Full transcript:

[00:00:00] Emily Race: Welcome to the Founding Mother's Podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. Today we are in conversation with Rowen White.

Rowen is a Seed Keeper/farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty.  She is the Educational Director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds, an innovative Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization located in Nevada City, California. Rowen is the Founder of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, which is committed to restoring the Indigenous Seed Commons. She facilitates creative hands-on workshops and strategic conversations in community around seed/food security around the country within tribal and small farming communities.

[00:01:01] Rowen White: Thousands upon thousands of years ago, our ancestors came into these agreements with seeds, that us as humans gave up a little of our wildness and the plants themselves gave up a little of their wildness. Caring for seeds, it's not just seed saving where you're taking the seeds from generation to generation, but there's a larger matrix of responsibility that comes from that, of engaging in that reciprocity of ensuring that we're showing up in good ways, in all layers, culturally, spiritually, emotionally.

[00:01:35] Emily Race: As a farmer, mentor, leader, writer, and storyteller, Rowen is deeply committed to a lifelong practice of embodied prayer that contributes to cultivating a culture of belonging in our ways of nourishing ourselves. She is part of a collective movement, to reseed imaginations of a more beautiful and nourishing future.

Through uplifting and mentoring emerging change makers, visionaries, community members, and creative humans who are making nourishing contributions at the intersection of the landscape of food sovereignty and cultural revitalization, she believes through the power of cultivating creative, supportive learning spaces.

By reclaiming narratives and practicing radical imagination, we can work together to see the change for a more equitable and beautiful relational, kincentric food system that centers around a deep sense of belonging and connection.

Welcome, Rowen. It is such a gift to be with you today. I'm really excited to hear and honored to share space with you as you share a bit about your vision and the work that you're doing with seed keeping amongst other things. Do you mind starting by sharing who you are today? .

[00:02:48] Rowen White: I always say that first and foremost that I'm a Mohawk woman. I come from a small community right on the New York Canadian border called Akwesasne.  I'm a Snipe Clan, that's who holds me accountable as my nation and my clan and my family.

I'm a mother to two beautiful teenage humans, they've been raised up on our seed farm. We have a beautiful 10 acre seed farm called Sierra Seeds, which really is an incubator for not only stewarding Indigenous seeds, some of my own ancestral seed bundle, but also diversity of different Indigenous seeds from across Turtle Island in North America.

But also it’s a sanctuary and an incubator for growing the next generation of seed stewards. So creating that legacy, creating creative learning circles where people can be empowered to rehydrate and awaken that part of themselves that is deeply and intimately connected with seeds and story.

So that's who I am. My growing edge as a seed keeper and a passionate activist for food and seed sovereignty is in the storytelling realm. I just love to tell story both through the photographic lens and also through words. I'm currently writing a couple of books. One is a memoir that really catalogs and maps out this very unconventional rites of passage that I went through under the guidance of the seeds and returning to seeds and land and food of my ancestors. And then the other one is a larger cultural history of agriculture of our people, the Mohawk people. So, I love growing into this side of myself in the ecosystem of the work as a storyteller and alongside the seeds.

So that's who I am in the moment, it's been a 25 year work in progress to grow myself into this woman who I imagine I perhaps wanted to know 25 years ago when I first got involved in this work. So I have slowly charted out a map to be where I am today.

[00:04:51] Emily Race: Congratulations on the books. I didn't know that and that's really exciting. Congratulations on the woman you are today. I feel like I just want to celebrate that given the journey there is worth telling. And on that point, I would love to hear the brief version of how you got to this point that you are today.

[00:05:09] Rowen White: I grew up in a household that was very committed to activism in its own way. My father is a tribal attorney and really centered a lot of his work around Indigenous land sovereignty and water rights. My parents worked for Native American Rights Fund, which is a nonprofit legal defense fund that helps native people reconnect to land and water and hunting rights, et cetera. So I grew up in that conversation of the importance of native connection to land, as a descendant of grandparents and great grandparents who were violently taken from their homes into residential and boarding schools as a part of the Colonial Assimilation project. My grandparents and great grandparents were farmers and grew up on farms, but it was in my parents' generation that that lineage and that stewardship to the land was severed through really, really traumatic means.

You know, the language was taken from the lips of my grandparents. That was their first language, Mohawk. And that commitment and that connection to land was severed. And so, I didn't grow up on a farm and grew up sort of with a penchant to have my hands in the earth and to be outside.

But it wasn't until I was a young woman, around 17, that I left home and ended up in a small town in western Massachusetts on an organic farm, and that was when that aspect of myself was rehydrated. So, under the guidance of some amazing mentors, including Nancy Hansen at the Hampshire College Farm really helped me to open up this doorway of inquiry for agricultural biodiversity, heirloom seeds, the wonder and magic of beans of all different colors and tomatoes of all shapes and sizes. And I was completely blown away at the beauty and brilliance of the garden and at 17, began to generate and touch in with these really cornerstone questions that have led me 25 years along this path, which are, Who are the seeds and foods that fed my ancestors? And why were our people forcefully disconnected from the land and from stewarding the land, and how could I find my way home? So I began to go home to my home community of Akwesasne and then to many other Hoho and Iroquois communities in New York and southern Canada and began to reunite with seeds of my ancestors. And in the memoir I speak about those seeds where my grandmothers and my aunties taking me in a very unconventional rites of passage to find my way home, to find my way home to what it means to be a woman of integrity, a Mohawk woman of integrity, and upholding my agreements and responsibilities to the earth and to seeds and to this web of relationships that in a lot of ways was very hidden from me in my upbringing.

And so that really was such a formative time for me, to learn inside the garden and to begin to gain a sense of purpose and passion, and also have that reflection of how vitally important this work was, and that really illuminated to me this vital connection point, this inextricable connection between cultural revitalization and this dignified resurgence that as a collective Indigenous peoples are embarking on, rising up from the wounds of colonialism, both as a collective and also individually. Each one of us as Indigenous people are doing that just the same.

So that inextricable connection between that cultural revitalization and the restoration of our foods and seeds and what those foods and seeds encode, right? They encode so many cultural memories, so much story, so much meaning, spiritual agreements, layers upon layers upon layers of wisdom and lessons that they have for us.

So that started to awaken and rehydrate inside of the earth of my body over 25 years ago.

And I feel so distinctly honored and privileged to have continued to have the perseverance and tenacity to continue to listen and follow them. And they've brought me into some pretty incredible spaces.

[00:09:26] Emily Race: Amazing. There's a lot in what you just shared. I just want to honor all of that.

And one thing that is not lost on me, even prior to really being exposed to the work you're doing with Sierra Seeds and seed keeping is the metaphor of a seed within itself and how it's such a beautiful image to come back to as we think about birthing new realities and the abundance that exists within seeds.

And that's my perspective. From your lens, it sounds like you have this very intimate relationship with seeds and it's connected you both to your ancestors and to a future that you're planting now or leading now. You talk about seeds being teachers, what does that look like to you?

[00:10:08] Rowen White: I think to speak more intimately into what you just said, which is that they remind us of, I guess I call it seed time, which is the sort of way in which our perspective as Indigenous peoples on time itself is not linear. It's very cyclical and circular and there's these cycles and successions that happen.

 In a lot of ways, in reconnecting to seed and renewing my commitment to them right and renewing my commitment to care for them and to listen to them and to learn from them was simultaneously reaching back into this ancestral brilliance, this co-evolutionary dance that my ancestors had embarked upon with plants since really the dawning of our creation story.

It goes all the way back. So you're simultaneously tapping into that brilliance, that ancestral brilliance, but at the same time from our cultural perspective, when we care for seeds, we're actually making a promise to care for them on behalf of future generations.

And we have a proverb that says, We don't own the seeds, but we borrow them from our children. We're literally borrowing them from the children that are yet to come. And so in this embodied prayer or this seed keeping is this embodied renewal of commitment or this prayer, you're uniting, being a responsible descendant to those ancestors, but also being a good future ancestor by continuing to steward them well for the next generations.

And so, you know, learning from them, growing myself into a woman capable of being called a seed keeper there's a humility that comes with that responsibility. So you're meeting a new seed for the first time, like an elder has given you a seed, has trusted you with something that is so immensely valuable and precious, and you are learning in real time of what that seed needs, how to care.

And so I always say that not only did the garden grow me into my capacity to be a good mother but the garden itself grew me into a person who's able to have reverence and have gratitude and engage in reciprocity and all of these layers of responsibilities that we have as humans.

And so, you know, I'm still an eternal student of those seeds as teachers. And, I think in so many ways they continue to be a cartography or a map of just so much. Nuance and layers of cultural memory that I don't even know.

So I keep showing up at season after season and saying, Okay, what is it that you have to teach me this year?

[00:12:42] Emily Race: Beautiful. Oh my gosh. And the embodied prayer that you spoke of, I feel that resonant in my own body. It's something that seems to come up often on this podcast.

I wanted to actually, if you don't mind, define seed keeping and why it's important. You've been touching on it a bit, from that cultural revitalization piece for Indigenous peoples, but I am curious, for listeners who may be new to this term, how would you define seed keeping and why is that important?

[00:13:13] Rowen White: Well, you know, seeds are the foundation of any durable, vibrant, local food system that's agricultural in nature. But there's also wild seeds of many different plants and keeping is not only showing up in reciprocity to care for these seeds that we have in our collections, but it's a wider breadth of upholding cultural agreements. So, to preface that, I guess I'll say that thousands, or perhaps thousands upon thousands of years ago, our ancestors came into these agreements with seeds, right?

That us as humans gave up a little of our wildness and the plants themselves gave up a little of their wildness, and we said that we would come together in this. mutual flourishing to, care for one another, right? And so those agreements are written in our blood and our bones, right?

It's been passed down from generation to generation as humans. Caring for seeds and seed keeping, it's not just seed saving where you're taking the seeds from generation to generation, but there's a larger matrix of responsibility that comes from that, of engaging in that reciprocity of, ensuring that we're showing up in good ways in, all layers, culturally, spiritually, emotionally, physically, all of those layers.

And so seed keeping is keeping the seeds alive, physically and from season to season. But it's also being that link and that intergenerational chain of stewardship, making sure that not only the seeds stay alive, but the stories and the recipes and the way to cook them and the way to grow them and the seed songs and the ceremonies and all of these beautiful layers of culture and spirit that surround those seeds that have been passed down in that bundle.

I was born into a time of great cultural upheaval for my people as were my parents, as were my grandparents. And so the bundle of seeds that was our birthright that was supposed to be carried down from one generation to the next no longer had good viable seeds in it, in my family in particular.

And so we've had to do a lot of work as a community to begin to grow some of the seeds from those four-sided elders that kept those seeds alive in the face of absolute atrocities, in the face of unspeakable harms and wrongs done to them, and begin to grow them out so that people can have those in their family bundles again.

So I always like to remind myself, my grandparents grew up on a farm, but my parents didn't grow up on a farm, but I raised my kids on a farm. So it only was one generation and we are able to slowly find our way back into this beautiful reciprocal relationship with seeds and plants.

And when it seems as though there may not be hope, when you go through something as traumatic as what my grandparents did, in just one generation, these things can start to shift and heal. And so that's my commitment to the layers of seed keeping, is that the act of seed keeping is not just keeping the seeds alive for their sake, but it's to honor that mutual reciprocity that we have and recognize the very healing nature of keeping those seeds alive on behalf of our ancestors and the future generations.

[00:16:29] Emily Race: What strikes me is there is that reciprocity as you mentioned, but it's really rooted in a relationship, right?

And, then when you think about our food system over here, and how these things are connected, it's just interesting. We talk a lot about different issues within the food system and then ways of reimagining, and so what would you draw as the link to that, if anything, if we have a fairly broken food system as it stands.

[00:16:52] Rowen White: We have a fairly broken world. Ultimately what I would anchor us back to is relationality, right? That's the foundation. How are we going to stitch together a beautiful world from all of these tattered pieces? It is to restore that connective tissue, which is relationship, right?

Begin to not just intellectualize about it, but actually be in an embodied practice of relationality. And that's my vision I oftentimes talk about. People will say, She does food systems work, or She does work in food sovereignty. But I actually push back a little bit on that because I don't necessarily like the lexicon or the word food system, because I think it comes from a very different worldview than the worldview that I come from and that is in my blood and my bones. Because Indigenous peoples the world over have a beautifully complex and nuanced understanding of a relational-- the word we're using is “kincentric.” So centering kincentric food landscape.

So it's more than some parts working together in a production line supply chain to get food from point A to point B. No, the relational kincentric food landscape is us showing up as humans to seasonally renew our connection and commitment to be a caring relative and a good neighbor.

I think the cultural insanity of our time right now is that we forget that we’re constantly being held in a web of relationship, constantly. And the cultural insanity is that we can't see that, we don't acknowledge that. And we actively harm that network of relationships in order to feed and nourish ourselves.

So the place where I like to go as somebody who, for better or for worse, is innately hopeful or is innately optimistic about where we can go into the future, is to engage our radical futurism or our imagination to embrace a food landscape based in relationality. And that just starts so small.

It starts in us growing a few plants wherever we are. Even if we live in an apartment, in a balcony, in a pot, and literally not figuratively, literally becoming a good relative to that plant and beginning to express our gratitude and express our care and express our reciprocity to that plant and begin to awaken that part of ourselves that recognizes that we care and that we don't abdicate that care or that reciprocity to an industrial system because the industrial systems don't know how to honor those agreements. And what I like to remind people is that the seeds never gave up their side of the agreement. if you ate today, they did not give up on you.

They didn't give up on the agreements that they made to us as humans. But unfortunately because of the culture of people in so many different cultural groups and backgrounds all over the world, the cultural stand in time is that we have amnesia for the role that we play in that reciprocity towards our food plants and our seed plants.

I told the story of disconnection in my own bloodlines, well, I'm pretty sure none of us who are listening are untouched by the grief of that disconnection in diaspora and so, my vision for this new food landscape is for us to create more intimacy, to create more opportunities to change the system from the inside out, from this really intimate, mycelial way where we begin to grow. I always say this, we grow the next generation of children who love seed as mothers and relatives. And that's the only way it's a long haul. It's not happening swiftly. But the only way that we can make sustainable change in the food landscape is to begin to raise humans who understand that love and that care and reciprocity, that it's not going to come from some technology. It's going to come from us recognizing as humans that we can engage in reverent and loving ways towards the earth and towards seeds.

And so, if there was any one goal to my life's work, it sure would be to, if I could raise people who could love seeds as mothers and relatives, that would be it.

[00:21:20] Emily Race: Thank you for diving into the vision because that's really what we're here to talk about.

I also really appreciate that redirection around the food systems language, because even as you're speaking there is more of a nurturing, relational, embodiment practice, of actually treating a seed in your home or in your yard as a relative versus “let's figure out this system and this industrial machinery.”

[00:21:48] Rowen White: The issue is cultural. It's cultural. It's that we have, unfortunately, a wider society that has a huge cultural blind spot that doesn't allow us to see plants as relatives or that we are bound into this reciprocal relationship with plants since the dawning of time, right?

That people have grown accustomed to going into the store and food gets grown outside of here and so in some ways, even though it's a long game approach, the culture work inside of the food sovereignty movement or the food justice movement or whatever is so critical because it has to do with shifting a mindset.

It has to do with shifting our, again, our relationality to this work. And again, there's no quick fixes, unfortunately. But I think there is a critical mass of, and again, it could happen in one or two generations where we begin to I mean, we've already seen it, we've already seen just in the last 25 years when I started getting into food sovereignty work, there were no young people interested. I was a total outlier. The elders were like, “Young people don't want to farm, they don't want to grow food, They don't care about this stuff.”

And now you go into Indigenous communities and there's a vibrant food and seed movement that's happening, and that's just been in the last 10 to 15 years that that's become valuable and of interest to younger people again. And so I don't think this change is necessarily glacial. I think it does happen relatively quickly. But we have to be patient and persistent in our values and recognizing that ultimately this work is cultural, is to get people to remember.

And that's the thing is that all of us, every single one of us, come from people who have seeds and food woven into their creation stories and their cosmologies and their ceremonies and the heart of culture is food, right? It's like the very, very center.

And so many of us carry trauma of the diaspora and of disconnection, but memory of it is literally in our bodies. It's literally just below the surface. And as an educator myself, I'm a farmer, a seed keeper, so I educate. I teach people about seed keeping and farming. And what energizes me the most is having those moments where you see that memory being rehydrated in people's bodies.

And that it's really right beneath the surface, these memories. And with it comes a whole host of different emotions. There's the grief like I had that when I first started reconnecting with seeds. It was the rage, the anger, the grief of being disconnected from seeds in the first place and all of the atrocities that came with that disconnection.

So there'll be a whole host of emotions that come up for folks when they begin to reconnect, right? But we have to trust that this memory's inside of us and that we have the capacity to do this. And what gives me hope is when I go into seed time, or when I take a little bit of a step back and recognize this little blip in time,  the industrial revolution, and then the GMO seeds and the super industrialized food system, in the larger scope of time is such a tiny, tiny, little blip, you know? And so I have the faith of a seed to just continue to slowly, slowly germinate and sprout.

That's why I think continuing to work in that mycelial way of reigniting that passion and love for this work is really the long game approach. Wendell Berry has a great quote. He says, “We exploit what we merely value, but we defend what we love.” And, that's the heart of this work. If we can inspire people to show up in their love of their people or their love of the land, or their love of the seeds, or the love of whatever's making them passionate, that's the true sustainability of the movement. That's what's going to keep this work moving forward intergenerationally, and make the changes that we are beginning to seed now.

[00:25:48] Emily Race: I love all of this reconstruction around time, our relationship to time, how we view it, because as you were speaking around your own family’s experience, and the generations within your own family, it does actually feel like when you put it that way, it is just a blip of time, which can create some hope. Even though when we're in entrenched in it, we can feel that this is all there is.

[00:26:09] Rowen White: Absolutely. But we have to trust, right? And we have to recognize that ultimately the work of caring for the land, caring for seeds, stewarding being in relationship to place, ultimately it's intergenerational.

All of this, God's willing, will outlive us. The earth will outlive us. What are we doing in this moment to create legacy with this work so that we are continuing to not only show up in this generation to renew our commitment to take care, but how are we inspiring that in the next generation and empowering and uplifting them to take initiative and leadership in this work?

So that's another growing edge of some of the work I do is mentoring young, emerging folks in this, whether it's learning how to care for seeds or learning how to engage in cooperative development work around their seed endeavors or whatever in order to create livelihood from the land and with seeds themselves.

[00:27:04] Emily Race: I'm feeling hungry to discover more what grows from this vision that you just shared. You shared you have this big picture vision that the next generation, the generations that are here now and being born now, have a new relationship with seeds themselves. What might grow from that?

[00:27:21] Rowen White: It's already growing in real time, like what it actually looks like. We can speak really esoterically about intergenerational legacy, but I'm a very boots on the ground, very practical person, even though I love to speak poetically about my love for seeds, and what that looks like right now.

I am grateful to be one of many founders of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, which informally has been in existence since people have been farming and gardening here on Turtle Island. But we formalized it as a network in the last 10 years to really mobilize and catalyze some momentum around helping people to reconnect to seeds and land in meaningful ways.

And what this bigger vision is growing into is actually creating physical seed hubs. One of the aspects of what Indigenous Seed Keepers Network is doing on the ground, is showing up to support communities who want to create cultural centers that care for seeds. So right now, in my home community of Akwesasne, we are in collaboration with the Akwesasne Freedom School, which is a Mohawk Language and Culture Immersion School, and we fundraised over $2 million to build a living classroom that's dedicated to seed and food stewardship. So there's the land, there's over a hundred acres, there's a cannery that's being built with a commercial kitchen, a seed bank, food processing stations, places for youth to learn, places for the community to host workshops around food, and seed stewardship gardens on the land. And working together in a cooperative way to create viable Indigenous economic endeavors that support farmers and seed keepers in their livelihood to continue to show up and grow good food and grow good seed on behalf of the community.

And so that's what it's looking like, in an actual practice, to create these models of places where people can gather, where stories can be shared, where food can be feasted upon, where seeds can be cared for in our day to day lives and where elders are there, where young people are there and we can all continue to share.

At ISKN we are currently supporting a number of different regions, a number of different tribal communities in developing strategic maps to create these seed hubs so that this can be a cultural center inside of their community. And I always say it's like reseeding the people, right?

This is our way of reseeding our communities, to create a gathering place where there's a living seed bank where the seeds are grown year in and year out, where those stories and ceremonies can happen.

And perhaps maybe it becomes a model for other communities of culture to look to and to say, Oh yeah, seeds are an important center inside of our community, what can we do to create those as well? So I'm very seed centric because it's my life's passion, and I think every community should have a living seed bank in their community where they can care for seeds and acknowledge the role that seeds play in a sustainable, bioregional, agricultural landscape. What I bring to that vision and what Indigenous people bring to that vision is recognizing the layers of cultural and spiritual commitment and connection that we have to seeds and the importance of people connecting in those beautiful ways around seeds themselves. So that's the vision in practice, if we have this vision of this beautiful, kincentric relational landscape of food. How do we get there? One way is that we build these places where we can grow the next generation of seed stewards and land stewards.

[00:31:05] Emily Race: I love how you mentioned that it's like a model, because if we can see what this looks like in practice, then it becomes a starting place to not necessarily replicate and scale, exactly, because maybe there's a nuance?

[00:31:18] Rowen White: There is an opportunity there and in some ways it's part of that seeding, which is really apropos in this instance, because the metaphor of seed is, one turning into many. And turning as many, like the metaphor of seed in this instance, because it begins to spark, and for each community, whether that's an Indigenous community or a migrant community or settler community, that seed hub will be a reflection of who they are as people and their culture and their values, et cetera.

[00:31:47] Emily Race: One thing that's coming alive for me is a curiosity whether you have dreams around what it would look like to extend beyond a hub so that our societal fabric now starts to look different as a result of this new relationship with seeds. Do you have any dreams or visions there?

[00:32:01] Rowen White: I think it begins as these locus, right? These little points. And then again, it's about building out that connective tissue. So another aspect of the work that we do at Indigenous Seed Keepers Network is intercultural in nature, which is the land and seed rematration work.

So that's essentially part of a larger movement to return seeds from non-native institutions into Indigenous stewardship again, and then land, same way, land that's been stewarded by non-native people to return that land back to Indigenous communities. And the reason why I bring that up is because that work in nature is intercultural.

It's actually beginning to build that connective tissue, that common ground between different communities of culture. So whether it's people of European descent who became settlers here, or migrant communities like the Latino community or Somali community or whomever, who are here, that's where that begins to ripple outward from these hubs, outward into a more comprehensive landscape. We begin to not only recognize that this work is us as humans building relationships to seeds or to land, but it's actually building relationships with one another across cultures and building those opportunities for that intercultural relational landscape. And that's even longer game work but it's recognizing that we all live here on Turtle Island and so how are we going to come into some mutuality around how land and stewardship, because if there's little islands of coherence of Indigenous people stewarding land and seed and language and culture, but the overarching dominant culture is absolutely destroying the earth through extractive, exploitative means, then it becomes really difficult. And so in some ways, even though it's difficult for Indigenous peoples to endeavor, to work interculturally with people who oppress them and whose ancestors actively were involved in their people's genocide, I think that's what this rematration movement offers us is a shade tree under which we can begin to find reparations and reconciliation and healing and truth telling and all of the things that need to come in order to move us towards more cultural sanity here on Turtle Island.

And I'm just a humble seed keeper, so I don't know necessarily what that might look like, but I am courageous enough to want to lean in and say, If we're all here, we have to somehow find a way forward together. So that's where I don't necessarily think that my message is exclusive for Indigenous peoples, that hopefully this message continues to spark longing or spark remembrance in people from all different backgrounds and turns this ugly cultural ship around where people are lashing out at the earth herself, in incredibly devastating ways, just in their disconnection and their brokenheartedness. So I think the future of a relational food landscape is intercultural in nature.

I think that we all need to show up to a table or around a fire and figure out ways in which we hold each other accountable to continuing to move ourselves towards that future.

[00:35:28] Emily Race: I'm really grateful that you are bringing this part of the vision to the conversation and it feels so important because it is true. We do live now together, but the way in which we're living together, the relationships that we currently have are not life sustaining. Then what does that look like? And I'm wondering if what you said earlier around how it begins with our own relationship to seed. For myself, as someone from a European descent, in my peoples there could be a huge disconnect with our relationship to the land and with seeds in that loving way. So by starting there then that kind of opens something in the heart that then creates a yearning for a new kind of relationship with other people. Does that feel in line with what you are dreaming?

[00:36:13] Rowen White: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing I think is really, really important. I always try and exercise that empathy of saying we all descend from people. It's being that inclusive of being like, Well, we all have that and yeah, there are settler people who came here did some unspeakable things. They came here on the tails of the Crusades and the crazy things that were happening in Europe and traumatized people. And then the way that those cycles of oppression continue to happen. I think that, perhaps it's foolishly idealistic on my part, but I do think we have to learn how to rehydrate or reawaken this in all of us. But in this time I do feel very strongly that Indigenous peoples the world over have a more embodied memory of what that feels and looks like. And so in this time, continuing to center Indigenous leadership and Indigenous voices, Indigenous visionaries so that we can begin to move towards that more equitable food landscape.

I think in some ways, in the regenerative agricultural movement or the organic food movement, we tend to see white folks or white males continuing to hold leadership positions in those movements. And again, I think there are cultural blinders there.

There are so many ways in which, while we all have to move interculturally towards the future of food, that I think that it's time for Indigenous peoples and bodies of culture and BIPOC folks to take leadership and to be able to articulate what that might look like, because you look at the organic movement and there's industrial organics now too, and it’s like, But is that really organic? Is that really the vision? No, it has to come from again, that deeper relationality.

[00:38:03] Emily Race: I'm curious, I feel like I ask this question often with different guests, but what does Indigenous leadership then look like if we have this one way that leadership has looked like, the dominant culture?  You mentioned most often it seems to be white male, but then there comes with that certain agreements around what leadership is or isn't and I'm just curious.

[00:38:23] Rowen White: Power dynamics. It's something I work out at work a lot. I host a creative incubator called Seeding Change, which is really all about leadership development inside of these movements and really it is participatory in nature, understanding leadership as organizations or movements or ecosystems, right? And we all have a specific role inside of that ecosystem. And while I don't necessarily advocate for complete anarchy, like everybody has their structure, people want to call it like horizontal leadership, where it's just so flat.

But then there's also vertical structure that happens inside of participatory leadership structures where each one of us has our zone of genius and our body of experience and we're empowered to make decisions in our own way. And we're building trust with one another.

And that's, I think, key to Indigenous leadership systems and decision making systems, that it's a constant practice of trust with one another. We have to continue to build that trust and continue to recognize that we are held accountable by our community, and that's something that Indigenous peoples bring to the table is that we're not just individuals, like this rugged individual, working on behalf of this project or this or that.

I came into this room saying I'm held accountable by my nation and by my clan and by my family. The things that I say I'm held accountable, by my, of my words and my actions, I'm held accountable by that community. And I think that's unfortunately where the cultural insanity comes in is that it's everybody for themselves, so I think in some ways recognizing who is it that we are held accountable by? Is a really, really important lens for what Indigenous leadership looks like, recognizing that we see ourselves as one part of a larger system, which includes our more than human relatives, right?

It's not just human centric. It actually includes our more than human relatives. And, we have ways of dividing and listening to them and understanding their needs and how we can support them in that way.

[00:40:28] Emily Race: Accountability is so missing in so many areas and it's so key. I totally was brought back to what you said around having an accountability to the seeds themselves. So thank you for that offering. As we wrap things up here, I'd love to know-- For listeners, regardless of their cultural heritage and how they identify, I'm curious, what's an inquiry or an action that you would love them to take out of this conversation?

[00:40:51] Rowen White: Yeah, that's a great question. I often tell this to folks: You can just be as simple as reconnecting to one food or seed of your ancestor. That was that original question. Remember 25 plus years ago, I was a 17 year old girl asking myself, I mean, it's so visceral-- I remember sitting on this dusty farmhouse floor in New England and I was paging through all of these different seed catalogs and I had all these packets of tomato seed. There were like 50 different types of tomato seed in this heirloom seed garden that they had there. And I remember paging through the descriptions of all of them and hearing about these tomatoes that had come from Italy and had been sewn into pockets and came across through Ellis Island.

And that person had brought them over because they reminded them of their family's kitchen back home. And I remember sitting there on that dusty farmhouse floor thinking, I wonder if my family had seeds that had stories like that, and I wonder what the seeds of my ancestors were and if they had similar stories and similar relationships and connections and taste, memory and cultural memory of them. And so we can all ask ourself that question that I had all those years ago. It was just like, what were the foods and seeds that fed my ancestors? And maybe some of us are mixed, we come from a multitude of different communities of culture, so pick one, and begin to relate to that plant in meaningful and reciprocal ways.

Whether we get some seeds of that plant and can grow it in our garden or in a container or pot or we get the ingredients and begin to research recipes that perhaps were in our bloodlines.

We know that ancestry is fraught and there's sometimes trauma that lay hidden in there, or ways in which the disconnection from our ancestry brings up a lot of emotions, but the only way you know out of this is through this, right?

The only way is to lean into it and to recognize that we hold so much capacity for healing and the foods themselves. That's the beautiful thing about food work is that it's somatic in nature and it's multisensory.

And so when you eat those foods or when you smell them cooking or when you're in the garden and you're engaging in this reverent, curious practice of being under those plants, it awakens memories that sort of bypass our brain or intellectual capacity and go into these felt memories and these embodied memories and teach us things that we can't necessarily always receive through our brain, our intellectual capacity. That’s why I love it so much, because you see wisdom and knowledge emerging inside of people that they didn't even realize they had when they begin to eat these foods because they travel in all parts of their bodies and reawaken certain things. And so that felt true for me, and I see it with students who I have the privilege of teaching in our programs. And so the practice is having multisensory experiences with a seed or food of your ancestors.

[00:43:47] Emily Race: Beautiful. What a whole life that question opened for you.

[00:43:50] Rowen White: I know it really is. I mean, I'm still answering that question.

[00:43:56] Emily Race: As we close out, is there any way that folks can support you?

[00:44:01] Rowen White: Well, you can come find us at Sierra Seeds, which is sierraseeds.org. We have a whole host of different online educational programs.

We have a Patreon. You can come follow me on Instagram. I do a lot of storytelling and photo sharing there. And then we also have our Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. The website is nativefoodalliance.org. There's all kinds of ways you can donate and volunteer and get involved in that organization too.

[00:44:30] Emily Race: We'll add all those links and I'm just so grateful for your time and all the wisdom that you shared that's come through you in in your lifetime so far. So thank you. Please continue living the life that you're leading because it's such a model for what's possible for future generations, and I hope that listeners leave just as inspired as I have been.

[00:44:49] Rowen White: Yeah. Well, great. Thanks again.

[00:44:54] Emily Race: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mother's Podcast. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Emily Race, and edited by Eric Weisberg. If you want to support the show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life. We'd also love to hear from you if you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the world. You could email emily@founding-mothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast.