[IPSM] Akwesasne: Together forever -- Communities and their seeds will share a future

[Dan ngh!]

Together forever -- Communities and their seeds will share a future

http://indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410000&CFID=495900&CFTOKEN=26800646

Posted: December 14, 2004
by: Stephanie Woodard
Indian Country Today



AMHERST, Mass. - Ethnobotanist Rowen White, Akwesasne, gathers and grows out 
Haudenosaunee heirloom crop varieties for the Akwesasne Seed Restoration 
Project, a community-based organization. She also has a personal project 
under way: Recording the stories of her grandmother, who was brought up on 
an isolated island in the St. Lawrence River. Nowadays, White is not in 
Upstate New York, where her reservation straddles the U.S./Canadian border, 
but in the hills of northern Massachusetts, where she's on the faculty of 
her alma mater, Hampshire College. White, who got her degree in 1999, is 
expecting her first child.

Indian Country Today: Tell me about your project.

Rowen White: Our goal is to create a network of Haudenosaunee seed growers. 
That involves finding and cataloging our heirloom varieties. There are 
approximately 40 different kinds of beans, two dozen varieties of corn, and 
half a dozen squashes that are considered Haudenosaunee. I go into our 
communities and look for old crops. I talk to elders about foods they 
remember, and I also ask people to be on the lookout for certain plants. One 
of their neighbors might be growing something very old and not realize it. 
In some cases, there are only a handful of seeds of a certain variety left 
on the planet. So, we see this as a race against time. We want to collect 
the seeds and get them grown out to the point where we have enough to 
redistribute.

ICT: What's the mechanism for doing that?

White: Among other things, we have an e-mail listing to get seed swaps going 
among community members.

ICT: What's the community's role in all this?

White: We especially want to give people our Haudenosaunee corn, so a lot of 
it can be grown at once. To keep a population of corn plants healthy, you 
need many of them, so they can diversify. A biologically-diverse population 
is a strong one; each plant has a unique combination of strengths, so if 
there is a drought, let's say, or an early frost, some plants will always 
survive. But, nowadays, because there are so few seeds left of some corn 
types, they've lost that flexibility. Certain varieties are not as robust as 
they once were. Our corn needs our people to grow it and live with it and 
select it for certain characteristics - to re-diversify it, as we 
Haudenosaunee people have been doing for millennia.

ICT: You don't sound like a mainstream seedbank.

White: Not at all. Non-indigenous seedbanks see seeds as static.

ICT: You mean, a Paiute bean is a Paiute bean, and that's that? They 
wouldn't want it to change?

White: Exactly, but for indigenous people, our seeds are the witnesses to 
our past. Now, because of climate change, environmental degradation, and 
land loss, the seeds are suffering. We have to bring them back to health, 
and they, in turn, will heal us.


---------------------------


Student revives Indian farming

By Jeff Donn, Associated Press writer

AMHERST -- As though treading an ancient path, Rowen White, an Iroquois born 
on a reservation, steps with a sure foot into a thicket of corn, bean and 
squash plants.
The wet summer has encouraged the growth of weeds, making the tangle even 
denser. Her once-tidy rows -- the one concession to modern farming -- are 
now barely discernible.
"I am a firm believer in evolution," White says. "I think plants have 
evolved in a certain way. I think they're doing a fair job on their own."

White is one of a small body of researchers trying to adapt traditional 
Native American farming to commercial agriculture. They hope someday to make 
inroads into those seemingly endless, monolithic vistas of wheat, corn and 
other crops that have come to symbolize the abundance of this land and the 
know-how of its people.
American monoculture farmers normally plant one crop to a field in neat rows 
to allow mechanized planting and harvesting by specialized machines. 
Herbicides, pesticides and irrigation can be applied in a one-size-fits-all 
way. Native American and other traditional farmers around the world 
intermingle mutually beneficial crops in a practice known as polyculture.
White, an agriculture student at Hampshire College in Amherst, planted her 
three vegetables on a quarter acre of college land in both monoculture and 
polyculture configurations. Her summer experiment is called the Three 
Sisters project, a reference to Native American tradition that likens the 
three staple crops to stories of the three sisters of the Earth. She learned 
the techniques partly from her own people and used the seeds of their 
ancient crop strains, which were available through a Cornell University 
program.
Traditionally planted in circular mounds instead of rows, the corn gives 
shade and support to the beans, which grow up the corn stalks like a vine. 
In the soil, the beans transform nitrogen into a form that the corn can use. 
The squash acts as ground cover, keeping down weeds.
"They're helping each other out," White said. "You're working with nature -- 
and not against it."
Researchers have established that, under certain conditions, polyculture can 
give equal yields to monoculture, said Stephen Gliessman, an agricultural 
ecologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He said monoculture 
farms, as simpler systems, are more susceptible to predators and need more 
fertilizer and pesticide.
"From an ecological standpoint, most monoculture systems are out of 
balance," he said.
But it is harder to use tractors and specialized mechanical equipment 
without rows and uniform crops.
White, 20, who spent her early childhood on the Akwesasne reservation near 
Potsdam, N.Y., believes polyculture could be useful at many small New 
England farms. Planted in rows, it would allow mechanized planting. 
Harvesting would later be carried out by hand. White is studying the optimal 
spacing of rows and awaits the results of her first harvest this fall.
Her academic adviser, ecologist Brian Schultz, said White's heritage serves 
as extra motivation for her scientific curiosity. "You learn what you're 
interested in," he said.
Harold Bower, a Seneca who planted a traditional demonstration garden at 
Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, said polyculture may be economically 
impracticable today. But he said it does show "there's a compatibility -- 
and it works."

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