Paper short abstract:

In the Andes, potatoes can “decide” to grow big and tasty or shrivel up and leave. Imagine how the Quechua farmers felt about depositing their potatoes in the arctic Seed Vault. As one lamented: I feel broken here. Without a consideration of the vitality of germplasm, refuges can turn to exile.

Paper long abstract:

In ecological edges and cultural folds, multi-vocal, multi-sensory, and multispecies kinships have emerged as sanctuaries of practice and memory. Such counters constitute sensuous conservation and provoke us to question, and to act. How do out-of-the-way gardens and kitchens nurture and deploy memories central to identity and persistence?

In the Andes, potatoes can “decide” to grow big, beautiful, and tasty or shrivel up and leave. This intimate-animate landscape contains within it considerable ambiguity and ambivalence. Imagine how the Quechua farmers representing the Communities of the Potato Park felt about depositing their potatoes ---“infants” that they swaddle in blankets and sing to, wily ones that jump out of the ground to greet them, and errant ones that they scold before taking back in --- in the Global Seed Vault for safekeeping. In the film, Uysay (The Seed), a Quechua woman who was part of the delegation grieves: I bring you, endangered children/I leave my family to walk this journey/And now, arriving, I feel broken here.

Without a careful consideration of significance and vitality of the germplasm we wish to protect from endangerment, providing refuges can easily turn to exile. Sensuous conservation is sustained in fertile milieus and lush sanctuaries where seeds and knowledge are transmitted through inter-animation and commensality. Cultural and biological legacies are not lost but instead are renewed and recovered in “pockets of memory” (Nazarea 1998). We are not without guideposts because an eco-cultural memory, like a refrain, is buried in the seeds and the stories woven around them.

Paper short abstract:

Seed sovereignty is the root of food sovereignty for Native American farmers. I will discuss community-based organizing to protect seeds as living relatives and intellectual property, and efforts to rematriate (bring home) seeds collected by outside institutions back to their communities of origin.

Paper long abstract:

Native American heirloom seed varieties, many of which have been passed down through generations of Indigenous gardeners or re-acquired from seed banks or ally seed savers, are often discussed by Indigenous farmers as the foundation of the food sovereignty movement, and as helpful tools for education and reclaiming health. Gardeners describe a connection and obligation to these seeds and the elders and ancestors to whom these seeds connected them. Seed keepers have formed organizations and alliances in an effort to not only pass along knowledge about how to grow these seeds, but also to protect seeds as both relatives and intellectual property through the theorization and enactment of “seed sovereignty.” This paper explores how Native American community-based farming and gardening projects are defining heirloom or heritage seeds; why maintaining and growing out these seeds is seen as so important, and how terms like seed sovereignty should be defined and enacted. Seeds are described almost as intergenerational relatives-- both as children that need nurturing and protecting, and as grandparents who contain cultural wisdom that needs guarding. For these reasons, a growing network of Indigenous seed keepers is coalescing to not only provide education to tribal people around seed planting and saving, but also to push for the “rematriation” of Indigenous seeds from institutions who have collected or inherited them, back to their communities of origin.

Paper short abstract:

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, heirloom seeds sharing emerges as a space to experience care and regain connection with culture, food tradition, and biodiversity perseverance. This paper explores invisible reproductive work in (re)producing heirloom seeds as not merely a shared resource.

Paper long abstract:

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, a small circle of women with diverse activist backgrounds established an heirloom seed sharing Facebook group, namely Pamong Benih Warisan (PBW/Custodian of Heirloom Seeds). Started as unpretentious solidarity to distribute reusable masks paired with seeds, the group's founders seized the momentum of the pandemic to rekindle heirloom seeds relation with culture, food tradition, and biodiversity perseverance. Without strict boundaries, heirloom seeds are received by middle-class urban gardeners, farmers, precarious informal workers, communities, and women groups in urban and rural areas across Indonesia. This paper explores how the PBW (re)producing heirloom seeds as not merely a shared resource but also its embedded socio-cultural meaning – or commoning?

The PBW member's relation with seeds is defined through the invisible reproductive work of planting seeds, utilizing the yields, and re-sharing the seeds. Heirloom seeds provided an opportunity to experience care, regain autonomy, access to nutritious food, and create an alternative economic activity based on biodiversity and solidarity. Moreover, knowledge is learned through an exchange of stories, recipes, and cultivation practices. As the members are scattered across Indonesia, commoning practices and approaches are diverse in each offline network. The remaining dilemma is whether to keep the PBW as an open-unstructured hub for seeds sharing with its irregularity online interaction and diverse offline practices or systematize it as consolidated seeds activism.