Returning seeds to their ancestors: Revitalizing biodiversity and foodways through plant rematriation

Courtney Streett first heard about the Nanticoke squash in 2021. As president and executive director of the then-recently formed Native Roots Farm Foundation (NRFF), which reunites the Nanticoke people of the larger Delaware region with aspects of their heritage and shares that knowledge with the wider world, she was intrigued and made a mental note to research the fruit further.

Streett, who is a member of the Nanticoke Tribe, was not surprised that she or few other tribal members were aware of the squash that was named after them. Beginning with the arrival of Spanish explorers in the 1500s, European colonization of the New World triggered a drastic loss of Indigenous lands, cultural traditions, foods and languages. Until 1978, it was illegal to practice tribal customs in the United States. Many Native Americans still face racism and lack economic opportunities. President Trump’s recent attempt to overturn birthright citizenship has also been disquieting: Some Indigenous people have been subject to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

A reckoning with this painful history has prompted, among other things, a renewed interest in rediscovering and reviving lost plants that were once Indigenous agricultural mainstays, leading to restoration efforts known as rematriation.

What is rematriation?

Rematriation is essentially “the act of returning culturally significant seeds from a place outside of our traditional communities and returning them back in good ways to those communities of origin,” explains Rowen White, member of the Mohawk Tribe, founder of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, and owner of the California seed farm Sierra Seeds. It is not a commonly used word; repatriation is the more familiar term.

The word rematriation is utilized because historically in Indigenous communities, planting, cultivating, harvesting and seed-saving fell under the women’s purview. And because, says Streett, the act of rematriation is “to restore human and plant relationships and reconnect us with Mother Earth.”

That human-Earth connection is intrinsic to many Native American belief systems — and its disruption also has real-world consequences. While Indigenous peoples are not a monolith, according to one study, Native populations suffer from “significant health disparities, including nutrition-related chronic diseases (diabetes, cancer, and heart disease)” — a result of displacement from their lands and ways of life, which has led to generational trauma, poverty, reliance on federal food programs, and other deleterious outcomes.

Rematriation efforts aim to restore food sovereignty and agency to Indigenous people. Reclaiming “lost” seeds and being able to plant them, says White, is critical to regenerating a community-based traditional agriculture system. And educating people about the seeds and their history (more is known about some than others), how to grow them and incorporate them into daily life, is the true expression of rematriation.

Reclaiming heritage

Streett’s interest in seed rematriation was sparked in 2018: After attending a Nanticoke powwow in Delaware, she stopped by a relative’s farm only to discover it was for sale. Nights spent awake, ruminating about the area’s robust development and the potential for cultural and family loss, propelled her to found NRFF. Its mission is to “reclaim, cultivate and celebrate Native relationships with land, plants and community for the next seven generations,” a reference to the Iroquois principle that sound, thoughtful decisions should create a sustainable world for the next seven generations.

Streett’s goal is for NRFF to steward land for their public Hakihakàn — the Lenape word for “garden” or “farm” — on which to grow Native plants, hold public programming and demonstrate Indigenous land practices. While seeking funding to purchase land, the fledgling nonprofit has engaged in public programming at powwows and area gardens, and in rematriation work, returning nearly obscure seeds and plants like the Nanticoke squash to its Three Sister Tribes community: the Nanticoke and the Lenape, based in Delaware, and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, centered in southern New Jersey.

The Nanticoke and Maycock Squash Revitalization Project, a collaboration begun in 2022 among NRFF, Experimental Farm Network (EFN), The Seed Farm at Princeton, and Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, exemplifies those efforts.

Nate Kleinman, co-founder of EFN — a nonprofit that breeds seeds for climate change mitigation, health, food and justice — gave Streett some seeds grown by the farms with which he works; so far, seeds and seedlings have been rematriated to roughly 85 tribal members and their ancestral soils for the first time in generations.

This reciprocal relationship — in which people care for seeds and vice versa — is vastly different from its Western agricultural counterpart, which places humans at the center and plants in service of humans. Historically speaking, Indigenous people have innately understood the value of diversity to evolution and survival, culturally encoding a wide variety of seeds and plants into ceremonies, stories and daily activities. For example, certain seeds and plants are used as ingredients in ceremonial foods, others in specific cultural activities.

The cultivation, care and love bestowed on seeds by early Indigenous ancestors — Streett calls them “plant scientists” — adds to the seeds’ significance. Squash, for instance, is an integral part of the Three Sisters planting — the traditional intercropping practice of growing squash, corn and beans together in support of one another — an example of advanced indigenous agriculture that has become mainstream, though not always attributed to its Native progenitors. So reviving another variety is significant.

Melissa Anderson, a Nanticoke tribal council member, was moved to tears at the lunch. Unexpectedly overwhelmed by emotion as she ate food grown from the seeds of her own ancestors rather than someone else’s, she credits Streett with “helping a culture move forward in their understanding of food.”

White estimates she’s helped rematriate hundreds of seeds around the United States. The 2018 rematriation ceremony of a squash variety belonging to the Taos Pueblo tribe near Taos, New Mexico, which White found in the Seed Savers Exchange seed bank, “was one of those moments that you’ll never forget,” she recalls. “I have all these pictures of women holding the squash like a baby. It was so emotional. They hadn’t had the squash in their village for like 40 some-odd years and it had returned.”

Adds Streett, “Inside seeds are the hopes and dreams of our ancestors. … It is our responsibility to continue to love and nurture these seeds and these dreams, and to pass them on to future generations.”

Top photo by Nate Kleinman.