This Colonization is (Not) a Death: Grief, Love, and Regenerative Relationality of Indigenous Seed Keeping through Climate Change

Abstract

For Indigenous communities where agriculture is historically or contemporarily a component of their food systems, Indigenous seed keepers provide for the continuation of food production, food cultures and teachings, and the health and sustainability of the ecosystems that receive, germinate, and influence the seeds. To be an Indigenous seed keeper is to be a steward and a carrier of many things. We lovingly dedicate ourselves to our seed relatives’ survival by carrying our peoples’ ancestral inheritances of seed varieties, seed stories, and seed songs through colonialism. Through love for better futures that are necessarily both familiar and different to us, we steward the seed varieties we belong to towards climate change adaptation, partnering with the seeds as co-authors of current and future seasons’ harvests. We are carriers of long and often interrupted seed histories and legacies that have shaped the states of survival and traits that our seed varieties and seed teachings are in today. Indigenous seed keepers intimately know and are exceptionally impacted by all that colonialism and climate change has altered and continues to take from our agricultural food systems. This commentary offers insight on how Indigenous seed keepers, facilitated by our love for the seeds that sustain us, are healers of collective food grief, ensuring the perpetuation Indigenous seed relationships through relational climate adaptation.