Heritage Seeds and Settler Legacies by Helen Anne Curry

Heritage Seeds and Settler Legacies by Helen Anne Curry

The third instalment in our project blog, where From Collection to Cultivation members share research insights, snippets, and ideas.

I first encountered Mandan seeds as I pieced together the history of some corn samples placed in the care of the US Department of Agriculture in the 1950s. Seeds of Mandan Yellow Flint, Mandan Black, Mandan Red Flour, and several others linked to Mandan farmers—who for centuries have cultivated corn on the Upper Missouri River—were registered on March 3, 1954 in the nation’s official Plant Inventory.

Records provide a clear provenance for these samples: the Oscar H. Will Seed Company of Bismarck, North Dakota. Yet as my research quickly revealed, accepting this seed company as the ‘source’ of the Mandan lines provided at best a partial understanding of how and why contemporary crop conservation collections came to be, and at worst a profound elision of Native history and knowledge. Untangling a throughline of Mandan seeds’ journey from the knotted threads of Native American, settler colonial, and industrial farming histories, I arrived at a more satisfying, if complex, account.

Across generations, Mandan women planted sunflowers, beans, squash, and corn to feed their families and communities. By the time the New York-born seed dealer Oscar Will arrived, Mandan farmers had experienced a century of settler-induced disease, violence, and dislocations. Many were now living on the Fort Berthold Reservation. This had been created in 1870, a product of US government decisions that relentlessly reduced the once-sizable joint Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara land claim defined in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

Although many settlers dismissed Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara crops as inferior to those they knew from back East or even from Europe, a few, including Will, took note of local expertise. Soon after his arrival in Bismarck, he obtained what he called a ‘squaw corn’ from an Arikara farmer. Will was not as dismissive of the Arikara corn as this language suggests: he went on to sow and select seeds, eventually producing a ‘new’ variety that he called Pride of Dakota. It was famed for ripening early, thus enabling the cultivation of corn in challenging the environmental conditions of the northwest. It was one of many sucesses Will would realise as a result of growing and selling Native American crop varieties—successes that positioned him as a key instrument of settler colonial expansion in the Northwest.

Will’s son George soon extended these commercial gleanings into a more thorough-going appropriation of Native American corn. In the late 19-teens, around the same time that he took over leadership of the Oscar Will seed company, George was finishing his book Corn of the Indians of the Upper Missouri. For this project, he’d sought to collect, document, and preserve corn varieties grown by Native American farmers of the region. He was motivated not only by business interests but also a typical settler view that Native American culture and knowledge were slated for extinction. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many Europeans and Euro-Americans were inspired to undertake ‘salvage’ missions to gather Native artefacts and information before they ‘vanished’ along with their people.

George Will’s corn salvage mission depended on visits to Native American communities and interviews with older farmers. Thanks to informants such as Buffalo Bird Woman at Fort Berthold Reservation and others, he thought he had succeeded at salvage by 1917. As he wrote, ‘nearly all of the sorts formerly grown… have been recovered… and the seed has been rather widely distributed among corn-breeders.’

As that description indicates, George Will saw it as the job of entrepreneurial breeders and settler farmers—and not Native American breeders and farmers—to maintain these crops. In other words, this restoration of native corn was not to be a means of restoring and fortifying the communities and cultures from which it had originally derived, but rather served the progress of the US industrial agricultural economy.

Will maintained his salvaged seeds for decades. In 1954, parts of this personal collection of Native corn were transferred to the US Department of Agriculture. This transfer was orchestrated as another ‘salvage’ mission—in this case a mission that targeted the ‘endangered’ maize varieties of the entire Western hemisphere.

By the early 1950s, a group of US maize experts had begun to worry that corn varieties cultivated across the Americas for centuries and indeed millennia were now in danger of extinction thanks to the wider circulation of professional breeders’ ‘improved varieties’. These experts therefore established a Committee on Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize (or ‘Maize Committee’) and set out to collect these ‘indigenous strains’, chiefly from peasant and Indigenous farmers, all the way from Chile to Canada. Their efforts produced some of the first preservation-oriented cold storage facilities for collections of rare and endangered crop varieties—institutions we now know as seed or gene banks.

Among many conundrums this Committee faced was how to include the United States in the hemispheric collection. Given sweeping changes in corn cultivation, especially a mass transition to commercial hybrid corn, they saw few opportunities to collect directly from farmers. Collections like Will’s offered a chance to gather types assumed to be otherwise extinct. Today ten of the dozen or so entries in the US maize germplasm collections that are explicitly linked to Mandan farmers trace their history through donations from the Oscar H. Will seed company orchestrated by the Maize Committee.

It goes almost without saying that the reason the US government invested, and still invests, in the time- and resource-consuming work of maintaining a living collection is to support the development of US corn production and productivity. The Maize Committee’s hemispheric salvage mission therefore resulted in Mandan maize being preserved in service of this state project.

Even if the intention of US government collections is to serve national agricultural needs, their use hasn’t been limited to this agenda. The rise of local seed-exchanges in the 1970s, bound up with a social movement rejecting industrial farming in favor of alternative agricultural approaches, has probably generated more requests from the national collections for Native American seeds than commercial variety development ever did.

Grassroots organizations like Native Seeds/SEARCH and national and state agricultural institutions have also played a role in channeling Native American seeds back to descendants of those communities.

Twenty-first century Mandan farmers have had access to varieties via many routes. When staff of the Fort Berthold Community College in North Dakota launched their Traditional Garden project in the late 1990s, they sought seeds of Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa maize, bean, and squash. They located several sources, including three local Mandan and Hidatsa farmers, Seed Savers Exchange, and the anthropologist Fred Schneider, who had his own supply of seeds once saved by Oscar and George Will. By 2001 the gardens were addressing its founders’ goals of providing fresh produce, encouraging healthy diets, and celebrating the cultural significance of traditional agriculture and crops within the reservation.

As these recent turns in the story of the Mandan seeds show, their history is tied to resistance to a state agenda by both alternative agriculturists and Native American communities. Yet we must also recognize that resistance has at times relied on resources offered by private industry and state agricultural agents—in this case, diverse Mandan seeds collected over many decades. A project of maize conservation that originated in settler colonial violence ultimately protected varieties that now serve as tools to challenge these same forces.

You can find out more about Helen's research on maize at her research page here.