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.