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 an activist for indigenous seed sovereignty.

I spoke to Rowan last year for our food-themed issue about what seeds, who she calls her greatest

teachers, have shown her that resilience is rooted in diversity and that all of us carry

encoded memories of how to plant and care for seeds.

Over the last few months, as the topics of resilient agricultural practices and seed sovereignty

came front and center as the pandemic reveal just how fragile our food systems are, I've often

found myself returning to what Rowan shared in our

interview. As we gather safely around the table this coming week, I encourage you to consider

your relationship to the foods that nourish you and to reflect on the encoded memories of planting

and care that you carry.

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 and gardened kind of as a livelihood

were my great-grandparents.

My grandparents grew up on a farm, but they were all part of what we call the boarding school

...