Thakóža, you’ve had no one to teach you, not even how to be part of a family or a community. You know what the grandmothers went through to save the seeds. That’s how tough you have to be as an Indian woman. And as a seed keeper.
With The Seed Keeper, author Diane Wilson uses “seeds”, both literally and metaphorically, to make social commentary and to trace the hard history of the Dakhóta people of Minnesota. In brief: The U.S. government signed a treaty granting the Dakhóta a portion of their traditional lands in perpetuity, but then broke the treaty to settle the West with white folk. The starving Dakhóta rose up when promised food wasn’t delivered to them, were massacred and hanged in the country’s largest mass execution, and the rest were imprisoned or marched to reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska (the women, the seed keepers, sewing precious heirloom seeds into the hems of their clothing). Eventually, Dakhóta were allowed to return to their homelands, only to have their children taken away to abusive boarding schools. And when those students grew up and had families of their own, they were often so broken — suffering depression, addictions, health issues — that lurking social services swooped in and put their children in foster care with white families. The effects of this history is related through the present day experiences of Rosalie Iron Wing — having no mother and losing her father when she was twelve, Rosalie was alienated from her people, their traditions, and barely survived foster care — but like a seed awaiting the right conditions for germination, Rosalie’s potential was curled up safely within herself the whole time, just waiting for the chance to grow. In a broad sense, this reminded me of Braiding Sweetgrass meets Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee meets Indian Horse, but it’s in the particular — the history of these Dakhóta people and not the lumping of all Indigenous people as some tragic monolith — that The Seed Keeper feels most important; when an Indigenous author such as Diane Wilson asks me to listen to the story of her people, I strive to do so respectfully and with an open mind and heart (and not dwell too long on plot details that may not have worked for me).
Once in a while I rocked a bit, but mostly I just sat, my thoughts far away. I was not interested in what would come next. I still had business with the past. I could feel the way it tugged at me, growing stronger as John’s light dimmed. No matter what people said, when he finally left his body, this life of ours would go with him. There was so little left as it was. I was a burnt field, waiting for a new season to begin.
As I opened with, Wilson treats “seeds” both metaphorically (as they are containers of the past and the future for Rosalie and the Dakhóta) and also literally: In order to escape her foster mother, Rosalie agrees to marry a local white farmer she barely knows when she turns eighteen. Rosalie begins to reconnect with nature as she plants the seeds for her first kitchen garden, and as the plot develops and her husband eventually embraces GMO agriculture, a philosophical divide is explored between traditional and modern methods. As The Seed Keeper opens, this husband, John, has just died and forty-year-old Rosalie returns for the first time to her father’s cabin in the woods. Through her POV and those of some of the seed keepers who came before her, the story of the Dakhóta, Rosalie, and her own family are all eventually revealed; and as might be expected, it is here, back on her traditional lands, that Rosalie finally blossoms.
Sometimes, when I was working in the garden, a wordless prayer opened between me and the earth, as if we shared a common language that I understood best when I was silent. Only when paying attention with all of my senses could I appreciate the cry of the hawk circling overhead, or see sunflowers turning toward the sun, or hear the hum of carpenter bees burrowing into rotted logs. Just as birds made their nests in a circle, this clearing encircled us, creating a safe place to grow and to live. History might have cost me my family and my language, but I was reclaiming a relationship with the earth, water, stars, and seeds that was thousands of years old.
In a number of memoirs I’ve read by Indigenous authors (Up Ghost River, One Native Life, The Reason You Walk), the return to traditional lands does have a powerful healing effect over body and soul for First Nations peoples, and as Canada nears our first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we should all be open-hearted to the stories these first peoples need us to hear; it is the first and smallest step towards true reconciliation and I am grateful to Diane Wilson for sharing her story with me.
