THE SEED KEEPER

A Native American woman reclaims her family and her people’s history in Dakhóta writer Wilson’s first novel.

A keening poem, “The Seeds Speak,” sets the novel’s tone in its opening pages, recalling a time when “Because we cared for each other, the People and the Seeds survived” and lamenting the “drought of memory, a time of endless darkness”  that followed. Rosalie Iron Wing’s story is emblematic of the deliberate destruction of Native American families and traditions by the U.S. government. Raised by her father, at age 12 she was placed in White foster care after he died and endured six years of misery “waiting for someone to come for me.” (She doesn't know that her great-aunt fruitlessly tried to find her.) At 18, she marries John Meister, a kind White farmer grappling with the changes introduced by chemical fertilizers and the new genetically modified seeds being pushed by a company building a plant in town. (John, a good man who is nonetheless clueless about how his family’s fortunes were built on the theft of Native lands, is notable in a cast of strong secondary characters that also includes Rosalie’s feisty activist friend Gaby Makespeace.) As the novel opens in 2002, John has recently died, most likely poisoned by the chemicals their son, Tommy, encouraged him to use on their fields. Tommy’s conflict between his Native heritage and modern “progress” seethes under the surface of Rosalie’s journey back to the cabin along the Minnesota River from which she was taken 28 years earlier. Her memories unfold in conjunction with the stories of her great-aunt Darlene, about the tragic history of the Dakhóta. Uprooted from their land, the seeds Dakhóta women carried with them were not just a source of sustenance, but their link to the past and hope for the future, a symbol of their profound bond with the Earth. They provide a powerful symbol for Rosalie’s rediscovery of her lost family and the ways of “the old ones.”

A thoughtful, moving meditation on connections to the past and the land that humans abandon at their peril.