In tow was the organization’s new “Cultural Harvest Trailer,” a four-wheel vehicle custom-designed to process the sacred bovid in line with Tribal customs—and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) meat-processing standards. Built through a cooperative agreement with the federal agency, the $75,000 prototype is a game-changing innovation, says Troy Heinert, ITBC executive director and a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.

“We can slaughter, skin and quarter an animal in the open, with grass still in his mouth and have him in a cool trailer in 90 minutes,” or half of the processing time allowed by the USDA, says Heinert. The narrow window, which is tailored to the centralized harvesting of cattle and other transport-friendly livestock, can be challenging on Tribal land, he says. Often, “it can take a couple hours just to get to the highway, let alone a processing plant.”

The harvest trailer is one example in a recent set of sweeping USDA initiatives that recognize and promote buffalo—an animal central to the identity of numerous North American peoples—as foundational to Tribal food systems.

Spurred by years of advocacy by the ITBC, the agency’s grant programs and regulatory overhauls reinforce the interwoven nature of bison husbandry, processing and distribution. The shift in perspective helps restore “Tribal buffalo lifeways,” he says, by putting bison back onto local plates and into the local economy.

The ITBC’s Cultural Harvest Trailer rolls across the Crow Reservation in southern Montana. (Photo courtesy of the InterTribal Buffalo Council)

For Native communities, especially those in rural and economically disadvantaged regions, reclaiming their food source is a major leap towards self-determination, says Heinert. “So, this is just a huge win for Tribal people.”

Prairie roots revival

Approximately 30 million American bison once roamed the country’s vast grasslands. But in the mid-1800s, federal policies tied to westward expansion fueled their systematic slaughter, devastating the livelihood of Native Tribes. By 1884, the buffalo population had plunged to just 325 animals, but subsequent conservation efforts have revived those numbers to about 400,000. Heinert estimates that Tribal herds total nearly 30,000; the remainder reside in state and national parks, including Yellowstone, and on commercial ranches.

As a keystone species, buffalo play a vital role in restoring grasslands by enhancing native grass growth. The fertile and highly threatened ecosystem is essential to biodiversity, water filtration, soil stabilization and carbon storage, and fostering them aligns with federal climate and environmental goals. (A recent study finds that, in the face of greater droughts and wildfires, the deep-rooted system can sequester more carbon than forests.)

The USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program includes nearly $92 million in bison-related grants. The ITBC is administering $5 million to assist Tribes in implementing climate-resilient, regenerative ranching practices, mainly through extensive fencing and water infrastructure development.

Like many other native animals and plants that have evolved with the land, bison are hardy and climate-resilient, requiring few interventions or inputs to flourish, says Heather Dawn Thompson, the USDA Office of Tribal Relations director and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. As a food source, the bison’s high nutritional content can also help boost health outcomes in communities grappling with diet-related health challenges, making it a key consideration in promoting national food security.

Yet, the USDA’s commodity-centered approach, which favors industrial producers and national distribution models, hasn’t fostered the small-scale production of Indigenous crops and livestock, says Thompson. Bison are a prime example; the undomesticated and free-roaming animals don’t fit the Big Ag paradigm of concentrated feedlots, commodity grain feeding and centralized processing facilities—common livestock practices needed to achieve the scale required to fulfill the 40,000-pound minimums required for USDA meat procurement contracts.

Consequently, “Tribal producers couldn’t even apply to programs that served their own reservations,” says Thompson, such as the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) and other initiatives that comprise the agency’s $3-billion annual spend.

The 2021 American Rescue Plan revamped the rules to accommodate “a more complex and diverse food system,” says Jennifer Lester Moffitt, the USDA’s under secretary of agriculture for marketing and regulatory programs.

In particular, the FDPIR, which includes elder and child nutrition programs, expanded food choices to cover traditional staples such as bison and wild salmon. It also drastically lowered procurement minimums and allowed state meat inspections in place of federal ones. (Bison, being a non-amenable, or wild species, don’t require a USDA seal; however, federal contracts and interstate sales do.)

Last year, the USDA tested these changes through the Bison Purchase Pilot program, awarding half-year FDPIR procurement contracts to four Tribal producers, including $67,000 to the Cheyenne River Buffalo Authority Corporation (CRBAC), a ranching operation owned by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

ITBC and Crow Tribe members slaughter bison using the ITBC’s Cultural Harvest Trailer on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana. (Photo courtesy of the InterTribal Buffalo Council)

The solid commitment helps “even the field for Native producers,” says CRBAC manager and Tribal member Jayme Murray, whose corporation has kept nearby reservations supplied with 800 pounds of bison meat every month since last November. While the near-10-percent uptick in sales is a boon for business, the profits go far beyond the bottom line, he adds. “A local food system [allows] us to feed our own Tribal communities and put a culturally significant [food] back into our diet.”

The recognition of state inspections also permits procurement opportunities with other federal agencies, as well as access to a national, online market. These changes “bring much-needed revenue and jobs to the Tribe and community,” says Murray, giving an economic boost to a region officially identified as being in “persistent poverty.”

Shoring up the safety net

Sitkalidak Island faces Old Harbor, a remote village of 235 residents—mostly from the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor, a Native Alaskan people—in Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago. Rugged and verdant, the uninhabited isle has long been a rich hunting ground for brown bears, Sitka deer and ducks, while the surrounding seas have provided the Alutiiq with abundant salmon, halibut, butter clams and seals. Yet, depleting fish stocks, increasing algal blooms and crashes in the deer population have made those traditional food sources less reliable in recent years, says Jeffrey Peterson, Alutiiq chief and city mayor.

In 2017, the Tribal Council acquired 30 buffalo with support of the ITBC as a means of enriching the local diet. For an isolated community with no grocery store—the closest is a 40-minute flight away in Kodiak City—the herd, which has grown to about 70 heads, has become crucial to Tribal food security. “They can survive the bears and the winters,” says Peterson. “And as Native people, we feel a connection to bison or any indigenous animal that may have roamed our [North America] lands.”

Currently, the Alutiiq harvest about two heads a month for local consumption. But without a processing and refrigeration facility, handling and storing the carcass of the continent’s largest land mammal—a mature bull can stand 6.5 feet tall and weigh upwards of 2,000 pounds—is a challenge, says Peterson.

The long-awaited approval of the Indigenous Animals Harvesting and Meat Processing Grant, a USDA program designed to bolster the processing, storage and distribution infrastructure of culturally relevant meat in Native communities, will be transformative, says Peterson. The $1-million grant secures the purchase and modernization of an existing warehouse—and with electricity costing more than four times the national average, will help keep it running.

The ability to process and stock ample buffalo and other locally sourced meats and fish helps shore up the safety net of the entire Tribe, he says, including expats in Kodiak City, Anchorage and beyond. It also opens up opportunities for new jobs, food exports and increased tourism by catering to more recreational hunters and fishermen. 

“You can’t stop… changes in the climate, the acidification in the ocean,” says Peterson. “Without a backup plan, we’re going to be hurting.”

Together, the comprehensive nature of these initiatives recognizes the centrality of bison in restoring both the land and Native food sovereignty, says ITBC’s Heinert. “The buffalo was nearly decimated in order to control the Native people of this country. Now, [we’re able to] bring this animal back to its rightful place, in its rightful numbers… all the while helping to heal our lands,” he adds. “It’s starting to come full circle.”

***

How to support Tribal buffalo efforts

Although Tribal ranchers and advocates see the economic potential of bison, they’re quick to dismiss the notion of turning it into a cattle-like commodity. Bison ranching runs counter to high-volume, mass production, says Dave Carter, regional director of the Flower Hill Institute (FHI). The Indigenous-led nonprofit partners with the USDA to assist Tribes with grant applications and project implementation, including bison processing, marketing and distribution.

As wild animals, buffalo are raised as nature intended—on vast open land, in natural herds that include bulls. They’re spared standard livestock practices such as castration, artificial insemination and confinement in feedlots, says Carter, who previously headed the National Bison Association, a trade group representing the interests of commercial bison producers and processors.

While these factors can limit the size of operations, “we have a lot of room to grow to herds without [it] becoming a commodity,” he says. Although Americans eat, on average, 59 pounds of beef annually, per-capita buffalo consumption equates to mere nibbles of a single burger.

“The best way to preserve bison,” Carter adds, “is to eat bison.”

For a Tribal source, check out the Cheyenne River Buffalo Company.

The post A Buffalo Renaissance appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Like the kūpuna, or ancestors, before her, “I create a product that I just give away,” says Gaisoa, 49. So, “I expect you to stand on the front line when I have to fight for this.”

Gaisoa belongs to one of 22 Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) ʻohana, or families, tasked with farming salt for centuries. Tradition dictates that their salt can’t be bought or sold—only traded or given. But in the 21st century, the flats grapple with modern problems, such as pollution and erosion. And contrary to Indigenous customs, a Hawaiian salt-farming industry has developed, with businesses marketing the product around the globe. 

However, Gaisoa isn’t threatened by the corporate farms because they’re often motivated by profit, not cultural preservation, she says. “There’s nothing to compare.”

The Hanapēpē salt ponds are a place of legend. According to Gaisoa, they were discovered one day after a local woman went fishing and caught too many. Because Hawaiians hunt and gather in moderation, she walked the coastline, trying to give her extra fish away. When she couldn’t, she started to cry. At the same time, Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, was visiting her brother, Kāmohoaliʻi, the shark god. Appearing from the bushes, Pele led the upset woman to the flats to teach her the art of making salt.

Salt forms in the salt ponds of Hanapēpē on Kaua‘i. (Photo courtesy of Kuuleialoha Gaisoa)

When Gaisoa first visited the salt patch with her father Frank Santos in her youth, she hated the activity. But once her two children, Waileia Tafiti and Piilani Kali, were born, she wouldn’t let them miss a day at the flats.   

There, each ʻohana maintains its own section. Located on the island’s south shore, the area floods during the winter, and only once it dries do the salt makers begin cultivating. Salt season is weather-dependent, but it usually takes place from May to August. 

Salt water travels underground into nearby wells, which can range from 10 to 15 feet deep. Every summer, the practitioners use buckets to remove the water, then scrape the wells’ inside walls to promote water flow.   

“You literally have salt crystals on your skin—that’s how salty the water is,” says Gaisoa. Brine shrimp also help clean the wells and sweeten the salt’s taste.

The kiaʻi, or stewards, dig for black clay, then use rocks to mold it into salt beds, which measure between three and four feet wide and eight and 10 feet long. Afterward, they bake in the sun. The entire process takes between four and six hours. After well water is poured into the bed, it crystallizes, forming layers of salt flakes. 

The fresh white salt sits at the top and is used as seasoning. The pink salt in the middle is given away, and the red salt at the bottom serves religious and medicinal purposes. 

Salt makers stand in front of buckets of harvested salt made in the salt ponds of Hanapēpē on Kaua‘i. (Photo courtesy of Kuuleialoha Gaisoa)

In the days of yesteryear, salt makers would give five-gallon buckets to those who asked, but, today, it’s typically limited to one gallon. They still barter with salt, and they have even auctioned it for noble causes. However, Gaisoa doesn’t judge the few who sell their goods.

“It’s expensive to live in Hawai‘i,” she says. “If someone is selling it on the sidelines, well, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

And 2023 counted as a bad year for salt makers. “I’m not giving out any more because I don’t have any,” says Gaisoa. “There’s only been another time in my lifetime where there was a salt shortage.”

They’ve faced other problems in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, county officials moved a group of unhoused people to the adjacent Salt Pond Beach Park, and their excrement contaminated the salt flats. Today, partiers who gather in their parking lot leave trash behind. Cars driving on the beach contribute to sand erosion. A 1960s-era road built by the government through the patch is now corroding, and the salt makers are working on a plan to address it. 

When the aircraft of a helicopter tour agency, Maverick Helicopters, flies overhead, they blow dust into the salt. Since 2019, Hui Hana Pa‘akai o Hanapēpē—a Kānaka ʻŌiwi nonprofit that represents the salt-farming ʻohana—has fought the company’s expansion efforts because the potential for noise, chemical runoff and pollution threatens the harvest. 

“My goal before I die is to get rid of the helicopter landing pad,” says Gaisoa. “At the end of the day, people just need to be respectful of the area.”

Malia Nobrega-Olivera, 52, also belongs to a salt-making ‘ohana in Hanapēpē. She highlighted several large-scale action points to better support them, including properly citing Indigenous elders and establishing prior and informed community consent.

At Keāhole Point on Hawai‘i, Kona Sea Salt Farm also deals with external challenges, such as strong winds and storms. During the winter, the team struggles to keep up with demand because weather slows its production. 

“Mother Nature always has the last word,” says Melanie Kelekolio, operations general manager and chief salt maker. Although the business sells its salt on the islands, the continental US and Japan, it still uses hands-on methods under Kelekolio’s leadership.

Melanie Kelekolio stands on the coastline outside Kona Sea Salt Farm. Leadership at Sea Salts of Hawai’i considers Kelekolio to be the steward of their leased land. (Photo credit: Ijfke Ridgley)

In 1999, she started at the nearby Natural Energy Laboratory, first growing microalgae before exploring salt production as a side project in 2004. Intrigued at the idea of making salt out of deep sea water, Kelekolio and a maintenance worker dug holes by hand to create their first hot house. 

Since then, trial and error has fine-tuned the oceanfront salt farm’s methodology. Now, a 40-foot pipe extending 2,200 feet deep into the ocean sends water into the operation’s solar evaporation beds. Those tunnels are covered, letting moisture evaporate under the sunlight before the salt is harvested.

“We can’t be totally traditional” and make salt in open ponds, says Kelekolio, 56. “It’s not as clean as it would have been 100 years ago.” 

And in order to sell their salt as food, the farm—owned by Sea Salts of Hawai‘i – also has to follow Food and Drug Administration regulations, which wouldn’t allow for the customary process.

The business is trying to move away from using plastic materials, although “the challenge is finding surfaces that can withstand the heat and the scope—the corrosiveness of sea salt,” says Kelekolio.

Her team has expanded to include seven full-time employees, several part-time workers and event staff—mostly kamaʻāina, or born in Hawai‘i. That aspect means “they totally appreciate the fact that we are still continuing something that is still an important part of the Hawaiian culture,” says Kelekolio.

Kona Sea Salt Farm sits along the coastline and its salt harvesting area. (Photo credit: Absence Studio)

She recognizes that they aren’t following local custom by selling their salt. But Kelekolio sees products mislabeled as Hawaiian salt at grocery stores, and she’s proud that she and others with Kānaka ʻŌiwi lineage are the ones behind their product made in Hawai‘i.

“We are actually located in a place where salt was traditionally harvested 100 years ago,” says Kelekolio said. “It really is helpful that you have Kānaka to carry it on.”

Editor’s note: Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton identifies as part-Kanaka ʻŌiwi. 

The post Preserving the Salt Ponds of Hanapēpē appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Here in Oaxaca, the southwestern Mexican state known for rich cultural traditions ranging from intricate artisan goods to vibrant music and dance, the veneration for corn is apparent when surveying some of the area’s favorite foods. You might greet your day here with a steaming mug of atole, a sweetened corn gruel akin to a thinned-out porridge; enjoy a midmorning snack of memelas, thick corn tortillas swiped with pork lard and a variety of other toppings; and, at dinnertime, crunch into a tlayuda, an oversized tortilla stuffed with mozzarella-like quesillo cheese and griddled over hot coals until crisp. And if, for some reason, the Oaxacan adoration of corn wasn’t glaringly obvious, a stroll through the area’s yearly Feria Estatal de la Agrobiodiversidad—the state fair of agrobiodiversity—clears the matter up in no time. 

This much-anticipated daylong event, which aims to both promote and protect Oaxaca’s agricultural richness, takes place every year in late November or early December. This year, the fair opened its doors on Saturday, December 2, in the community of San Pablo de Mitla, located about an hour’s drive east of the capital, Oaxaca City. A multisensory celebration of local crops ranging from sweet potatoes to medicinal herbs to amaranth, the Fería naturally has a heavy presence of corn. This year, visitors to the fair—who range from foodie members of the public to agronomy students to biologists and more—were greeted by an elaborate arch bedecked in multicolored corn kernels and flowerlike dried husks, with a mosaic-style image depicting a woman with long braids emerging from an ear of corn.

Visitors to the fair admire offerings from the mountainous Sierra Mixe region of Oaxaca. (Photo: Lauren Rothman)

Passing through the archway, visitors arrived under a big white tent where more than 500 farmers from across the state and a handful from out of state displayed their colorful, edible wares. Sprawled out on the ground atop well-worn petates (woven-fiber mats) or seated on low stools, the farmers showed off their hard-earned ears of corn, yes, but also laid out carefully arranged piles of smooth, shiny beans, bowls of bright red and yellow chile peppers, verdant heaps of string beans and many more crops. This year, according to to the Secretaría de Fomento Agroalimentario y Desarrollo Rural—the governmental body that’s part of a multigroup organizing committee that puts the fair together—more than 500 expositors belonging to 16 indigenous ethnic groups were present, bringing with them 35 of Mexico’s 64 native variants of corn alongside other important crops.

In Mexico, as in the rest of the modern world, biologically diverse traditional agriculture is increasingly being crowded out by hybrid and genetically modified crops that can withstand heavy applications of industrial herbicides and pesticides. For many millennia, the land of the milpa—an interdependent, mutually beneficial growing system of corn, beans, squash and the class of wild-growing greens collectively known as quelites—the country, since the so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, has increasingly shifted to vast, chemical-dependent monocultures of crops, including corn, limes, papaya and single-species forests grown for harvesting timber. 

A kaleidoscope of native corn varieties, plus colorful beans in a range of shades. (Photo: Lauren Rothman)

The idea for the Fería, now in its 11th year, was born as a response to this ecological crisis, which necessarily endangers the existence of small-scale traditional crops that are more time consuming to grow and less lucrative to sell, according to Girmey López Martínez, an agricultural engineer and promoter of traditional agriculture. Each year, the fair unites a diverse group of farmers who continue to grow traditional Oaxacan crops even in the face of the rising tide of big ag, sharing their products with the public in order to help maintain culinary familiarity with them, as well as saving seeds to exchange them with other farmers they meet at the fair in an additional effort to maintain agricultural diversity in the region.

“The aim of the fair is to strengthen and maintain the biodiversity of the region’s gardens, milpas, coffee plantations and cacao plantations,” said Martínez in an interview a few days after the most recent edition of the fair, which he helped fundraise. In addition to an increasing dependence on monocropping in Oaxaca, Martínez cited factors such as the growth of the local ranching industry and the explosion of unsustainable ecotourism practices as additional pressures that endanger agricultural diversity in the region. 

The display of husband-and-wife producers José Gregorio Justo and Reina Ramirez Ronquillo from the rainforested Chinantla region, which includes yucca root, fresh banana leaves, and chayote gourd. (Photo: Lauren Rothman)

For husband-and-wife producers José Gregorio Justo and Reina Ramirez Ronquillo from the rainforested Chinantla region of Oaxaca, continuing to grow the corn sown by their ancestors is of utmost importance. “We can’t lose the traditions we’ve had since the olden times,” Ronquillo said at the fair as she stood behind the couple’s abundant display of organically grown sugarcane, bananas, squashes, green beans, coffee, beans and several types of corn. “Where we live, lots of people are growing genetically modified corn. But we know that what we grow is better than that type of corn. And we’re taking care of the soil, too.”

Accompanied at her display by her daughter-in-law, Ronquillo added that farming in the old way takes future generations into consideration, too. “We don’t buy anything at the store,” she said. “Everything we eat, we grow. Lots of mothers and fathers today are buying their children sodas and chips, and it’s pure poison. Our grandchildren eat boiled chayotes, bananas, yucca; we make a fresh infused water to drink and it’s much healthier.”

Nearby, Maria de Jesús Fuentes attended to her display of panela, or raw sugar-sweetened tostadas made from native corn and flavored with additional ingredients such as cacao and grated coconut. Fuentes had traveled from the Mandimbo community close to the Oaxacan coast and, in addition to her prepared products, had in tow a variety of young fruit trees ranging from jackfruit to starfruit to mango. She explains that part of her work is saving the seeds from different types of fruit, both to trade with other farmers as well as to grow into trees that she sells. 

“There are two major threats to criolla [native] seeds today,” said Fuentes. “One is the threat of all the GMO crops everyone is sowing. And the other is that the young people just don’t want to keep farming. Under both of these threats, species can go extinct. And that is why we save seeds.”

Women producers of Tlahuitoltepec, in the Sierra Mixe region, display corn (of course), plus prickly chayote and freshly fermented pulque drink, made from the tapped sap of the agave plant. (Photo: Lauren Rothman)

While many of the vendors adhere to organic practices, others continue to sow native crops but take advantage of the convenience offered by agrochemicals, such as one farmer from the mountainous La Cañada region who admitted to mixing commercial fertilizer in with goat manure. 

Overall, Martínez noted, the majority of the expositors left this year’s fair feeling delighted with the event and the opportunity to exchange products, seeds and ideas with other growers as well as with the Oaxacan public. “This is our second year participating, and we really enjoy being here,” said Ronquillo from the Chinantla region. “It makes us happy to be able to offer the products that we grow.”

The post In Oaxaca, a State Fair That Celebrates Native Crops’ Rich Legacy appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The boat belongs to Rose Piccinini, the Tribes’ Sanpoil district wildlife biologist. She is part of a team that manages the herd of bighorn sheep that the Tribes’ wildlife department reintroduced beginning in 2009. She also leads the Tribes’ efforts to restore lynx populations back into the ecosystem here.

The animals who shared this landscape were once fully integrated into every aspect of tribal members’ lives. They harvested bighorn sheep and other game for food, tools, and clothing. Intricate myths, legends, and teachings about the animals were passed down by elders to descendants and bound them to who they were—and who, as a result, their descendants came to be.

But then American settlers brought domesticated European sheep and goats, and with them, diseases that bighorns weren’t able to recover from. The succession of disease exposures, against which bighorns had no defense, significantly reduced their numbers and made them more vulnerable to other impacts they might have otherwise withstood. Save for a few small pockets in secluded locations, the bighorns died off, and the herds disappeared from the landscape and the lives of the tribes.

As we crane our necks and squint our eyes upward in the hot midday July sun, shadows reveal more than a dozen bighorn sheep on the north side of the canyon, less than 100 feet above the reservoir. Ewes and lambs weave paths through stalks of mullein, leaving their crescent-shaped tracks in the sand, all the while feeding on shrubs that dot the hillside and scree. Their sharp horns curl back from their heads as their amber eyes attend to their surroundings. Two of the animals walk onto a sandy section of the slope, licking at minerals. They kick up dust and cascades of sand, which form rivulets and accumulate into plumes, slowly fanning down the sandy slope to the shoreline below.

For the 12 tribes of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, whose reservation is located in north-central Washington State, their ecosystem isn’t complete without the animals and plants who have long inhabited the land alongside them. Maintaining these relationships of reciprocity in modern times involves the protection and reintroduction of native species, as well as the restoration of their habitats, an ambitious effort that the Tribes’ wildlife department has been leading since its inception in the 1970s.

As the Tribes work together to restore more native species like bighorn sheep and salmon to their lands and waters, they bring collective healing with them. This healing is felt by the people who have long endured cultural trauma from the forces of European and American colonization. It further strengthens their enduring resilience.

Bighorns were among the Tribes’ first relatives to be extirpated from the region, but the world-shattering impacts of colonization only intensified henceforth.

Salmon have always been at the center of the Tribes’ culture and, until the mid-20th century, their diet and economy. The fish fed the people and the land with, among other things, the nutrients stored in their bodies. The fish consumed sea life and later carried this sustenance upstream in their migratory journey inland. Tribal representatives cite reports of 20,000 salmon per day, weighing on average 35 pounds each, swimming up the Columbia. With their death and decomposition, the nutrients brought by the salmon in their flesh and bones nourished the forests, prairies, and riparian areas, as well as the coyotes, deer, elk, bighorn sheep, lynx, pronghorn, buffalo, wolves, eagles, and innumerable other beings interconnected within these systems.

But in 1942, the U.S. government built the Grand Coulee Dam and “ended a way of life,” according to a documentary produced by the Tribes. The dam blocked 1,400 miles of salmon spawning habitat and flooded 56,000 acres of land, as well as the ecosystems that supported whole communities of animals and people. This included critical winter habitat for deer and elk, and areas the Tribes relied on for native food and medicinal plants, all of which were drowned by the government’s dam construction.

No fish passage was built then, nor since.

For the Tribes, the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River “ended a way of life.” (Photo: Shutterstock)

“Overnight, it was shut off,” says Richard Whitney, a member of the Sinixt band of the Colville Confederated Tribes and the Tribes’ wildlife department manager, who assumed leadership of the department in 2014. All at once, salmon, who were the Tribes’ staple food and the foundation of their culture and economy, were gone.

To survive, the Tribes turned to other species native to the ecosystem, and started a decades-long effort to restore wildlife populations in the area. By 1975, the Tribes had established a wildlife management department with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in accordance with the Bureau’s trust responsibilities to the Indigenous peoples with whom it had signed treaties. Elk, Whitney says, have, “stepped up to offer themselves so [the Tribes] could persist.”

Today, thanks to the Tribes’ reintroduction efforts, their elk herds are strong, going from 481 total elk counted in 2002, to more than double that in 2022. Whitney says elk numbers on the reservation are at a 20-year high, which gives Tribal members additional opportunity for harvest.

With elk reintroduction efforts underway, the Tribes next turned their attention to sharp-tailed grouse in the late 1990s, bighorn sheep in 2005, pronghorns in 2014, followed by lynx, salmon, and buffalo.

Although they have not reintroduced wolves, the Tribes have allowed wolves to recolonize their lands, since evidence of the canines was first identified in 2008. Wolf packs are now managed here at a stable level.

The Colville Confederated Tribes’ plan to re-establish bighorn sheep began with six translocations that ultimately brought 136 bighorns back to the reservation. Although the herds have continued to suffer from diseases carried by domesticated goats and sheep—which are worsened by drought as it concentrates animals around smaller watering areas—Whitney says the population has since grown to more than 250.

As Whitney assumed leadership of the wildlife division and took over the restoration of bighorn sheep, it was suggested to him that the Tribes sell licenses for trophy bighorn hunts to non-tribal hunters to help pay for more staff. Some state fish and wildlife departments sell hunting licenses via auction or raffle for a number of species considered to be trophies to the highest bidder to generate revenue. For example, in Washington this year, one bighorn sheep hunting license generated $181,460, while a similar license was auctioned for $370,00 in Oregon.

Whitney was adamantly opposed to the idea, and his reasoning provides insight into the approach he takes to wildlife management: “That animal is worth more to me than a biologist position. That animal has value and it’s not in dollars,” he says. With so much wildlife management reliant on hunters paying license fees, which in turn fund conservation and management, Whitney says the priorities are off. “If it just comes down to money, then you guys are in the wrong business. You’ll never get it right.”

In addition to providing sustenance for tribal members, the restoration of native species serves to restore a community of species of which people are an integral part. “There’s a harmony there, and anything that’s missing breaks that balance,” Whitney says. “There’s still a harmony, but it’s missing a note here and there.” With each member of the ecological community Whitney’s wildlife department restores, the whole community sings fuller-voiced.

This story was originally published in YES! Magazine. It is the first in a three-part series produced in partnership with bioGraphic, an editorially independent magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Read part 2 here and part 3 here.

The post Bringing Back the Bighorn appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“As a child, you learn that giving away the first catch is part of the respect for the animal, culture, and people, so I had my grandson go with me to pick berries,” says Naomi Michalsen. 

“When you pick little lingonberries, it’s like picking up marbles off the ground—it’s a lot of work. He picked up the small berries, and when we were done, I told him we were going to give them away to an elder. At first, he was confused and unsure; he felt like it was so much work he should get to keep the berries. When I explained the reasoning to him, he was happy with that.

“We took them to the elder’s house and placed them on the doorknob in a bag and walked away. It was a powerful lesson for my grandson.”

Photography courtesy of Michalsen.

Michalsen, whose Tlingit name is Kaasei, lives in Ketchikan, AK, the traditional home of the Tlingit people. Food has always been an important part of Michalsen’s life, both personally and within her community. Within the Tlingit culture, the connection to food was once seen as subsistence farming and foraging. But tribe elders didn’t like the connotations of the term subsistence, feeling that it meant “less than.” 

“They felt our food was so abundant, and we had so much bounty, and it was so integral to our survival, they renamed the term ‘subsistence’ to a translated version meaning ‘Tlingit food is a way of life,’” says Michalsen. 

The Tlingit hunter/gatherers have inhabited the Alaska territory for thousands of years. They relied on available resources such as seafood, plants and berries for survival, nurturing and harvesting what was indigenous to the area.

Still, many Tlingit members were disconnected from the land because of physical removal from it.

“We were physically removed from the land—and because of colonization, boarding schools and separation—so much loss. The languages and our way of life were totally disrupted. As a result, many of us are trying to reconnect to that,” says Michalsen. That attempt to reconnect to a shared heritage is part of what led her to create Kaasei Training & Consulting, where she teaches about the power of Indigenous plants and foods to “honor the past, create community and change the future.” 

In her educational courses, Michalsen explores the hundreds of plants that are abundant in Alaska. There’s the red and yellow cedar, used for medicinal teas as well as ceremonial fires. She looks at sustainable and respectful harvesting practices of salmon and other fish, fireweed, Labrador tea, stinging nettle, goose tongue, skunk cabbage, wild rose, numerous varieties of berries including salmon berries and red elderberry, plus hundreds of edible seaweed and kelp varieties.

“The plants are abundant,” says Michalsen. “Unfortunately, a lot of these plants are over-harvested, so it’s important to teach respectful harvesting practices. We look at these plants as sacred.”

Since the Tlingit people were separated from their culture and traditions, and their culture and history weren’t taught in schools, Michalsen says it wasn’t until she was an adult that she began to reconnect and learn the ways of her people.

Her education began with elders asking her to harvest certain plants for them. She learned each plant’s growing methods, when they were ripe and how to respectfully harvest, leaving enough for the plant to continue growth for future harvests. Then, in the early 90s, she attended a spiritual gathering of the tribes in Siberia. It was a transformational experience, says Michalsen, where she was asked by a group of women to help harvest some medicinal plants. She says the opportunity to meet others who live “close to the land and practice their ways” led to her inspiration to share this knowledge with others. She started by working for the local tribe, and also as the director at a domestic violence shelter. In traveling around the state and training others, she realized her purpose was that of prevention, intervention and healing.

“That’s what I’ll hopefully do for the rest of my life as it’s the best way I can be of service to my community.”

Photography courtesy of Michalsen.

Whether it’s getting outside on a trail or at low tide, harvesting and experiencing all the senses in the outdoors, or it’s a classroom situation where Michalsen brings the plants to people for educational purposes, she helps tribal members remember where they came from and what is available just outside their doorsteps.

In hands-on classes, she might teach methods for harvesting and making medicines, creating first aid kits with insect repellant, salves and herbal teas, or cooking something together to remember ancient practices.

Her classes run the gamut from four-day training or cultural workshops to hour-long presentations or an online plant symposium. She says there’s always more connection to the concepts of sustainable foraging and traditional meals when folks have a chance to experience the foods themselves. 

”Many of us, we … didn’t grow up with these kinds of foods and tastes, and so when we try these things, and we realize how good they are for us and how delicious they taste, we’re more likely to want to protect those traditions. But, unfortunately, if we’re not connected to the land and to the foods, we’re not likely to care about these things.”

Sharing these practices is crucial, because, she says, “If we don’t share with anyone, then it’s not going to get passed down. And that’s what happened to our parents and grandparents when they were forced to relocate or forced into boarding schools. They were beaten for talking their language or eating their foods. So, in this way, by educating and sharing our culture and traditions, we’re reclaiming our history and who we are.”

The post Meet the Modern Farming Consultant Sharing Ancient Culture and Traditions in Alaska appeared first on Modern Farmer.

He’s here, on this 100-degree August day, to show high school and college students—the future of the Winnebago Tribe—how Ho-Chunk Farms, the tribe’s farming company, is changing the face of agriculture on their reservation.

“When you asked a student at my high school what a farmer looks like they would tell you a white guy with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat on,” said LaPointe, senior director of business operations for Ho-Chunk, Inc. “They didn’t see themselves as farmers, they just thought that’s what the white guys do. And we just let them use our land to do that.”

That perception is rooted in a century of reality. The tribe only owns roughly 27,000 acres of its 120,000-acre reservation, after U.S. government actions directly or indirectly led its farmland to pass into non-Native hands— mostly white farmers.  

But that reality is starting to change. In the past five years, three Nebraska tribes—the Winnebago, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska—have bought a combined 3,000-odd acres of farmland that was once theirs.

These buybacks aren’t cheap or easy. Tribal leaders say landowners who know that tribes want the land back believe they’ll pay any price.

And all three tribes are paying higher-than-normal prices, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of data gathered by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln journalism class.

The Winnebago Tribe spent nearly $10,000 per acre, on average, to buy back 340 acres of ag land. That’s about $3,000 higher than the northeast region’s 2022 average. 

Tribal leaders think the higher prices and headaches are worth it.

“We want to start farming our own reservation. We want to own our reservation again,” LaPointe said.

Ho-Chunk Inc. Farms begins spring tilling on tribal land near Winnebago on April 20, 2020. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press)

Reservation, not reserved

After the Civil War, the United States government tried to upend the way most Native American tribes lived—including the way they viewed land.

The Dawes Act, passed in 1887, tried to force assimilation by splitting the previously communally owned reservation into 160-acre pieces of farmland, individually owned by tribal members.

The government then sold the leftover land to non-Native settlers.

“At one point we owned 100 percent of our reservation, until the federal government thought ‘Oh, this guy’s got maybe too much land, let’s take some of that from them,’” LaPointe said. 

Native Americans had no concept of land as property, said Ted Hibbeler, UNL Tribal Extension Educator and member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. Tribes built relationships with land over thousands of years but didn’t view it as a form of money or power.

More reservation land was lost when tribal members grew financially desperate.

One example: After the land allotment, members of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska who couldn’t afford food were convinced by a White Cloud, Kansas, grocer to sign over their land as a promise to repay.

“They needed food, and that’s just what they had to do,” said Tony Fee, secretary of the Iowa Tribe. “This individual got them to sign it over as collateral … and they never could afford to get it back. So they lost it.”

Today, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska owns about half of its 12,000-acre reservation, with Native and non-Native land ownership checkerboarded throughout.

On the Winnebago reservation, many families lost their land back paying unfamiliar taxes, or sold the land to cover medical bills, LaPointe said.

In 1934, the US government put all remaining Native-owned allotments into an indefinite trust. By that point, an estimated 90 million acres had been removed from Native ownership, according to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation.

Land ownership had gone in only one direction—away from Native tribes and farmers. Until recently, when several tribes decided to change that. 

Ho-Chunk Farms senior fields operations supervisor Jeffery Thomas begins planting a soybean crop in the Big Bear Valley near Winnebago on May 2. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press)

Sticker shock

In the past few years, in addition to other larger purchases,  the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska bought 4 acres next to some land it already owned. The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska made a 36-acre purchase.

Neither is notable, except for the price tag: More than $43,000 per acre.  

“I don’t see too many places where anything approaching that happens,” said Cris Stainbrook, Oglala Lakota and president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “I mean, $40,000 an acre is a lot.”

Farmland prices in Nebraska have risen across the board in recent years. According to UNL’s 2022 Nebraska Farm Real Estate Report, where the Winnebago and Iowa are buying, average acre values for high-quality land are around $7,000. 

Those tribes often pay far more than that. In fact, every piece of reservation land the Iowa Tribe buys is priced higher than what similar land sells for, Fee said.

Racism is an underlying reason for higher land prices, Stainbrook said. He has seen sales where the asking price dropped dramatically when a non-Native organization was the buyer. 

“When we’re helping (tribes) get land back there’s this underlying thought that if the tribe wants it bad enough, they’ll pay anything for it, or they must have a casino somewhere and therefore they can afford to pay more,” Stainbrook said.

Sales on tribal land are sometimes disincentivized by existing tax policies, like capital gains, LaPointe said, because the original sales happened for such little money that the taxes would be disproportionately high.

Ho-Chunk Farms manager Aaron LaPointe helps other employees and members of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska harvest corn Sept. 5 near Winnebago. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press)

But tribes shouldn’t be paying more because of the current owner’s tax bill, Stainbrook said.

“Do you think they sell it to another non-Indian and tell them, ‘Well, you’ll have to pay X amount more because of our capital gains’?” Stainbrook said.

Another reason for high prices: High demand. 

One of the last pieces of reservation land the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska bought was offered to another individual right before the sale, Fee said, so the tribe’s only option was up their offer to get the land.

“They got us over the barrel if we want it. I mean, then they know we want it. We want it bad enough. We’re gonna pay for it,” Fee said, “To me, that’s not the right way, but we really don’t have a choice.”

The Iowa Tribe didn’t have many opportunities to buy land four or five years ago, when values were cheaper. Now that prices have risen, sellers are offering up land—if the price is right.

“The tribe does feel that we should do everything we can to try to get the land back,” Fee said. “And we’re just doing what we can to work toward that.”

Food as sovereignty

For Trey Blackhawk, manager of the nonprofit Winnebago Tribal Farm, acquiring more farmland  is a way for the tribe to feed itself without relying on outside sources. 

The farm, founded in 2018, grows fruits and vegetables on a 40-acre plot, as well as traditional Indian corn used in ceremonies. In the next decade, Blackhawk hopes to open a food co-op for the tribe.

Right now, the nearest grocery store to the Winnebago reservation is in Sioux City, Iowa. Tribe members drive up to 30 miles each way to get their groceries. 

Winnebago Tribal Farm manager Trey Blackhawk seen at the farm outside of Winnebago on Sept. 14. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press)

“I think the pandemic helped people realize that we’re not very sovereign. We can’t even feed ourselves, really,” LaPointe said. “All these shortages were happening and we’re like, geez, we’re really dependent on a lot of people for our food sources.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 49 percent of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives experienced food insecurity, according to a Native American Agriculture Fund survey.

Investments in Native agriculture help tribes to keep food production local so they can support their communities, said Whitney Sawney, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and director of communications and policy for NAAF.

The Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska farms about 4,500 acres of their land, Fee said, with the goal of food sovereignty. 

The tribe is moving toward regenerative agriculture, using native plant species, natural fertilizers and beekeeping to grow nutrient dense foods.

Local tribal school children visit the Winnebago tribal farm to learn about planting and animals on April 22, 2022, near Winnebago. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press)

On the Winnebago reservation, LaPointe often visits classes at Little Priest Tribal College, presenting farming as a way to feed the tribe – and a good career opportunity.

LaPointe, 32, is the second oldest Ho-Chunk Farms employee. Young tribe members are becoming interested in agriculture. LaPointe believes they can be the next generation of farmers.

“That’s why I say land acquisition is so important for us, because our growth is dependent on it,” LaPointe said. “If I’m going to create jobs for this next generation of people that are getting educated in this field, we need to be moving forward by growing our acre base.”

The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

This reporting is part of a collaboration with the Institute for Nonprofit News‘ Rural News Network, and the Energy News Network, Flatwater Free Press, Mississippi Free Press, New Mexico In Depth, Religion News Service and Sierra Nevada Ally. Support from the Walton Family Foundation made the project possible.

The post These Nebraska Tribes Are Buying Back Farmland and Attempting to Reverse History appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When you harvest oysters, you have to make sure you aren’t crossing over into restricted territory. To help, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources developed a web app for commercial and recreational shellfishers called iShellfish, that depicts state waters with demarcations for several categories including seaweed protection zones, oyster sanctuaries, aquaculture leases and more. Users can see where they are in relation to these boundaries, many of them hard to see in person.

“I can hold it in my hand and look at it and know exactly where I am without having to get the binoculars out to look,” says Harrison. The app helps him stay on the right side of the different boundaries. Crossing them could have serious consequences. “I could actually lose my license.” 

Screenshot of the iShellfish web app.

Harrison uses iShellfish regularly. When it comes to knowing where he can go, it takes all of the guesswork out of the process, he says. Harrison, also the president of the Talbot Watermen Association and chair of the County Oyster Committee for Talbot County, used to try to find individual boundary charts online, but the app compiles all of the information into one place.

Shellfish are both culturally and economically significant in coastal communities across the continent, but knowing which waters are legal and safe to harvest can present a significant obstacle. Behind these issues are wicked problems without simple solutions. But when it comes to figuring out where and when you can harvest shellfish, the answer may be as easy as downloading an app.

Helping farmers adapt

Some call North Carolina’s estuaries the “Napa Valley of oysters,” a nod to the abundance of perfect shellfishing conditions in the area. But being an oyster grower in this area also comes with its fair share of financial risk and unpredictability.

Heavy rainfall can flush pollutants and chemicals from roadways into the water. This is when pollutant concentrations in a waterbody can hit dangerous levels, and in North Carolina, the Division of Marine Fisheries enforces temporary closures for affected shellfish leases as a way to address the health risks associated with eating oysters from contaminated waters. 

These closures are critical for public health. But they also create a very inconvenient interruption for growers.

View of the water from Morehead City, North Carolina. (Photography by Lena Beck)

Before Natalie Nelson started working on the ShellCast app, there wasn’t an accessible tool in North Carolina that could help oyster farmers predict potential closures to their leases. Nelson is an associate professor in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. ShellCast, which was piloted in 2021 and released to the public in 2022, was recently updated and expanded this year. It sources data from the National Weather Service’s probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecast, which shows the future precipitation possibilities.

“We’re essentially contextualizing [the forecast],” says Nelson. “So we provide that information in the context of the management criteria that are used to determine when the temporary harvest closures should occur.”

The app features a map of all the oyster waters in the state, and users can see whether the risk of closure is very low, low, moderate, high or very high. The forecast presents the risk level for the present day, one day out and two days out. 

Now, the team has expanded the app to include South Carolina and is working on expanding to Florida. Nelson says the farmers who benefit the most are the ones who are most vulnerable to low influxes of rain—that is, are more likely to experience a closure due to less rain.

“If they have a temporary closure that occurs, they are then suddenly in limbo, and they might not be able to harvest their products as planned,” says Nelson. “By having information, they’re at least able to assess whether or not they should potentially harvest early.” 

Screenshot of the ShellCast web app.

Mapping toxin risk

Toxin-producing algae and pollution present multiple obstacles to shellfish consumption. In coastal areas of Canada, a new app is mapping toxin risk to enable safe, local harvesting. 

The idea for Can U Dig It was developed by Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society (QARS), a coalition of Hul’q’umi’num’ communities. Intertidal shellfish are a traditional food source for these First Nations, and safe access to these foods is important to maintain. Trailmark Systems, a cultural and environmental consulting firm, took on the project.

“Folks do get sick by harvesting shellfish in these areas, and we really wanted to develop something that they felt was trustworthy and that they could use while they’re out in the field,” says Beth Keats, partner at Trailmark Systems. “QARS wanted to make sure that people would know when there is a partial opening so that they can go and exercise their rights to harvest and be safe to do it.”

Screenshot of the Can U Dig It app.

Can U Dig It harvests open-access government data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, including which beaches are currently open or closed to shellfishing, as well as whether the closure is caused by biotoxins or sanitation issues. The openings can sometimes be short and easy to miss, says Keats, so it’s important to be able to identify harvest windows when they occur. Can U Dig It is also available in more languages besides English, including Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The app is usable on both Canadian coasts.

Harvesting shellfish contributes to a greater sense of well-being, says Keats, and is an especially important right for First Nations.

“It is so essential…to maintain that practice as they have for millennia.”

The post Harvesting Shellfish? Get the App appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Patterson grew up on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation just south of Lake Ontario near Niagara Falls. The painting reminded him of his elders teaching him to harvest black walnuts and hickories.

“I think, for me, it wasn’t about the tree, it was about a way of life,” said Patterson, who today is in his 40s, with silver-flecked dark hair and kids of his own. He sounded wistful.

The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into southeastern Canada. The beloved and ecologically important species was harvested by Indigenous peoples for millennia and once numbered in the billions, providing food and habitat to countless birds, insects, and mammals of eastern forests, before being wiped out by rampant logging and a deadly fungal blight brought on by European colonization.

Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the US government. (Transgenic organisms contain DNA from other species.) When that happens, people will be able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction. For years, controversy has swirled around the ethics of using novel biotechnology for species conservation. But Patterson, who previously directed the Tuscarora Environment Program and today is the assistant director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has a different question: What good is bringing back a species without also restoring its traditional relationships with the Indigenous peoples who helped it flourish?

That deep history is not always clear from conservation narratives about the blight-resistant chestnut. For the past four decades, the driving force behind the chestnut’s restoration has been The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 5,000 active members in 16 chapters. Before turning to genetic engineering, the foundation tried unsuccessfully to breed a hybrid chestnut that looked and grew like an American chestnut but had genes from species native to Asia that gave it blight resistance. “Our vision is a robust eastern forest restored to its splendor,” reads The American Chestnut Foundation’s homepage, against a background of glowing green chestnut leaflets. “Our mission is to return the iconic American chestnut to its native range.”

But the Foundation website’s history of the tree begins during colonial times, suggesting a romantic notion of a precolonial wilderness that ignores the intensive agroforestry that Indigenous peoples practiced. By engineering vanished species to survive harms brought on by colonization without addressing those harms, people avoid having to make hard decisions about how most of us live on the landscape today.

The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Bill Powell began working on chestnut genetics when he was a 28-year-old graduate student in Utah, which is actually outside the tree’s natural range. Now in his late 60s, with silvery hair, glasses, and an infectious curiosity about the relationship between tree and pathogen, he’s a leading chestnut restoration expert.

When I met Powell in 2022, he fretted that the chestnut restoration process was taking too long. “Unfortunately, I see retirement on the horizon,” he told me. “But not anytime soon, because I have to get this done.” At the time, Powell was a colleague of Patterson’s, working for the same university and directing the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project. Since then, as the blight-resistant tree has wound its way through the deregulatory labyrinth of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Agriculture, Powell has had to step down, recently sharing his diagnosis of terminal colon cancer publicly.

When we spoke, Powell stressed that after the blight-resistant chestnut is deregulated, no Indigenous nations will have to grow the transgenic trees on their lands if they choose not to. But he acknowledged that this does not reassure those who think of Indigenous land not in colonial terms, meaning within reservation boundaries, but instead in terms of treaty rights or cultural practices on historic tribal lands. Indigenous nations, including members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy such as the Tuscarora Nation, have long argued that even when they ceded land to colonial governments, they did not cede their rights to access and care for plants and animals on those lands.

The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. They were an important part of the varied diet that sustained Patterson’s ancestors for millennia; in return, people cared for groves of the trees across thousands of miles. When the United States pushed Indigenous peoples throughout the chestnut’s range off their lands, and the American chestnut became functionally extinct, an ancient reciprocal relationship vanished, too.

“We were instructed to pick those nuts,” Patterson said. “And when we don’t pick them, the plant goes away.”

The American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. (Photo: Shutterstock)

With craggy bark and shaggy branches of feathery leaves, the American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. Its trunk could be 13 feet wide. The trees huddled along the Gulf Coast for some 8,000 years during the most recent ice age, sheltering in the relatively warm stretch from Florida to the Mississippi River, because mountain peaks even in the southernmost part of the Appalachians were too cold for chestnut trees to grow. Then, as the snow receded northward 20,000 ago, the trees slowly migrated from their coastal refuges. They worked their way up the Appalachian Mountains — helped by Indigenous peoples, whom they helped in turn.

The trees dropped an avalanche of chestnuts to the forest floor each year. According to historian Donald Edward Davis, people burned low fires that dried the nuts and killed off chestnut weevils. By suppressing other plants, fires helped the chestnut trees spread, and the nuts became staples of Indigenous diets — a reliable source of nutrition that people stored in earthen silos or pounded into flour for chestnut bread and other foods. The human-tended groves also fed animals such as elk, deer, bison, bears, passenger pigeons, panthers, wolves, and foxes. Chestnut logjams in streams created deep, clear pockets of water where fish could thrive. Several species of invertebrates relied on chestnut trees for habitat; after the trees died out, five species of moths went extinct.

European settlers forced Indigenous peoples along the chestnut’s range from much of their homelands, severing access to plants and animals they’d long interacted with. Meanwhile, settlers cut down chestnuts for many reasons — to clear space for towns and farms; to build fence posts, telegraph poles, and railroads; or just to gather the nuts more easily.

Nevertheless, the chestnut survived for centuries. Enslaved people gathered chestnuts to supplement meager meals and to sell. White Appalachian communities came to rely on chestnuts as free feed for their hogs and other livestock, and as a cash crop.

Then, in the late 1800s, horticulturalists imported trees carrying the fungal blight Cryphonectria parasitica to the United States. The blight spread by wind and splashing rain; it also hitched rides on insects and birds. Once it landed on the bark of a new tree, it dug in through weak spots — old burn injuries, insect wounds, or scars left from woodcutting — and dissolved the tree’s living tissue with oxalic acid, creating angry orange streaks and open cankers on trunks. The trees would die back to their roots, resprout, and die back again, like botanical zombies. The blight killed at an astonishing pace. All told, a tree whose ancestors evolved millions of years ago died out in less than 50 years.

In turn, the chestnut lost the people whose practices helped it thrive. Patterson told me that some Indigenous nations even lost their word for the chestnut tree, because chestnuts disappeared at the same time that the US government took Indigenous children, including at least one of Patterson’s own relatives, and placed them in boarding schools. In part, this was another strategy for coercing tribes to give up territory. Many children didn’t survive the schools, which were often run by Christian organizations. Those who did were forced to give up their languages, religious beliefs, and traditions. But chestnuts still inhabit Indigenous creation stories and religious calendars, and Patterson believes that a reciprocal relationship can be reestablished between Indigenous nations and the tree. He’s just not convinced that releasing the transgenic chestnut will restore those connections.

The Tuscarora Nation, of which Patterson is an enrolled citizen, is one of six Indigenous nations that today comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee creation story, Patterson said, is “a cycle of loss, grieving, and recovery all the time, just like ecological succession.” By creating a genetically engineered chestnut, Patterson argues, scientists are avoiding the part of the cycle where people grieve and learn from their mistakes.

On the timescale of Haudenosaunee history, the losses still feel new. “It’s been 100 years — but that’s not long,” Patterson observed. Then he reconsidered. “That’s long for research scientists, or a plant technology innovator. It’s too long.”

To Patterson, what’s not being restored — treaty rights to access and care for plants and animals on the landscape — is telling.

“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”

An undated archival photo shows a grove of blighted American chestnut trees in Page County, Virginia. (Photo: Library of Congress)

By the time Patterson first saw Ernest Smith’s artwork in the early 1980s, the Tuscarora Nation was going through a cultural renaissance. Patterson’s mother made her children speak Tuscarora at home to keep the language alive. His relatives participated in political acts such as the occupation of Wounded Knee by Indigenous people from across the US, in part to demand that the federal government uphold treaty obligations to the Lakota people. Murals on the walls of Patterson’s state-run elementary school showed Tuscarora people hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering, even as non-Indigenous people contested those traditional activities outside of reservation lands, from the local to the national level.

Over time, Patterson was taught that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy never ceded its “reserved rights,” or rights that are not explicitly mentioned in treaties or court cases. Today, the Confederacy maintains that it still holds rights to care for and access the species growing on its ancestral homelands and in ancestral waterways — even in territory ceded to settlers. But both the state of New York and the federal government have chipped away at those reserved rights through court cases, and often won. In this legal context, harvesting chestnuts, like the family in Smith’s painting, is not only a cultural practice; it’s an exercise of tribal sovereignty.

Patterson works to rebuild tribal access to many plants and animals that are culturally important for Haudenosaunee peoples. Because those plants and animals often live outside of reservation lands, his work can be difficult. New York State maintains that, except on reservation lands, Indigenous peoples have the same rights as non-Indigenous peoples, and have to follow the same regulations regarding when, where, and how much they hunt, fish, or gather, such as hunting seasons or fishing licenses — regulations the Tuscarora have been fighting in court for decades. So to Patterson, the question of whether to grow transgenic trees isn’t really the most urgent one. He’s more concerned about upholding a way of life that restores traditional ecological relationships.

“Aside from the whole issue of being transgenic, this is just about access and care of place,” he told me. In New York’s state lands, he added, there are almost no provisions for gathering medicines, collecting food, or growing food in traditional territories. Yet that reciprocity helped chestnuts spread and thrive across thousands of miles and thousands of years.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy began making treaties with white settlers more than 400 years ago. The two-row wampum belt, made of rows of white beads run through with two rows of purple beads, documents a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers to live in parallel, not interfering with each other’s ways of life. In 1794, during George Washington’s presidency, the Haudenosaunee and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming the Confederacy’s sovereignty on its territory. In the Nonintercourse Act, a series of statutes passed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Congress also barred states from purchasing lands from Indigenous nations without federal approval. When states’ land purchases are approved, Indigenous nations don’t lose any other rights on those lands, such as hunting, fishing, or gathering, unless the treaty specifically cedes those rights, explained Monte Mills, who directs the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington.

Nonetheless, states including New York still try to assert control over tribes or tribal resources, and in many cases, succeed. In one 2005 case, Patterson himself was the defendant, charged by the state of New York for ice fishing without properly labeling his gear. Patterson brought a copy of the Treaty of Canandiagua to court, explaining to the judge that as a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, he had the right to fish in the state park, formerly Seneca territory, without regulation by the state of New York. Patterson lost that case.

The Supreme Court of the United States has also limited Haudenosaunee reserved rights, though from a different angle. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, decided just a few months before Patterson’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that although the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, never gave up certain rights on its ancestral land, it had essentially waited too long to exercise them.

This particular case centered around whether tribes had to pay local and state taxes on ancestral land that they bought back on the real estate market. In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that both Indian law and the need to treat people equally “preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” According to Mills, the Supreme Court essentially said that Oneida had let too much time pass to assert its sovereign rights, and therefore had lost them.

“It’s one of the worst decisions from foundational Indian law court,” Mills said. Although the case was about property taxes, Mills said that it could be a precedent for preventing Indigenous nations from exercising reserved rights. “The state would probably point to Sherrill and say, ‘No, you can’t have those rights, because you haven’t asserted them for so long,’” he added.

But Mills also pointed out that sometimes, tribes and states have been able to work together to come up with mutually beneficial ways for tribes to exercise their reserved rights. If states are interested in recognizing tribal sovereignty, he said, there are models out there for how to do it.

For its part, the state of New York has been working recently to improve its relations with Indigenous nations. In 2022, the state and the federal government agreed to return more than 1,000 acres to the Onondaga Nation. That same year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration created an Office of Indian Nation Affairs in the Department of Environmental Conservation, the same department that 20 years previously ticketed Patterson and fought him in court over reserved fishing rights. Peter Reuben, who is enrolled in the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, is currently serving as the first director of the new office.

To Reuben, the creation of his position by the department “really shows that they are serious about us,” he said. Reuben is working to create a productive and respectful consultation process between the region’s Indigenous nations and the state of New York on environmental issues, and to hash out agreements over hunting, fishing, and treaty rights.

“If it’s in the state’s interest — which it seems like it would be — to have more support and additional resources for natural resource management, then why not work with tribal folks to support a program where they’re able to continue to do what they said they’ve been doing all along?” Mills said. “It’s probably going to lead to a better end result anyway.”

Chestnuts were a reliable source of nutrition for Indigenous people. (Photo: Shutterstock)

For now, while transgenic American chestnut trees are still highly regulated, one of the best places to see one is at the Lafayette Road Experimental Field Station on the southern outskirts of Syracuse. Powell met me there on a sunny July morning two summers ago.

On fields that glowed bean-pod green in the upstate humidity, thousands of chestnut trees grew in varying stages of reproduction, healing, and death. White paper bags festooned the taller trees, their flowers covered to manage fertilization.

The transgenic chestnuts contain wheat DNA that lets the tree create an enzyme that fights off Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungal blight. The blight cankers on these trees don’t grow big enough to girdle them.

Rows of strappy transgenic saplings, some as tall as Powell, waited in holding plots fenced to keep out hungry deer. “We’re planting them on very close spacing, and we can only hold them for about three years, and then they get root-bound,” Powell said. As the permitting process drags on, time is running out to replant these young trees.

I asked Powell why he thought restoring the chestnut was important. Chestnuts produced a stable crop of nuts for wildlife, because they flowered late enough in the year that they escaped flower-killing frosts, he said. “It was just an important part of our ecosystem, and for our heritage, too,” he added. “The railroads that were made in the East used ties that were made out of chestnuts because they were rot resistant. And people used to say, chestnuts used to follow you from cradle to grave, because the wood was used in everything from cradles to coffins.”

Although he’s retired, Powell is working to create a research center that would develop transgenic versions of other native species going extinct from blights, insects, and other introduced pests. He imagined growing transgenic versions of everything from elms, killed off by Dutch elm disease and the elm yellows pathogen, to ash trees, which are currently being devoured by iridescent green beetles called emerald ash borers.

People who hope to use technology to resurrect extinct species, whether the American chestnut or even the woolly mammoth, are sometimes considered ecomodernists. According to Jason Delborne, who studies biotechnology and environmental policy at North Carolina State University (where I previously worked, in the English department), “There are people who are environmentalists at their core, but sick of losing, and interested in the promise of technology to solve the ecological and environmental problems we are facing.” Part of that interest, he said, comes from a sense of responsibility to “fix what you broke.”

Indeed, Jamie Van Clief, the southern regional science coordinator for The American Chestnut Foundation, explained to me that she got interested in working for the organization because her field, environmental science, was depressing.

“There’s a lot of disaster, there’s a lot of dismay, and to have this foundation with such a positive and impactful mission just attracted me immensely,” she said. “To be able to work towards something when it kind of feels hopeless sometimes — and to be part of restoration on the scale that we’re doing — is incredible.”

As Powell and I gazed at a diseased, non-engineered chestnut sapling, its yellowing leaves hanging limp in the sun, I reflected that eastern forests weren’t exactly flush with any other giant trees. Almost all old growth has fallen to human endeavors. Conservation efforts also have to take into consideration climate change, which may shift suitable chestnut habitat north into Canada — and shift plant diseases’ habitats as well. Root rot, or Phytophthora cinnamomi, is another introduced pathogen. It only infects chestnuts in the South right now, because root rot dies during winter freezes. The American Chestnut Foundation estimates root rot will spread to New England in the next 50 years as the region warms. Plus, there are few places available for a new chestnut forest to grow, except perhaps forest remediation sites such as old Appalachian coal mines. The fact is, releasing blight-resistant chestnuts into the wild won’t guarantee them a landscape where they can survive.

Because biotechnology alone can’t restore the American chestnut to the numbers that its supporters are envisioning, Powell anticipates relying on citizen scientists. After deregulation, he imagines The American Chestnut Foundation sending transgenic pollen to interested people, who could pollinate the flowers of wild mother trees growing nearby. They could plant the nuts the trees grow or pass them on to other chestnut fans.

The health and ecological risks of introducing the transgenic chestnut into the wild are likely to be low, according to Delborne; its signature wheat gene is commonly found in many major food crops. But at heart, Delborne argues, the debate isn’t just about chestnuts. “It’s also about a category of technology that could find its way into the world,” he said.

Even if the chestnut recovery doesn’t work out, the approval of the engineered chestnut for unregulated growth could open the door to a new era of biotechnology in US forestry — such as a pest-resistant poplar tree, which kills forest insects by expressing genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and already grows commercially in other countries.

The debate about blight-resistant chestnuts isn’t really about trees or even genetic engineering; it’s about who gets to make decisions on the land. Conservation is framed in European cultures as an objective goal, but it’s a worldview that other people may not share, explained Katie Barnhill-Dilling, a North Carolina State University social scientist who researches environmental decision-making. “Some of the people I’ve talked to from the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force would contest that humans are here to accept the gifts as they are now,” she said.

Some Indigenous nations in the chestnut’s historic range, such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, are considering growing genetically engineered chestnuts on their reservation lands after the trees are deregulated. To EBCI Secretary of Agriculture and Natural Resources Joey Owle, restoring the American chestnut is another way for the tribe to exercise its sovereign rights, more than a century after the tree’s disappearance.

“It’s one project of many projects that we work on to enhance our sovereignty as a tribe, to work to establish a culturally significant resource that provided a bountiful harvest for our ancestors and wildlife,” he said. “It’s just cool to be part of it.” Based on feedback from EBCI committee members, Owle said that planting transgenic trees, while an option, is the “last option that we would like to pursue” to restore the species. For now, the EBCI is scouting out wild chestnuts that survived the blight, and planting hybrid trees on its land in partnership with The American Chestnut Foundation.

Photo: Shutterstock

On a crisp fall day a couple of years ago, Patterson and Powell arranged for around 15 people to gather chestnuts in upstate New York. The grove grew on a hilly slope on state land that used to be an agricultural field. “It was just a beautiful little spot,” Patterson recalled. The 12 or so American chestnuts were young; Patterson estimated they were perhaps 20 years old and no more than 25 feet tall.

The group, a mix of Haudenosaunee Confederacy members and non-Indigenous scientists, toted assorted equipment to gather the prickly nuts: ladders, homemade pickers, plastic buckets, sturdy leather shoes, and gloves. But first, they stood in a circle in the grove and discussed the future of the American chestnuts. According to Patterson, things quickly became adversarial.

Powell and Patterson had long been collegial: Patterson first tasted an American chestnut after he microwaved some that Powell handed him in the campus building where they both had offices. Meanwhile, Powell’s students learned from Patterson about the parallel expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the disappearance of chestnut trees.

Powell has constantly reached out to tribes for input and to understand their perspectives, Patterson said. And unlike other biotechnology researchers, Powell has focused on technology for environmental restoration, not for personal profit. “I admire the idea that this is about technology for restoration — whatever that is,” Patterson added.

But their relationships with plants remain fundamentally different. For example, Powell has talked about keeping the price of the transgenic chestnuts low, just to raise enough money to cover the costs of getting them out to people. In contrast, when I asked Patterson why he never bought or sold seeds from traditional food plants for his home garden, he sounded incredulous. “That’s like selling people,” he said. “That’s life. … Why would you sell somebody?”

That fall day, Patterson began worrying that if the restoration succeeds and transgenic chestnuts grow across the land, releasing pollen into the wind, people won’t be able to tell transgenic trees apart from non-transgenic trees. Scientists in the group assured everyone that in the future, people would be able to tell the trees apart through genetic testing.

“It was this privileged standpoint, which is, ‘Well, technology will figure it out for us.’ But it’s not as if I’m going to hand that technology to my son or nephews or my grandsons before they go off to gather,” Patterson said. “It just seemed like it was so simple to them.” He wondered why the non-Indigenous scientists and conservationists had been able to plant this grove on state land in the first place, when his nation was largely prevented from accessing or caring for plants there.

The group got tense. “The conversation turned to fear, and to moral opposition,” Patterson recalled. Patterson realized this standoff wasn’t the right frame of mind for the trip. “Well,” he exclaimed, “let’s go pick some nuts!”

As he collected chestnuts, Patterson couldn’t help but think of Ernest Smith’s painting. “It was a fulfillment of that scene,” he told me. Patterson reflected on his ancestors, wondering how they’d gathered the prickly nuts without his contemporary tools. He felt that by collecting chestnuts, he was doing what he was supposed to do. He hoped that in the future, he’d be able to find more wild chestnuts and organize more gathering trips, taking care to bring Haudenosaunee kids along. But he could see that the masting trees were struggling with the blight and weren’t going to survive much longer. Some of the young trees were already more than half dead, leaves brown and wilted.

He and his wife, who also attended the trip, were struck by a realization: If the federal government deregulated the blight-resistant trees, letting their pollen float freely through the air, this trip might be one of the last times they could gather wild American chestnuts with certainty.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post The American Chestnut Tree is Coming Back. Who is It For? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Cardoso’s agricultural roots taught her to value and respect nature. Without Mother Earth, says Cardoso, “we have nothing.” She transformed this cultural imperative into a career that not only cares for the planet but helps people along the way. As director of sustainability at Astral Tequila, she takes the waste created during the tequila distillation process and repurposes it into adobe-style bricks. The bricks are then donated to build homes for people in the surrounding communities, nearly half of whom live below the poverty line. 

Martha Jimenez Cardoso, pictured with a bottle of Astral Tequila. Each bottle produced helps to make approximately two bricks. (Photo courtesy of Astral Tequila)

Tequila waste is abundant. One standard .75-liter bottle of tequila produces more than 11 pounds of bagasse (the fibrous remnants of the agave piña after steaming, crushing and fermenting) and around 10 liters of vinasse (the liquid runoff of the distillation process). In 2016, the Tequila Regulatory Council estimated that the industry generates more than 4.7 million tons of bagasse and 2.5 billion liters of vinasse annually. That looming figure has only grown with a global thirst for this Mexican spirit. As the second most popular liquor in the world, tequila is a $10-billion industry that exports to more than 170 countries. Market experts predict international demand to expand to more than $15 billion before the end of the decade. 

Because bagasse is comprised mainly of cellulose and lignin, it can be repurposed into a number of valuable items, including construction materials, fertilizer, paper, wooden crafts, biofuels and even prebiotic dietary fiber. But many tequila companies simply compost the bagasse or toss it into landfills where it off-gasses methane. Vinasse, on the other hand, doesn’t have nearly the versatility of its cohort. Although environmental regulations from the 1990s require the run-off to be treated, the vast majority of vinasse is not. Most of the liquid winds up in nearby bodies of water or farming fields where its low-pH and high temperatures can cause damage.

Cardoso helped pioneer a solution to combine soil with the leftover bagasse and vinasse from agave spirits distillation to create an ancient building material known as adobe. Along with her team at Green Loop, a raw material and energy solutions company specializing in recycling agave fibers, Cardoso oversees the Adobe Brick Project, the sustainability arm of Astral Tequila. The project has made thousands of bricks, donating them to new housing construction and improvement projects while collaborating with local builders and architects. 

Bagasse is the fibrous waste from the agave plant. (Photo courtesy of Astral Tequila)

The adobe bricks not only repurpose tequila waste, but they’re also an excellent construction material for the warm, temperate climate in Mexico. Because of its high thermal mass, adobe stays cool during the day and releases heat at night, producing less waste, consuming less energy and creating a lower environmental impact than mainstream building materials. The more local the supplies to make the adobe, the smaller the carbon footprint. Plus, adobe buildings are remarkably resilient and can stand for centuries with regular maintenance.

For Cardoso, using her skills to benefit the community and upcycle food waste fulfills a lifelong dream. A graduate of the Oaxaca University of Technology with a degree in civil engineering, she credits her family for inspiring her intrepid path. Her father, a farmer and construction worker, enthralled young Cardoso with stories about the projects on which he worked. When one of her older brothers decided to study engineering in college, she took great interest in what he was learning. Cardoso realized that if she followed in her brother’s footsteps, she too could carry out quality projects and help even more people.

“The most important thing is to be surrounded by people with the same goal of helping by doing their part to make dreams possible together,” says Cardoso. “Sustainability is a topic that is very important not only to me but also for many people who seek to reduce the impact on the environment, and it is a joy to know that I do two things that I like in the same project.”

In searching for a way to unite her passions, Cardoso learned from connections in Oaxaca that tequila waste could be used for a sustainable twist on traditional adobe. She immediately began assembling a team of experts on waste and soil to help her develop the agave upcycling process she continues to use today. “It was just a matter of teamwork and continuous testing to provide a good quality product that helps create homes for the families who really need it,” she says.

Cardoso first began repurposing agave byproducts from Astral Tequila’s sister brand, Sombra Mezcal, in 2017. When Astral was acquired and reintroduced in January 2022, Cardoso and her team began working with the tequila company, then headquartered in Guadalajara. The Adobe Brick Project currently operates in Jalisco, near Astral’s state-of-the-art distillery in Amatitán, where agave from five regions in Mexico is processed. Each change in geography created its own unique set of engineering challenges. Explains Cardoso, “It was a path of many lessons since the land in each place is different, and the waste is, too.”

To make the bricks, a machine combines the bagasse, vinasse and soil into heavy, wet adobe mud. A team of local employees then hand-packs the still-wet adobe into wooden molds that are left outside in the elements for ten days to cure—no oven, kiln or carbon emissions required. As the mud shrinks and dries, the agave fibers provide reinforcement for the brick. Multiple bricks can easily be mortared together using more mud. Each bottle of Astral Tequila helps make approximately two bricks, each measuring roughly 16 inches long, 8 inches wide and 4 inches tall. The project assembles around 300 bricks a day. 

Later this year, the Adobe Brick Project will work with Hábitat para la Humanidad and Green Loop to provide bricks and other necessary construction materials for ten new homes and community spaces in the local municipality of Gómez Farias, Jalisco. Building structures for families facing housing insecurity and homelessness gives Cardoso great personal satisfaction. “When you come from a low-income family,” she explains, “you know what the deficiencies are and how difficult it is to have a decent home.” To see the big smiles on the faces of the families when a project is complete, she says, “that inspires me.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that the adobe is mixed with a mechanical tahona. The tahona is used to crush agave for tequila.

The post Meet the Indigenous Engineer Upcycling Tequila Waste into Sustainable Housing appeared first on Modern Farmer.

How the seed passed from the Abenaki to white settlers is unknown, but what is known is that the genetic strength of Abenaki Flint is due in large part to the efforts of Abenaki seed breeders. And while the revival of Abenaki Flint (sometimes called Roy’s Calais) is unique, many of our familiar crops share a story of lost lineage. 

Bringing a seed to a high level of performance is not accidental: Instead, it is a years-long process of observation, testing and careful stewardship. All of our most important food crops have undergone this process, yet many of the ties to their original producers have been severed. How we credit this work is a complicated process. 

One of the methods of attributing value to seed creators is through royalties. Royalties are traditionally paid out to seed breeders who file a patent proving that their seed offers a new genetic profile with distinct characteristics from other seeds on the market. But what about the hundreds of years of foundational development before the common practice of patents and royalties? How do we recognize some of the most important seed architects?  

In 2018, in recognition of this question, Fedco Seeds designated Abenaki Flint as “indigenously stewarded,” along with a handful of other varieties, and started allocating 10 percent of the proceeds from seed sales to a donation fund under its Indigenous royalties initiative. 

Nikos Kavanya, seed branch co-ordinator at Fedco Seeds, was responsible for implementing  Fedco’s program. “The impetus came from my sense of justice,” Kavanya said in an email. “For me, honoring our debt to the goodness and beauty of the past, especially for something as vital as seed, is a core value.”  

Fedco was already paying royalties to independent seed breeders, but Kavanya felt that the foundation of some of that breeding work was going unrecognized and unrewarded. 

“We were paying current breeders for seed that they had developed—but which had been bred before by many tribal peoples, whose work had, in many cases, been stolen,” said Kavanya. 

“We exist in an industry that tends to be very pro intellectual property rights,” says Courtney Williams, Fedco Seeds’ co-ordinator and product developer. Of the Indigenous royalties program, she says the company wants to “value [the Indigenous work] in a way that is akin to valuing these intellectual property constructs awarded by patent offices.”

Determining which varieties to designate was the most challenging part of implementing the program. It is difficult to narrow down which crops deserve designation and harder still to confirm the lineage. How do you trace the story of something as complicated as a seed, small enough to fit in a pocket, and—up until recently—difficult to genetically verify?

“A case could be made that all of the seeds we sell were Indigenously derived,” said Kavanya.

Hopi Blue Corn. (Photo courtesy of Fedco Seeds)

The first stage of Fedco’s project was to designate varieties with the most overt connection, such as those with a tribal affiliation in their name, such as Hopi Blue Corn, Jacob’s Cattle Bean and Waneta Plum.

Choosing to call the designation Indigenous royalties was also a decision based on ease of communication, more than precision of the term. “We were already distributing ‘breeders royalties’ to some of the independent breeders whose seed we sell and so it felt like an easy shift for our customers to make,” said Kavanya. 

Royalties traditionally refer to a direct payment made to an individual or company, but in this case, due to the difficulty of determining provenance, the proceeds are pooled. Therefore, Kavanya and her co-workers at Fedco decided to name a single beneficiary: a local project called Nibezun that crosses tribal affiliations to reach a broader constituency. Nibezun is a registered non-profit that operates on 85 acres in Passadumkeag, Maine, with access to Olamon Island, the original home of the Penobscot Nation and Abenaki confederacy. 

Through the allocation of 10 percent of seed sales, along with direct donations from customers, Fedco paid out about $10,000 in Indigenous royalties last season.

In 2018, when Kavanya first started exploring a method to pay homage to indigenous breeders, she met with other seed sellers to brainstorm and explore the practical steps. Following up with those that sat around the table with her, she says she doesn’t see any evidence of implementation.  

“I couldn’t find any of that work continued. It’s disheartening. There was a certain momentum at the time,” said Kavanya. She cites two possible obstacles. The first is with scale. For some companies, “the amount of seeds they are selling is so small, it felt sort of futile,” said Kavanaya. The second is with general opposition to the imprecision of the vocabulary itself.  Using the word “royalties” was an unpopular decision with both sellers and Indigenous groups. 

Because the money from all the designated seed varieties is pooled and not tagged to individual tribal breeders, “it is not terminology that everyone thinks is most representative,” writes Kavanya. An alternate name for the practice, which emerged from the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, is “Indigenous seed benefit sharing.”

“Terminology is worthy of thoughtfulness, but, hopefully, [it] does not overshadow root concerns, which in this case includes the commercialization of seeds and the unsettled matter of what is adequate compensation for what to some are relatives, ancestors and children,” says Dr. Andrea Carter, AG outreach and education manager at Native Seeds/SEARCH, an Arizona-based seed conservation organization.

Recognition of prior ownership is a first step, but what about returning the seeds? Groups such as Native Seeds/SEARCH and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance are working on drafting policies and beginning the work of returning Indigenous seeds to their native communities. They call the process “rematriation,” in recognition of the role women have played in seed stewardship. Returning seed breeding and stewardship to original Indigenous keepers on Indigenous land is an important step in seed sovereignty, which is in turn a foundational step in food sovereignty. 

According to NAFSA (the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, which houses the Indigenous Seed Keepers’ Network), “Seeds are a vibrant and vital foundation for food sovereignty and are the basis for a sustainable, healthy agriculture. We understand that seeds are our precious collective inheritance and it is our responsibility to care for the seeds as part of our responsibility to feed and nourish ourselves and future generations.”

“Rematriation of all Indigenously derived seeds is impractical,” acknowledges Kavanaya. It would mean no beans, corn or squash available on the commercial market. But recognizing this does not mean that all Indigenous seeds should be available commercially. Some nonprofits such as Native Seeds/SEARCH are removing culturally significant varieties from their catalog while choosing to leave others readily available. 

Small seed companies provide a valuable service to all gardeners looking to benefit from careful breeding and stewardship, but seeds are not just food: they are also a living cultural legacy. Acknowledging this idea is just the first step toward addressing a complex issue. “It is a larger and much-needed conversation that requires the voices of many,” says Carter.

The post Payment for the Past: Recognizing Indigenous Seed Stewardship appeared first on Modern Farmer.