Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Rowan White is a seed keeper from the Mohawk community of Aquasasnay and is the director and founder of Sierra Seeds, an organic sea cooperative based in Nevada City, California.

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

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

Throughout her conversation, she spoke about the links between cultural revitalization

and the restoration of traditional food ways,

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 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 generation. So they were taken away

from their families and the connection between the land and between food and seed from a cultural perspective was really severed.

And so I always was curious, always pounding rocks and getting my hands on the earth.

And my mom had a little garden out back. I used to grow these

little pumpkins and everybody always used to say that I have two ancestors in my lineage, my great

...