, a journey during which thousands died from disease, exposure, exhaustion and hunger.
Those who survived were resettled in Oklahoma, their homeland and many loved ones having been lost. Also lost were many of the traditional crop varieties, but some Cherokee had carried some seeds with them. In time they were able to revive some of their agricultural practices, but Cherokee agriculture had been dealt a heavy blow, worsened by the very different soil and environmental conditions in Oklahoma. Still, with the help of those seeds, they persisted.
In 2005, news about the construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was spreading around the world. Among those who took notice were members of the Cherokee Tribal Council. As Pat Gwin, senior director of environmental resources of the Cherokee Nation, later explained to Seed World magazine, council members made it a priority to search for as many ancestral Cherokee seeds as possible, and Gwin was tasked with heading the initiative. He and his team established the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank in 2006 and spent years searching and collecting. They also set up a garden in Oklahoma dedicated to cultivating the recovered crops. Over time, the seeds of dozens of culturally significant plant varieties were collected and stored in the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank, from crop species to plants of medicinal value and ceremonial importance. There is also another collection in case something happens to the first – and it very well could. Cherokee territory, which is still in Oklahoma, is right in the middle of what is known for good reason as Tornado Alley.
When National Public Radio picked up the story of the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank in 2019, it caught the attention of Luigi Guarino, director of science for the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Guarino immediately extended an invitation to the Cherokee Nation to deposit a backup of their crop seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Svalbard only stores crop seeds, so only crop seeds were sent. Nevertheless, those nine crop varieties are incredibly special to the Cherokee, and the deposit at Svalbard was a significant moment for them.
That said, as with everything stored at Svalbard, the seed deposit is only meant as a backup. The Cherokee are intent on ensuring their seeds play a role in the preservation of Cherokee culture. With this in mind, the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank has also initiated a program enabling Cherokee citizens to access the ancestral seeds, so that these plants can once again be grown and cultivated by as many Cherokee people who wish to do so. And indeed, many do.
Like the Cherokee, many North American tribes were displaced from their ancestral homelands and forced to resettle elsewhere. Each time, whatever seeds could be kept were carried on long, often tragic journeys to unfamiliar places, new environments, different soil. Some crops were grown, though not as easily as before. Traditional foods were still prepared, but not as much as before. The absence was felt keenly, because it was more than the loss of a dish or a flavour. Rather, it was akin to the loss of a loved one – many loved ones.
Jessika Greendeer is a tribal member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a seed keeper at Dream of Wild Health, a non-profit organisation in Minnesota that is working to help recover and share traditional knowledge, foods and medicines of Native Americans. On a recent call, she told me that Native Americans do not see plants and their seeds as simple commodities. Instead, they are considered to be living relatives. Moreover, she says that ‘where native people had gone through trauma, our seeds went through the same thing’.
‘Many of our indigenous seed relatives had their identities stripped from them, they were –’ Greendeer pauses briefly to take a breath, then tries to continue. She begins again but pauses once more and I can hear the emotion in her voice when she apologises for becoming upset. It’s very clear how important this is to her. She wants to tell this story. She takes another breath and continues.
‘A little over a hundred years ago, there was this huge campaign within the United States about killing the Indian and saving the man. That ushered in the boarding school era, where children were being taken from their homes, their families, their reservations and their villages to be colonised or assimilated into the mainstream culture, which was not American Indian or Native or Indigenous. During that same time, there was the thought that native people were going to be extinct at some point in the very near future, so it became this massive grab to take not only objects that were culturally significant, but also forbidding us from speaking our languages and then also taking our seeds with them. [The seeds] were taken and grown by people who didn’t speak their language and who didn’t have that same ceremony that the seeds had become accustomed to. And now we’re bringing that back.’
As part of the revitalisation of ancestral cultures, an increasing number of Native Americans like Greendeer are engaging in a process called ‘seed rematriation’ in which crop varieties are not only returned to the original ecological settings where they were first cultivated but also to the cultural traditions that surrounded that cultivation. ‘There are a lot of layers of research going on behind the scenes to find our relatives out there,’ she says. It’s about searching through collections at universities, museums and other institutions to find the seeds, then more research to figure out precisely which tribes they came from and what the associated cultural traditions were. The aim is to get to a point where you can look at a plant or a seed and know its tribe and its Indigenous name, she says, giving the example, ‘It’s not Aunt Karen’s bean, it’s actually the Haudenosaunee cranberry bean.’
Greendeer tells me how an organisation in Iowa, called Seed Savers Exchange, went through their entire collection of seeds and found all of the Indigenous seeds that were in there. With the help of a historian, Seed Savers Exchange is endeavouring to get those seeds to their cultural homes. There’s also the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, which enables members to share advice and community news, talk about relevant changes in legislation, and run workshops on farming and gardening. Seed rematriation is an important focus for those involved.
Mohawk seed keeper, writer and food sovereignty activist Rowen White is a founder of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. As she told Permaculture Women magazine in 2018, the term ‘rematriation’ is a deliberate choice, one which serves as a reminder of the important ancestral role of women in seed keeping and cultural memory. Indeed, seeds are intimately linked with stories and cultural memory. Those who took on the role of seed keeper became a source of knowledge of how to harvest the seeds, how to store them and care for them, and with this stewardship they became keepers and sharers of cultural knowledge as well. In many ways, seed rematriation is an act of decolonisation – or, as White likes to call it, ‘re-indigenising’.
‘The seeds are ready to come home,’ says Greendeer. ‘I think the most important aspect of that is that we need to be ready for them. It’s just like having a baby, you’re not just pregnant for nine months and then go to the hospital and then now you’re in a panic because you have no idea – you don’t have a car seat, or you don’t have any belongings for the baby. So, it’s the work that we’re doing by educating people and getting them ready – we’re essentially helping them put their crib together and put the car seat in the vehicle before they go to the hospital.’
It’s about regenerating soils and learning what to plant and when. It’s about revitalising traditions linked with the planting and harvesting of each plant, and the preparation of the food. It’s also about preparing a place to store the seeds, but Greendeer clarifies that she does not like to use the term ‘seed bank’ because it wouldn’t do to lock one’s beloved relatives in a bank. ‘We want to make sure that our seeds have more of a sanctuary with us, that they’ve come to us freely and they can leave from us as well and go other places, and really focus on trying to get them back into their home communities.’
‘It’s a very beautiful time to be working with our seeds,’ she says. ‘There’s so much more history and wisdom and knowledge and healing that we not only have to go through as human beings, but our seeds are doing the same thing and they’re doing that healing with us as we continue to forge a relationship forward every growing season.’
There are many seasons to come, so it’s crucial to ensure that seeds and knowledge are passed on to the next generation. ‘All of our work [at Dream of Wild Health] focuses on our youth,’ says Greendeer. ‘They learn about different aspects about food, not only farming, but also being able to take that harvest and prepare a nutritious meal inside the kitchen.’ Though the pandemic has made gatherings difficult, this didn’t stop them. Ancient lessons simply continued in an entirely new way.
‘Last week we were actually shelling beans with one another over Zoom,’ she tells me. ‘We were able to talk about some of the seed stories while we were shelling.’ The kids were then able to make a recipe out of the beans they’d had a hand in growing and preparing. ‘It’s very exciting to have them see everything come full circle.’ It’s also a good example of seeds bringing people together, offering a means of human connection just when it is needed most. Greendeer wants to ensure the ‘young ones’ have a head start so they can keep the healing process going, she says. ‘I want this work to outlive me, and it needs to.’
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There is a garden in the middle of an old industrial precinct in South Philadelphia, squeezed between warehouses, asphalt parking lots and truck depots, and enveloped in the dull roar of Interstate 95. To be honest, it’s difficult to think of a less likely place to find an agricultural revival for people from the mountain rainforests of Myanmar. But there it is. Chillies are grown in the garden, and bitter melon. There is also gourd, cucumber and a variety of roselle called chin baung ywet, or sour leaf. They are being grown by members of the Karen refugee community, who have found a longed-for taste of home there in the industrial end of South Philly.
As journalist Natalie Jesionka explained in The Conversation in 2021, the Karen are an Indigenous people from Myanmar, and many of those who tend the garden fled their homeland’s escalating civil war in recent years, only to arrive in an unfamiliar land with unfamiliar food. Seed keeping and gardening are traditional practices among the Karen, so with the help of community gardeners in Philadelphia, and a global network of seed keepers extending to farmers back in Myanmar, the Karen refugees were able to access traditional seed varieties and the Novik Urban Farm provided a place to cultivate them.
Anthropologist Terese Gagnon works with the Karen refugees at the garden. As she explains to Jesionka, the cultivation of familiar crops is incredibly important for this, and in fact any, displaced refugee community. It provides a sense of agency and has a grounding effect. The familiarity of the foods offers a sense of place in an otherwise foreign setting. Gagnon says, ‘This includes having access to longed-for flavours, engaging in the physical work of gardening and getting to shape the landscape to have something that visually looks like home.’ In this way, seeds become touchstones, linking generations across time and space.
Many refugees come from farming communities but are resettled in urban settings, often with little access to green spaces, much less opportunities to cultivate their own food should they wish. As the global refugee crisis continues, there are enormous issues that need to be resolved when it comes to the fair and just treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Meanwhile, networks of seed keepers can offer access to ancestral seeds, while gardens – even those in the most unlikely of places – provide the space to engage in traditional farming practices. They offer an opportunity to gather and feast, a chance to pass along stories and language, to hold on to special words and flavours. As long as there are still seeds and the soil to plant them in, there remains a living connection between the past and the future.