Saturday Apr.12
Welcome and Introduction
Shanti Morell-Hart and Stacie King
1) Seed collections as deep history
The Seed Bank at Cerro X: Conquest, Mesoamerican Foodways, and Indigenous Resilience
Stacie King and Shanti Morell-Hart
Abstract: Evidence from Cerro X, a seed bank documented in southern Mexico, shows that Indigenous people in Oaxaca went to extraordinary efforts to preserve their foodways during a time of incredible spiritual and physical insecurity. In this presentation, we detail a specialized storage feature dating to AD 1400-1600, excavated in the Sierra Sur region of Oaxaca. We identify key attributes of seed banks and compare these characteristics to the context and contents of the storage bin. We also identify ingredients and practices of Oaxacan cuisine that persist to the present day, and consider why people may have saved seeds during this tumultuous point in history.
Ancient Seeds for a Reasonable Future
Abstract: Archaeology is about the past but is also relevant for the future…often in utilitarian ways. For a variety of reasons, I will not focus on how ancient peoples saved seeds and maintained diversity on the genetic pool of cultigens. Rather, I will suggest that: (1) the entire range of propagations need to be considered, not just seeds and fruits; (2) ancient crops and varieties, even now extinct ones, have value for the future; (3) the wild progenitors of ancient and modern crops should be preserved, and (4) although tangential to the focus of this symposium, we should recognize the value of prehistoric farming strategies has value for future sustainable food supplies. Illustrative examples include prehistoric agricultural complex in Eastern North America and agaves in the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico.
2) Seed collections as heritage
Seed Collections as Genetic Resources, Biocultural Heritage and Endangered Family: Potato Cosmopolitics in Conservation Practices
Abstract: In the highlands of Cuzco, a Papa Mamaq Mujun Taqena Wasi (House of Mother Potato Seeds, in Quechua) was built in 2012 as part of an agrobiodiversity conservation initiative known as the Potato Park. The house currently hosts around 1300 native tuber varieties, including 850 collected from local cultivators, and 410 repatriated from the genebank of the International Potato Center in Lima. The repatriated varieties had been extracted from the region during 20th-century botanical expeditions aimed at gathering “genetic resources” for the breeding of new varieties.
In contrast, the mother potato seeds in the in-situ facility of the Park are intended to be grown annually into plants that will bear baby tubers, thereby sustaining the flourishing of highland communities. In this center of potato domestication, agricultural collectives are composed of a diversity of tubers attuned to the micro ecological niches of the Cordillera, but this diversity is under threat due to the spread of so called “improved varieties,” introduced in the past century along with chemical packages and mythologies of agricultural progress. In the Taqena Wasi, seed potatoes are not only mother and baby tubers; they are also curated as a “biocultural heritage,” a term coined by Alejandro Argumedo, the designer of the Potato Park, as part of an effort to seek legal protection for indigenous agricultural landscapes and knowledge practices.
In 2015, a delegation of cultivators from the Park traveled to Svalbard to deposit botanical seeds of 750 potato varieties in one of the Global Seed Vault’s black boxes. The Vault serves as a backup for worldwide conservation facilities, ensuring the transmission of “seeds heritage” across generations by protecting them from loss and destruction. This contribution examines the verses chanted by a cultivator, Brisayda Sicus, as she delivered the 750 seeds for storage in the Vault. Intended to soothe her potato kin before leaving them in this cold and faraway place, these verses reclaim a relatedness that is threatened by agricultural intensification programs. Hearing this chant as a cosmopolitical intervention enlightens the ontological politics at stake in this conservation assemblage, where seeds are enacted as germplasm, heritage, and family.
Contained Futures
Abstract: At the top of the north west facing slope of Nāhelehele, a native dryland forest, lies the Hawaiʻi Island Seed Bank (HISB). Started in 2008 and inside a shipping container, the bank provides seed storage services for landowners, farmers, growers and state agencies. The HISB’s remit is wide but local. Their stakeholders are diverse and sometimes in ethical and epistemic conflict with each other. This chapter presents a case study from Hawaiʻi Island, focusing on a seed bank’s operations and its implications for grounded engagement in conservation efforts. I examine the role of seed banking in addressing contemporary environmental challenges facing Hawaii Island, considering it as a site of contestation between precolonial bio-geography and introduced agricultural species. By pausing time and taking advantage of the latent life enabled by the freezer, I probe the speculative imaginaries that suffuse the technopolitics of the seed bank.
3) Seed collections as germplasm
Seeds: Evolutionary Marvels and the Complex Challenges of their Collection for Scientific Research
Abstract: The seed is an extraordinary evolutionary adaptation that allows land plants to exist in suspended animation for extended periods—sometimes spanning millennia. My career as a plant biologist has provided intimate insight into seed longevity in nature. Recently, I participated in the latest stage of the Beal Seed Experiment, extracting a bottle of soil and seeds buried 141 years ago on Michigan State University’s campus. Remarkably, some seeds still germinated despite prolonged exposure to fluctuating soil moisture.
While seeds have been integral to the success of many plant species, my recent focus has centered on building and maintaining seed collections for scientific research. Though technical challenges exist in collection, storage, and propagation, the greatest impediments are cultural, legal, and financial. These challenges often stem from inconsistent international laws and policies as well as tensions between open-source scientific values and the protectionism of cultures and corporations.
In this talk, I will share my perspective as an evolutionary biologist and a scientist concerned with improving crop resilience. I’ll discuss navigating the complex legal and ethical landscapes of assembling seed collections for research. To illustrate these points, I’ll highlight my two-decade-long seed collection of monkeyflowers, which has provided foundational insights into the relationships between plants and the natural landscape while maintaining my personal connection to nature.
Promise and Peril in a Potato Genebank
Abstract: Since the early twentieth century, farmer’s varieties and crop wild relatives have been heralded as important sources of genetic disease- and pest-resistance. They have been secured through bioprospecting expeditions and placed in genebanks where they can be made available to breeders in sites far removed from their original habitats. Yet the transit of seeds and plants across lands and oceans brings risks, and none greater than that of introducing new pests and diseases that will further endanger vulnerable monocultures. This talk explores the history of efforts to manage the risk of disease introduction that arises from the search for new sources of disease resistance through a study of one of the world’s most important potato genebanks, the Commonwealth Potato Collection. It emphasizes the complex relationship between managing monocultures and maintaining crop diversity and reveals that crop diversity has been understood as a source of both security and risk in industrial agriculture.
Sunday Apr.13
4) Seed collections as futures
What Seeds Carry: Sprouting, Keeping, and Exchanging Locality in Turkey
Abstract: Starting in the early 2000s, Turkish legislators restructured the agricultural seed sector, with an eye towards creating stable commodities for international agricultural markets, produced by private seed breeders and safeguarded by varietal protection certifications. This seed policy also banned the commercial sale of farmer-saved seeds, and eliminated subsidies to fields cultivated with non-certified varieties. At the same time, the ban stoked a mushrooming of municipal seed exchange festivals, seed cooperatives, and local seed preservation societies, associations, and informal efforts, which are ongoing. Subsequently, Turkish politicians, bureaucrats, and scientists from across the political spectrum have advanced new and often starkly contrasting claims about the cultural and scientific value that “local seed” varieties possess, framing them as key resources of Turkish national heritage, and as central bulwarks of agricultural resilience in the face of accelerating climate change, and raw genetic material for new commercial varietal development. This talk, based on ethnographic research, examines how small-scale farmers, activists, and scientists in Turkey’s Aegean region ascribe cultural and political meaning to local seeds (yerel tohumlar), an ever shifting, and elusive, category. My entry point is a focus on three things that cultivated seeds do with people. Seeds sprout; seeds keep; and seeds travel. This cultural and political ecology of seeds centers the life-worlds of agricultural plants themselves alongside the practices of the people who tend to them, and the institutions, markets, and politics through which people and their cultivated plants shape one other.
Presentation
5) Seed collections as property
A Brief History of Seed in Eight Paradigms
Abstract: Ever since patents were extended to plants in the 1980s, seed saving has been at the heart of a global power struggle known as the “seed wars.” In this talk, I will trace how farmers’ right to seeds has been progressively recognized in international law, including in human rights law. And yet, as I will show, this right is being increasingly undermined in practice by the extension of intellectual property regimes and the advent of digital sequencing technologies. The contemporary enclosure of seeds has been hotly contested and has spurred a creative revival of seed saving practices worldwide. It has also prompted a radical rethinking of our relationship to seeds, from the right to seeds to the rights of seeds within the rights of nature paradigm.
Enclosures, Encroachments, and the Value of Agrobiocultural Heritage in the North Aegean
Abstract: In the last fifteen years, the nexus of climate crisis awareness and the Greek financial crisis amplified sustainable development programs, along with a variety of community and activist actions focusing on the value of local and traditional varietals. Albeit in different degrees, the framing of these actions links ecological consciousness, aspirations of economic development and deeper social, political and affective concerns around identity and belonging, which vernacularize (Merry and Levitt 2017) rather than simply interpret scientific, economic, political and sociocultural discourses. In seed, policy, scientists, state and local programs and organizations, businesses and activists valorize the work of otherwise nameless and faceless farmers, which must be revealed and protected. And even as they propose different visions as to how, they converge on identification, inscription, conservation and promotion with the ultimate goal of utilization (here, it may be worth noting that the Greek term αξιοποίηση connotes enhancement and realization of value as factor of utilization). This talk examines seed mobilization as it unfolds on the North Aegean island of Lemnos, and attempts to trace how notions of seeds as genetic property, agricultural heritage, essential local identity, raw material for value-added protected geographical indication commodities, or universal right produce inconsistent, and potentially contradictory patterns and practices of enclosure and dissemination.
6) Seed collections as kin
Presentation
The Heart of Native Seeds: Why Do Seeds Matter and How Do they Contribute to Indigenous Sovereignty?
Abstract: Native seeds embody material, cultural, spiritual, and political values and meanings of great significance for Mayan peasant communities. Among other things, seeds are central actors in foundational myths —particularly those in their center of origin and diversity—symbolize the historical continuity (literal and figurative) of communities through intergenerational moral commitments, are the backbone of local food systems and the reproduction of ‘peasantry,’ and are the ground on which the process of building a good and dignified life takes place. I argue that these meanings greatly explain why native seeds have become a defense frontline of Indigenous sovereignty and why they are essential to explore these communities’ understandings of how an existential future made by and for Indigenous peoples looks like.