Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Rowan White is a seed keeper from the Mohawk community of Aquasasasne, and is the director and founder of Sierra Seeds,

an organic seed cooperative based in Nevada City, California.

I spoke with Rowan in 2019 about her work to sustain and revitalize indigenous seed sovereignty.

As we prepare to gather around our tables for Thanksgiving,

we are resharing this conversation

as an invitation to honor and remember the embodied histories

and relationships that are carried by the foods that nourish us.

Rowan views seeds as both her direct ancestors and her greatest teachers.

Throughout this conversation, Rowan speaks about the links between cultural revitalization

and the restoration of traditional foodways, how resilience is rooted in diversity,

and her growing awareness of the ways that seeds are a reflection of people.

Well, it's a real pleasure to talk with you this morning, Rowan.

And I wanted to start off by getting a sense of what your relationship with food

and farming and seeds was like growing up?

Well, first and foremost, as a Mohawk woman, we are, culturally, we're intimately connected

in with food and farming because of our ancestral traditions and our cosmologies and our

stories, but unfortunately due to the impacts of colonization, acculturation,

displacement of our people. When I was growing up, the last people that I knew who farmed

...