Wild and Cultivated: On Diane Wilson's "The Seed Keeper"
Diane Wilson | The Seed Keeper | Milkweed Editions | 2021 | 392 Pages
Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper is prefaced with the poem “The Seeds Speak,” told from the perspective of stored seeds. “We surrendered our wildness to live in partnership with the Humans,” the seeds say. “Because we cared for each other, the People and the Seeds survived. For many generations, this Agreement was kept… Then came a long silence, a drought of memory, a time of darkness.” These years of dormancy comprise a time when generations, beliefs, and traditions were lost. The poem describes the relationship and respect between the seeds and the Dakhóta people, held since time immemorial. Yet since “the long silence,” the seeds fear that their opportunity to be planted and germinate may be almost gone. The seeds’ own sense of loss, reach for connection, and resilience parallels that of The Seed Keeper’s main narrator, Rosalie Iron Wing, a Dakhóta woman in Mni Sóta, or Minnesota.
The novel begins with a tense meeting between Rosalie and her great-aunt, Darlene Kills Deer, told from Darlene’s perspective. Though they have not seen each other in almost thirty years, they are connected through blood, culture, and the practice of saving seeds. Darlene reflects on their meeting and the strange familiarity between them:
As if I were there at the birth of your boy, close enough
to cut the umbilical cord and to bury the placenta in the garden.
The garden.
The garden repeats, standing on its own line, and this stark punctuation signals the reader to pay attention—if the novel’s title or epigraph haven’t signaled enough, this is a story of plants both wild and cultivated. Rosalie is surprised to see corn planted in buckets in her great-aunt’s apartment. She learns that Darlene views the flora and fauna as a living part of her community, and uses them to reach out to lost human relatives. “I could ask the plants for their help,” Darlene says. “I could ask the crow for help. I could talk to the oak trees on the boulevard outside my apartment and ask them to watch for you. Year after year, we kept this vigil.”
Plants are not only a food source, but have a reciprocal relationship with the creatures that eat them, tend them, and disperse or collect their seeds. Darlene and Rosalie come from a long line of female seed savers, “women who believed their work was essential to their families’ survival. Not just as food, but as an expression of who they were.” Darlene says to Rosalie, “I thought I’d never see you again. That’s why I started the garden. All those seeds in my closet, all that's left of my family–they had to be planted or they’d die, just like us.”
Mirroring the life cycles of seeds and seasons, The Seedkeeper is a mosaic that comes together in a circular process, eventually revisiting the meeting between Darlene and Rosalie. Wilson weaves back and forth from Rosalie’s ancestors in the mid-1800s to her present in 2002, giving wider context to her and Darlene’s Dakhóta heritage. Darlene’s potted plants sing the pangs of lost loved ones: “It’s not the same here as in a garden, where they share their roots, through the soil.” A lost way of life is felt in the space between each root that cannot connect.
Wilson’s use of multiple narrators is reminiscent of the work of Louise Erdrich, who often features Native American characters and histories. Like Erdrich’s The Beet Queen, Wilson uses various points of view to show the gaps in characters’ self-perception and behaviors. For example, Rosalie is extremely quiet and bookish to others, but has fierce opinions in her internal dialogue. Both Wilson and Erdrich build characters who feel connected to the Earth and those who do not. They both weave together modern life with the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous people and community.
The Seed Keeper rebegins in winter from a forty-year-old Rosalie’s perspective. Snow blankets the ground as seeds lie dormant. Her husband of twenty years, John, has just died, and her life is suddenly fragmented. She feels judged by her neighbors, unsure of herself, and alone in the world. John was a white man, a farmer on his family’s multi-generational farm, and Rosalie had never felt completely at home there: “I was soothed by the plants, comforted by the long patience of trees. I knew with certainty that just as the seasons would always change, I would one day find my way home.”
Both of Rosalie’s parents are dead. Her mother’s death is a mystery, and her father died when she was twelve. After her father’s death she was placed in foster care. During her senior year in high school, she comes up with a plan to escape the verbal abuse she endured for years. She signs up for detasseling corn on a farm, which happens to be John’s farm. She saves enough money to move to the Twin Cities on her own, but her foster mother steals half her savings. The injustice pains Rosalie, “as if the little bit of hope that kept [her] alive had dried up and blown away.”
John, lonely after the deaths of his father, mother, and brother, proposes to a 17-year-old Rosalie. Rosalie later wonders if she would have married John if she hadn’t been in such a desperate position. We see the legacy of abuse, racism, and violence against indigenous people expressed through the expectations Rosalie has of John. She expects the worst of the colonizer mindset from him: ownership over her, free labor from her, and subservience. She waits for a “mean self with his fists or his tongue, busting [her] down to nothing like other bullies [she] had known.” But she soon realizes that he is kind, compassionate, and respectful, albeit domineering and a heavy drinker.
Spring is the time when “a seed awakens.” Seasons run deep throughout this novel, reminding readers that everything happens in due time. Rosalie and John warm to each other, like the spring weather itself. He is gracious and gentle with her, and she develops respect, affection, and love for her husband. She is soon pregnant, though not entirely thrilled about it. Rosalie names her baby Wakpá, or river. John insists on calling him Thomas.
In Rosalie’s childhood, her father taught her to identify the wild plants of the forest and pray to the earth. He taught her the creation stories of the Dakhóta, and that “[The Dakhóta] are a civilized people who understand that [their] survival depends on knowing how to be a good relative, especially to Iná Maka, Mother Earth.” As a white farmer’s wife, Rosalie is expected to bear children, go to a white man’s church, and buy seeds based solely on their economic yield. Her garden flourishes. She learns how to can food and takes pride in feeding her family. However, she is stuck straddling two worlds, clinging to her heritage even as farm life tries to erase it.
John’s death frees her from the farm, and she decides to find her way to the cabin she grew up in with her father. While she endures a brutal winter, Rosalie digs into her family history and revisits the sources of her grief: a mother whose death is a mystery to her, relatives who never came to find her, a son with whom she feels estranged.
Another narrator, Marie Blackbird, Rosalie’s great-great-grandmother, helps to fill in the gaps in Rosalie’s story. Marie describes forced migrations that bring harrowing accounts of forgotten events. “Half our people died from hunger and sickness. Our dead were left behind, some in shallow, unmarked graves, others alone in the woods or surrendered to the river.” The smell of wood smoke, fear, wrenching uncertainty, dead leaves and dead relatives crowd the pages. Rosalie’s ancestors sew seeds into their skirt hems to preserve their food and their sovereignty as they are forced to walk miles across North America.
The repeated, dehumanizing efforts of the U.S. government to displace and assimilate indigenous communities derailed countless indigenous lives, and the effects trickle down as later generations struggle to heal and find their place in the world. Darlene is old enough to remember the day in 1920 when agents came and took her siblings off to boarding schools. An entire generation was taken this way. “The schools harmed a lot of families. Some are still trying to find their children. Or to bring their bodies back home,” an elder explains to Rosalie. When Darlenes’s siblings returned years later, her brothers “moved like ghosts.” One brother refused to talk, preferring to wander in the woods. The other drank heavily until he died of kidney failure. Darlene’s sister and Rosalie’s grandmother “used her fists on anyone who crossed her, including her brothers and her daughter.” None of them would talk about what happened at the school. “Sometimes too much harm has been done,” Darlene says. “Whatever had come home from the boarding school with [my sister], it lived on. She never found a way through it. It lives on until somebody finds a way to stop it.”
Gaby Makespeace, Rosalie’s closest friend throughout the novel, enters like a thunderbolt. Loud, brash, and confident, when asked which land was included in an 1862 treaty she defiantly answers, “My land. And you’re standing on it.” Acknowledging what continues from one generation to the next, she says of Rosalie, “Girl had a wound she kept hidden away, like all of us, like any Indian alive today. I think that’s when we became friends, when we knew we could trust each other with our bad-luck stories.”
Gaby’s activism against Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) seeds and Rosalie’s place on a farm that embraces modern industrial agriculture opens a rift between the two for a time. But just when Rosalie seems to be drifting “like a dried leaf in autumn,” Gaby brings her back to her roots and reminds her that, like any plant, she has a community. Gaby becomes a lawyer and much of her career is spent protecting rivers, which gives her and Rosalie hope for the future. Agricultural chemicals are polluting these rivers, the heart of their land in Minnesota, and this seems to parallel an idea about Rosalie’s own son. Rosalie fears that Wakpá is being poisoned against his heritage. Like John, who “had never been taught to think about seeds as relatives, as living beings deserving of love and care,” Rosalie worries she didn’t do enough to teach Wakpá. Despite her efforts, he detaches from his native culture and becomes increasingly interested in seed patents and the economics of farming.
The Seed Keeper co-positions human relationships with ecological ones, and their profound connection can bear no better comparison than that of a seed with its keeper. Seeds are small, resilient, carry hope for the future, and are vital to our human survival. The keepers bring water, nutrients, and life. Darlene gives Wakpá ancient ruby-red corn seeds to care for. As he sinks deeper into the world of GMO licensing and technology, Rosalie is reminded by her adopted elders to have patience that these seeds will bring him home. “Seeds hold the world together” as the cycle of life and seasons continues.
In a time of cultural reckoning with past injustices, and an overly delayed acknowledgment of systemic racism against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, The Seed Keeper confronts a fraught past and unravels the propagation of pain. External strife, internal conflicts, and the ongoing processes of healing are all given their full shapes in this elegant and ultimately hopeful story.
Reminded by this book that the plants in my garden and the trees on my street are relatives, I begin to feel more in tune with the world at large and my tiny slice of it. I become more keenly aware of roots stretching and reaching for nutrients underground. As last year’s acorns decompose, this year's blueberry buds tentatively emerge. I go outside and hold fertile soil in my hands, sensing this is a meaningful act in itself.
The partnership between humans and seeds in The Seed Keeper feels like Earth reaching out to readers from the book’s pages. Both pass knowledge and information to the next generation, their lineages paralleling and tangling. As Rosalie says, “when we save these seeds, when we select which ones will be planted again, our lives become braided into the life stories of these plants.”