Respect the Seed: Genetic Diversity - Rowen White, EcoFarm Conference Keynote 2017

[00:00:00] Great. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for the distinct pleasure of coming here and speaking [00:00:21] to you all. There's so many familiar faces and also so many new people to meet while [00:00:25] we're here. So I did want to put these up here. These were seeds that I sent all [00:00:30] the way up to Standing Rock and they were prayed over and then they came back [00:00:32] just tonight to me. So I figured they'd be good talismans of hope for for tonight. [00:00:37] In some forgotten part of all of us, there yet towers the roofless ruins of a neatly made [00:00:47] tiny earth and timber palace of unconscious memory and whose thick walls these [00:00:54] amazing ancestors have left for us to find. A pot of precious seeds, indigenous seeds of [00:01:01] still viable knowledge and living vitality. Seeds that could re-sprout into view the organic [00:01:09] articles of the original treaty that we humans promised long ago to uphold between ourselves [00:01:15] and the natural world when we began to cultivate seeds and her plants and animals through agriculture. Mudded into these forgotten [00:01:24] ramparts of our indigenous souls. These seeds of how humans are meant to live have passed down unnoticed like [00:01:31] through millennia, through millennia, waiting for each generation to consciously rediscover them, [00:01:43] replant them into welcoming ground, and cultivate, once again into view, a livable, viable array of ritual seed cultures worth descending from. [00:01:53] Now these are some words, some dear and precious words from a friend and mentor of mine, Martine Prechtel. [00:02:02] Maybe some of you have met him, had the honor of being around him. And I hope that these words provide invocation and seep into your heart, that earthy and cracked vessel, [00:02:14] to inspire the sprouting of a new seed culture, which is really what I came here to speak on behalf of. [00:02:21] My name is Rowan White. [00:02:23] I come from a place called Akwasasne, which is a Mohawk reserve right on the New York-Canadian border. [00:02:28] I'm Snipe Clan, and I descend from a long line of people who have, um, danced around, um, who have learned to dance and sing like beans twine around corn. [00:02:41] You can see this, they dance in a certain way. [00:02:43] Now I'm just a humble farmer of life, somebody who, like each and every one of you, loves the seed and the earth as mother, right? [00:02:53] And if my voice quivers a little bit or if I flush in the face, it comes from the depth of this love that I have for these seeds that we carry. [00:03:02] I brought corn up here as, as a, a talisman. [00:03:06] And the distinct honor of carrying the message of the seeds here tonight, such hopeful seeds. [00:03:16] So we are corn people, or us Mohawk people, Haudenosaunee people. [00:03:19] You can see here on the screen, this is a depiction of our creation story. [00:03:24] And in our creation story, we were told a long, long time ago that original woman sung the world awake. [00:03:33] And as she sung the world awake, she sowed seeds. [00:03:36] And it was her, her feet that shuffled them into the earth, and then they sprouted. [00:03:41] And upon her death, her body became a garden. [00:03:46] And the, and in that garden, her hands sprouted as beans. [00:03:51] The squash, you can see one of my ancestral squashes that's before us on the stage. [00:03:56] Those came from her umbilicus. [00:03:58] The sunflowers came from her legs. [00:04:01] The strawberries sprouted from her heart. [00:04:03] Tobacco from her mind, for us to give prayers in a good way. [00:04:07] And the corn, our sacred corn, sprouted from her breasts. [00:04:13] As a, as a, as a, a connection so that we would know that she was always our mother. [00:04:19] Each spring, we renew this covenant. [00:04:23] This agreement that we have to the seeds and to the earth. [00:04:26] In the planting of this garden. [00:04:28] My daughter's here in the front row. [00:04:30] She's just about 12 and as a part of our rites of passage. [00:04:34] We teach our young women how to, how to tend to this garden. [00:04:38] And how to, uh, to renew those contracts for the coming season. [00:04:45] Now is a time of midwinter for our people. [00:04:48] Uh, we, we are, um, we are a lunar people. [00:04:51] We follow the stars and the moon. [00:04:53] And the beginning of our agricultural calendar is now in the midwinter. [00:04:59] When the seeds lie dormant, just like seeds in the dark soil before the spring sprouting. [00:05:05] Now winter, this is a sacred time for story and dream. [00:05:09] And it also is a time for seed dreaming. [00:05:12] For some of us, this comes in the form of gathering our stacks of seed catalogs that arrive in our, our mailbox every day. [00:05:20] For others, it's digging in our treasure box of seeds that sit up on a shelf or a pantry or, or perhaps, you know, some little special spot in your barn. [00:05:31] Little tiny gems of embodied potential. [00:05:34] The pallet of seeds from my garden design admittedly comes from both sources. [00:05:40] I love and treasure finding, you know, adaptive seeds and Seed Savers Exchange and, uh, you know, even Johnny's Seed Catalog, looking through them. [00:05:49] But I also have treasured varieties that I bring out of our earthen seed kiva. [00:05:54] Trusty old friends who grace our gardens and our tables. [00:05:58] Um, sacred mohawk, uh, red bread corn that looks like juicy pomegranate kernels. [00:06:05] This was one of the first varieties that I had the good, great fortune to steward, um, as a, as a treasure from my own people. [00:06:14] This, this corn right here that you're looking at was nearly extinct. [00:06:21] It had whittled down to just one cob in the hands of a trusted mohawk seed elder. [00:06:26] And through the course of the last couple of decades, we've revitalized her again. [00:06:31] I have blue, uh, blue corn that are lined up in neat little rows of eight kernels around. [00:06:39] Oftentimes have this kind of pearly blue and gray slate color. [00:06:44] Multicolored calico corn from my own people that catch the light in the morning sun. [00:06:50] Spiraling chapalote corn cobs that look as though they are sculpted from iridescent tiger's eye. [00:06:56] Piles of beans. [00:06:59] These are skunk bean, um, vigorous pole bean from my people, from the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois people. [00:07:05] These are, uh, hayot bean. [00:07:09] They call them cranberry beans. [00:07:10] They're beautiful pole bean. [00:07:11] These are, are beautiful bear paw bean. [00:07:16] Some of you know them as scarlet runners. [00:07:18] But they're all visibly pulsating with the dynamic energy of life that infuses us all. [00:07:24] Each one of these varieties that I know with intimate reverence. [00:07:29] They have fed my body. [00:07:31] They have fed my children. [00:07:33] They have fed my friends and community. [00:07:36] And their seed song will live on in my blood and my bones as we pass from one generation to the next. [00:07:42] These seeds have become one with the land that we have the great good fortune to steward. [00:07:47] Having grown here in California soil now for seven generations at least, [00:07:52] they are now at home here in this earth. [00:07:55] They are the heirlooms for the future. [00:07:58] In the course of the last couple of centuries, [00:08:01] seed stewardship has gone from being an integrated part of every farm and garden and homestead [00:08:06] to becoming increasingly specialized and commodified. [00:08:10] Seed stewardship is a vital and fundamental practice towards the sustainability of the whole farm system. [00:08:16] We know this. [00:08:18] In this age of specialization and fragmentation, [00:08:21] we have seen alm farm stewardship, seed stewardship nearly become extinct. [00:08:26] Only a small handful of seed companies to steward the seeds on our behalf. [00:08:34] With this trend, we have seen the diversity and regionally adapted heritage seeds of the past, [00:08:39] replaced with one size fits all seeds from these national and international seed houses. [00:08:47] I can say with an open heart and mind that within the pages of these seed catalogues, [00:09:00] there are some gems emerging from the swiftly growing organic seed movement. [00:09:05] In the last 18 years of being on the seed path, [00:09:08] I have seen the heartfelt swelling of gardeners and farmers remembering the call of the seed. [00:09:15] That seeds are our connection to adaptation, to evolution, [00:09:20] to the plant's own storehouse of creativity and fertility. [00:09:25] To forget our relationship with them is to damage ourselves and diminishes our own creative capacity [00:09:32] to continue to evolve as the face of our Mother Earth changes in this time. [00:09:41] It has been a great joy to see the awakening of seeds in the hearts and the minds of the people. [00:09:47] Across the earth, there is a peaceful rumbling of a grassroots revolution to reclaim the seeds into the hands of the people. [00:09:55] People are remembering their responsibility to care for our precious seed relatives. [00:10:00] Farmers and gardeners are remembering their responsibility to care for the seeds. [00:10:09] Since the dawning of agriculture, people have been passing seeds down from one generation to the next. [00:10:13] All seeds that grace our fields and grace our tables descend from the collective efforts of countless ancestors. [00:10:21] Carefully selecting the right seeds that meet the needs of the family, the village, the nation, the watershed, [00:10:29] and shed the bioregion. [00:10:34] One magnificent proclamation for our love for seeds has been through our annual rite of seed swapping. [00:10:41] I know we'll have a seed swap tomorrow and I hope each and every one of you will come and join us in that beautiful celebration. [00:10:48] One small vestige of our beautiful and intricate seed culture that each one of us descends from. [00:10:56] Each person that comes in with their boxes and baskets full of jars of abundance. [00:11:01] We are seeing a magical homeopathic distillation of the seasonal cycles of the land where they have [00:11:07] the great good fortune to steward and grow and dwell. [00:11:10] Seeds that have come into being in the grand interplay between soil and sun, blossom and bee, wind and pollen, seed and chaff. [00:11:22] Each one of these seed keepers has their own earth apothecary of a whole living library of nourishment from the unique piece of land where they dwell. [00:11:32] Each variety is a constellation of memories, whole libraries of volumes of science, tragedy, romance, love, family, adventure. [00:11:42] I found myself on a compelling journey about 18 years ago of curiosity. [00:11:50] I was sitting upon a dusty farmhouse floor in New England. [00:11:55] I had been going to school at Hampshire College and I was set to task to take care of the heirloom tomato garden that they had planted each and every year. [00:12:07] My family had, the last person to farm in my family had been my great grandfather. [00:12:13] As a Mohawk woman and as a Mohawk family, we had been deeply impacted by the legacy of colonization and acculturation. [00:12:22] And so my grandparents and even my great grandparents were taken away to residential schools and stripped of their language, their culture. [00:12:29] So I had been set to task at this specific moment on this farmhouse floor to sort out all the seeds. [00:12:38] I had never heard at that point in my life, I was 17, I had never heard before the word heirloom in relationship to seed or the garden. [00:12:48] Nor had I any understanding that tomatoes came in any other color or shape other than round and red, right? [00:12:56] This was a whole new world for me. [00:12:59] That seed had stories of tomato, I remember paging through all of the seed catalogs and reading about all these different, 50 different tomato varieties. [00:13:07] And reading stories of tomatoes that had made the long journey from Meso and South America across the Atlantic Ocean to places like Italy, [00:13:16] where the grandmothers gratefully took them in and, and, and, you know, enveloped them into their own culinary tradition. [00:13:23] Then I read stories of some of the descendants of those same seeds being sown into the pockets of, of immigrants and crossing back over the same ocean to Ellis Island, [00:13:35] where they would have maybe just a small vestige, just a small little bundle of the flavors of their own home that would remind them of who they were. [00:13:43] Now sitting upon that dusty farmhouse floor, I had great sparks of inspiration, but I will say honestly to each and every one of you that I also had a great wellspring of grief that came from my heart. [00:13:58] Me being a Mohawk woman who descended from a long line of honorable and beautiful farmers sitting upon that floor, feeling her poverty and not being able to say that I carried the seeds of my ancestors. [00:14:10] So I felt a great wave of grief and so, but it was that grief, some of that grief that we're feeling in these times right now, knowing what is happening, you know, to, to the legacy of this country. [00:14:22] We feel that grief, but I used that grief as a catalyst, as a means to step onto this beautiful path to discover the seeds of my ancestors. [00:14:31] I had wakened that deep yearning in my heart and now, years later, I have boxes and baskets and jars of the food that fed my great grandpa and, you know, many, many others before him. [00:14:46] Working with these seeds, 18 years ago I would have never understood what it meant for me to be a seed keeper in this time. [00:14:55] Caring for these beautiful corns and seeds have taught me how to be a mother. [00:15:00] They have taught me how to be a teacher. [00:15:04] They have taught me how to be a gardener. [00:15:06] They have taught me how to be a lover of life. [00:15:08] They are the greatest teachers that I've had, you know, in this time. [00:15:12] And they have become that trellis of hope for me when things seem bleak on the outside. [00:15:17] I have had the great honor of learning from many wise seed keepers, some of which are in this room right now. [00:15:24] Folks like Steve McCumber, Mary Arquitt, Winona LaDuke, Deb Echohawk, Frank Kuka, John Navasio, Frank Morton, Steve Peters, Clayton Bracope, Amigdio Bayon, Mikayla Akali, Matthew Dillon. [00:15:38] We have this beautiful long lineage in this new renaissance of seed keeping. [00:15:44] There's some of my Haudenosaunee elders. [00:15:52] This year we convened for the first time in probably over a hundred years to honor and celebrate our seeds at the first annual Haudenosaunee Seed Keeper Society meeting. [00:16:02] Which is a huge, big endeavor. [00:16:14] We do not own these seeds as it's been told to me by my elders. [00:16:18] We are told in our Haudenosaunee tradition that we borrow them from our children. [00:16:24] This work is never done. [00:16:26] It's filial work. [00:16:27] It's intergenerational. [00:16:28] We grow old maintaining these varieties. [00:16:31] We who love the seeds like our mother, our sisters, our brothers. [00:16:37] When we restore the seeds in our lives, our farms, we restore these time-honored relationships. [00:16:43] Because through the act of engaging in seed stewardship on our farms again, [00:16:48] we rewrite ourselves back into the story of the magnificent dance between humans and plants. [00:16:53] The gardeners and seed collectors are part of the evolutionary mix. [00:16:57] New expressions emerge from the blend of the terroir from the land. [00:17:01] The interplay of the elements, the weather, the tastes and imaginations of the new culture that we live in. [00:17:08] We are bound in a reciprocal relationship that extends far beyond living memory with these plants. [00:17:14] And what I like to remind myself, my children, and the people who come to study on our farm, [00:17:20] and the people who I get to visit with in my travels, is that these agreements that our ancestors made a long, long time ago reside in our blood and our bones. [00:17:31] And it is those memories that you see being rehydrated when you walk into a seed swap, [00:17:37] or when you walk into your own seed storage room, or your pantry, or, you know, to one of these eco-farm celebrations. [00:17:46] We have those deep memories written in our blood and our bones, that cellular memory, [00:17:51] that each and every one of you descends from a long line of seed keepers. [00:17:55] A long line. [00:17:59] Now, as you walk into the seed swap, you begin to see people's hearts and eyes swelling with that remembrance. [00:18:05] Stories passing from one person to another as seeds change hands. [00:18:10] That visceral feeling of hope that we are blessed with to grow old and that there'll be another season. [00:18:17] The seeds inspire new dreams, potent new beginnings, colorful transformation. [00:18:23] And in their patterns and shapes, they whisper to us and remind us that their life is our life. [00:18:29] And our mutually beneficial relationship that extends in our bloodlines thousands of years, [00:18:35] we thank them through this ritual of seed swapping that we continue to fulfill our promise that we made a long, long time ago [00:18:44] to uphold our responsibility to take care of them because they are always taking care of us, right? [00:18:50] Every single bite of food that we take is due to the generosity of a seed. [00:18:56] Now, the seed swap to me is the most potent and rich form of the gift economy, right? [00:19:04] The seeds are talismans of abundance and they remind us once again of the innate generosity of life. [00:19:11] We witness the incredible alchemy in just one season of seeds turning from one into a hundred, a hundred into a thousand. [00:19:22] We see this multiplication exponentially every year. [00:19:25] Now, I ask myself sometimes, how did we ever buy into the story of scarcity that they're trying to feed us each and every day? [00:19:33] If you take those seeds back into your lives, you'll recognize that nature is inherently abundant and generous. [00:19:40] And when you spend any time with people who carry seeds, you see that generosity being passed from one person to another. [00:19:48] Our greatest wealth is not only in the seeds and the stories of abundance and nourishment, but it's the connection and the relationships that happen when we share seeds with one another. [00:20:00] This is the currency of connection. [00:20:04] The social fabric that is woven and reinforced in so many exquisite shades. [00:20:09] People swap stories, plants, foods, ideas, inspiration, hope, recipes, and inspire a whole new season of earthenhand prayers. [00:20:18] Through these celebrations of life, these seed swaps become one of the most potent forms of social activism that we have in this time over the growing corporate control of our seed resources. [00:20:29] In the spirit of Gandhi, they are the seeds satyagraha, or civil disobedience, against unjust laws that try and restrict human rights to save, swap, trade, and share seeds. [00:20:42] Over all these years of following the seed path, I've had the great good fortune to be able to visit and provide mentorship and also learn from many indigenous communities across Turtle Island. [00:20:55] We are working diligently to restore relationships to the seeds and to the land. [00:21:01] The focus of this indigenous seed keepers network that I'm now the project coordinator, the national project coordinator of, is to reintegrate seed stewardship back into these communities. [00:21:13] In this work with indigenous people, but also folks just like you in this room, caring for the seeds is a powerful way to heal the wounds of the past. [00:21:25] What an act of courage it was for our ancestors to keep the seeds protected and safe in the face of violent transitions, relocations, assimilations, and war. [00:21:36] What an act of courage it was to think creatively and proactively in the face of disease, colonization, to look to food, agriculture, and seeds as a vessel for our collective healing and transformation. [00:21:51] What an act of courage it is to plant a seed and save it for future generations. [00:21:58] Each one of us, and many of you in this room as seed keepers, and the communities that we come from, have chosen to take the path of survivor. [00:22:07] Just like our seeds, we have overcome so much adversity. [00:22:12] This picture here that is up here is my daughter and I, and we are standing in a field of sacred red corn. [00:22:18] And this story that is being told in this field, we sing our seed songs, we pray to the corn mother. [00:22:25] This is something that's been taught to me by our elders. [00:22:28] This is a story of healing through many generations. [00:22:32] This is a story of a great-great-great-granddaughter who can now speak her own language. [00:22:37] This is the story of a mother who sings the seed songs of the sacred corn to her children. [00:22:43] This is a story of children being proud of who they are and where they come from. [00:22:48] This is a story of my great-great-grandmother's dreams coming to life. [00:22:52] This is the story of intergenerational resilience coming to dance into another day. [00:22:58] In the face of so much adversity, both historically and currently, these seed keepers, this is my dear friend Angela Ferguson from Onondaga Nation, [00:23:11] they're rising to the call of the time to bring our indigenous foods back onto our daily plates and into our daily lives, [00:23:18] and to re-indigenize a healthy way of living in balance with our lands. [00:23:23] This includes all of us in this room, and I'd like to remind you of that. [00:23:27] That each and every one of you are indigenous to somewhere, [00:23:30] and you have a deep and beautiful ancestral memory of the foods that fed your ancestors. [00:23:36] The seed keeper movement is calling upon the actions of people of all ages, all cultures, all religions, all faiths. [00:23:46] The time has come for us to join the path of the peaceful warrior of the seeds. [00:23:51] Let us remember and rejoice that nearly every bite of food that passes our lips eventually connects back to the generosity of a seed, as I said before. [00:24:01] Food has such a sensory impact upon our everyday lives, on people, culture, story, the human experience. [00:24:09] And in this time, I invite each and every one of you to fall in love again with those seeds as though they are your sister, your brother, your mother. [00:24:20] It is time for us to celebrate a new chapter of seed and food culture, which is inherently reverent. [00:24:28] It has been told to us by our elders in the Haudenosaunee tradition that our corn is a reflection of ourselves as a nation, an individual, as a culture. [00:24:43] When our corn is strong, it means our people are strong. [00:24:47] When our seeds are weak, it means our people are weak. [00:24:50] It's a direct correlation of our seeds. [00:24:53] Last spring, I found myself driving through the heartland of our country, a place that our indigenous peoples know of as Turtle Island. [00:25:01] And as I was driving through Kansas and Iowa and Illinois, it was in the springtime, and so all of the fields were just anew with that sparkly, shiny, new sprouting corn. [00:25:12] And I remember driving through this valley and just being, on one hand, equally in awe of the beauty of the sprouting of all of these corn seeds, [00:25:20] and then, on the other hand, knowing that they were most likely GMO corn, right? [00:25:25] But it was still a really beautiful sight. [00:25:28] And as I was thinking about this, I was contemplating the expression of these hybrid and genetically modified seeds [00:25:35] and how they represented the hands of the land -- they represented those people whose hands had planted them, [00:25:43] of the larger American culture, sometimes of monocultures of the mind, and such a melting pot of tattered origins. [00:25:50] And so I sang my seed songs to those corn seeds because they, too -- I felt like it was brokenhearted seeds planted by brokenhearted people. [00:25:58] And that's the message that I got from her, and I sung to her in that way. [00:26:03] From my elders that I have learned that seeds are our relatives. [00:26:08] We love them as though they are our grandmother, our mother. [00:26:11] From the Anishinaabe people who I have the great good fortune of working with on their seed sovereignty efforts, [00:26:16] I was gifted a song, and that song comes -- their seed songs -- each one of you descends from a culture of people who most likely had seed songs. [00:26:27] But these seed songs derived from their birthing songs. [00:26:30] And in the -- in the -- in the -- in the -- in the -- in the -- in the words of the song, they say, [00:26:33] "Maji'ishka, maji'ishka, maji'ishka, mani dumineis, ashkena minu binma dezuin." [00:26:41] And those words would be spoken, "Maji'ishka," by a midwife to a woman in labor. [00:26:46] And those words say, "Come in your own time, sacred seed. Come when you're ready." [00:26:51] And what I love about that song and that -- that experience and that tradition is that they see that those seeds [00:26:58] and this agriculture that we are entrusted with is a sacred gift, that those seeds are like new babies coming. [00:27:05] And I had a revelation that we, as seed keepers, are also plant midwives, right? [00:27:10] Like we steward life from -- from -- from one plant to another. [00:27:15] So my prayer in this next generation of seed stewardship, as we rehydrate those ancient agreements [00:27:21] that lie in our blood and our bones, that we may put together, here in this room, [00:27:26] our hearts and our minds together as one. [00:27:29] And then we might infuse this movement, as you all have, in so many ways over the decades [00:27:35] of this conference coming together, with that love, right? [00:27:39] In this collective and active prayer of keeping seeds, making beautiful meals, and growing bountiful gardens [00:27:48] that will help compost and metabolize the gathered grief of all these past decades of failures and losses, [00:27:57] and setbacks of the disconnection that emerges from the industrialization of the food system. [00:28:03] May this movement be heart-centered, and may that center at the -- at the -- may that bundle be held at the center of our gatherings. [00:28:12] May it be held with bejeweled hearts of beautiful seeds, you know, corn mothers, [00:28:18] that will feed the dry and calloused hands of maybe those who have lost hope along the way. [00:28:25] There is nothing more hopeful than a seed, and our movement to reclaim our living heritage is growing exponentially, [00:28:31] just as our treasured seed relatives. [00:28:33] I wanted to tell you that just this last spring, the Ponca Nation in Oklahoma, their corn was sprouting [00:28:43] on ancestral homeland in Nebraska for the first time in 137 years since being relocated to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears. [00:28:52] That's a big accomplishment, that those seeds are coming awake in the hearts and the minds of the people. [00:28:58] This past October -- let's see if I can find it, I'm a little behind on my slides here -- [00:29:05] This past October, the sacred red corn was harvested by many diverse hands within the Hudson Valley [00:29:11] in a beautiful and grand healing act of reconciliation across cultures. [00:29:16] We worked with migrant farm workers, we worked with Mohawk seed stewards and elders, [00:29:21] and we worked with young, new generation of farmers from across cultures together [00:29:27] at the sacred corn in our ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee. [00:29:32] We have a few folks here in the crowd tonight from the Paiute tribe along the Eastern Sierras [00:29:36] who are revitalizing a new and vibrant seed culture through the means of a seed cooperative in their community. [00:29:44] In this moment, small networks of community gardeners and farmers are coming together in the land of the Anishinaabe, [00:29:51] the Mohawk, the Haudenosaunee, the Paiute, the Hawaiians, and countless indigenous communities to sing these seed songs of resilience [00:29:58] and to awaken that time-honored relationship with the seeds. [00:30:01] Seeds of hope are coming alive in the hearts and the minds of people all over Indian country. [00:30:06] And with these gardens and these seed projects, we proudly proclaim that we are still here. [00:30:12] We are still vibrant. [00:30:14] We are sovereign peoples with beautifully sustainable ways of living and nourishing our communities. [00:30:20] And I come as an ambassador from those people and we say that we need you, each and every one of you in this room. [00:30:27] We need to learn how to compost and metabolize the gathered grief of the losses. [00:30:33] And we need to come together in this time to work together. [00:30:36] Because as we clearly know, there are many more adversaries out there than each other. [00:30:41] And so, what we saw from the movement at Standing Rock, what we see with this new movement with the Women's March [00:30:46] is that we see it's time to come together in solidarity. [00:30:49] And so I come with an invitation on behalf of those people that we might be able to find a new way of living in cooperation with one another. [00:30:58] So some of the most potent forms of activism is in planting of seeds, cultivating food, strengthening community and cultural connections, [00:31:19] breathing new life into our ancestral seed ways and food ways, living in close and in balance with our Mother Earth. [00:31:26] Just like every one of you in this room knows because you are the farmers and the gardeners. [00:31:31] You have made your whole lives love poems and honouring songs to this grand and magnificent work that we do. [00:31:38] Our protest is rooted in rendering the current system obsolete by following the green flowering pollen path of sustainable and traditional life ways. [00:31:48] Of restoring our power as people who love the earth as Mother, who honour the feminine, life-giving force that sits in the heart of every seed. [00:32:00] Making prayers with our hands on the earth help us to heal the wounds of disconnection that arise sometimes from this modern way of life. [00:32:07] The map has been written in the seeds, in the water, in the earth, in the cycles of life, and in the relationships of the grand family all around us. [00:32:19] Our Mother will show us the way through these times. [00:32:23] I was thinking about it when everybody marched, you know, just a few days ago, that the inception of this beautiful women's march we are witnessing was when our foremother, [00:32:36] Sky Woman, original woman from the Haudenosaunee people, when she shuffled her feet upon the earth and sung the seeds and life into being. [00:32:44] May we be strong in our conviction, and may our hearts beat fiercely in promise to uphold these agreements to be a part of the continuous life-affirming creation and symbiotic dance with our Mother Earth. [00:32:59] May we rehydrate these agreements that run like wild rivers in our veins that ask us to care for the seeds and that the seeds will take care of us. [00:33:09] She has never stopped taking care of us. [00:33:13] Let us not forget that. [00:33:15] To all those of you who are sitting in this room, who are working towards a new guiding narrative that reflects the innate generosity of life and the true wealth of gifts from the earth, [00:33:28] I leave you with this imperative. [00:33:30] Stand in the prayer. [00:33:35] Take action inspired by your heart. [00:33:38] Plant seeds of hope that will feed those beyond a time of your own. [00:33:42] We stand together in this time. [00:33:45] In the grand lineage, in honor of the grand lineage of seed keepers who have faithfully passed down seeds for our nourishment, [00:33:53] we make renewed and restored commitment to care for these precious seeds for those to come. [00:33:59] Thank you very much. [00:34:00] Thank you very much. [00:34:29] Thank you.