The Seed Keeper

“Everything I teach you is for survival. Every day is a test of your readiness.”

Ray wants his daughter to be strong and wise. Though their life at the rustic cabin is not easy, it toughens Rosalie and provides her with skills that will help her. Unfortunately, the loneliness she experiences from her father’s absences and being cut off from the rest of her family prepare her for a life of feeling alone and like an outsider.

“I didn’t know we were poor until social workers told me so.”

From an outsider’s view, living in a cabin without heat, electricity, or running water might seem like a hardship, but for Rosalie, it is just the way it is. She is loved, and her life is rich with lessons about the natural world and stories of her Dakhóta culture. This quotation is poignant when considered against the backdrop of how Indigenous children have been, and still are, removed from their homes and placed in foster care, sometimes simply because the social workers see poverty and equate it with neglect.

“I had come back hoping to fill an emptiness I had carried all my life. I had no choice but to face it. There was a passage here; I felt its sharp edge.”

Rosalie returns to her childhood home after nearly 30 years away, something she had hoped to do many years earlier. After the death of her husband and the distance growing between her and her son, she feels empty and without a place in the world. The passage is about her moving from one life to the next stage, though she knows it will be difficult.

“I laughed and told her that in our friendship, I was the mouth and she was the ears.”

Rosalie’s friendship with Gaby keeps her connected to her Dakhóta heritage. The two women are yin and yang for each other. Rosalie is quiet but a good listener. She is steady and calm. Gaby is outspoken and fiery, ready to take action.

“I was supposed to be grateful for a bed with real sheets, for a flushing toilet, for a place in a family of ghosts who needed me to fill their emptiness. I had lost everything, but they told me I was ungrateful if I looked sad, if I pushed their bland food around my plate.”

Rosalie doesn’t often speak with anger or bitterness, but when thinking about her experiences in foster care, she can’t help it. It feels to her like her past and her identity were being erased, as she wasn’t even allowed to grieve what she lost. Instead, they wanted her to be thankful for all that they gave her, even if wasn’t what she asked for.

“I was soothed by plants, comforted by the long patience of trees.”

A child of the woods, Rosalie feels at peace in natural settings, whether it’s her garden or the tree-lined river. Plants and trees make no demands on her, and they are exemplars of persistence. Trees, especially, live long lives and have seen much, so they are one of Rosalie’s connections to the past.

“When I finished cutting, the girl who was born in the woods was gone. In her place was a new self, a woman who was harder and stronger, who was ready to become a mother and raise a child.”

Rosalie marks the end of one stage of her life and the start of the next by performing a Dakhóta mourning ritual: cutting her hair. She now knows that she won’t be leaving the farm to find her home, so she mourns her father, her younger self, and the plans she’s had since age 12. Putting those behind her, she can focus on her new life as a mother.

“They’re so afraid of stirring up the past that even a name is too much of a reminder.”

John’s rejection of her choice of Wakpá as their son’s name partly arises from his knowing that the Dakhóta are not well-regarded in the area because of the 1862 war. The past before that—of the same settlers kicking the Dakhóta off the land and causing their starvation—is either glossed over or forgotten altogether, as if the attack came out of nowhere.

“[W]e had crossed a line. I knew […] that a part of John still wondered why I hadn’t gone to Tommy first. The question lived between us, small and nagging, contested ground in an old war.”

Due to a miscommunication, neither parent rescues Tommy first. Even though John comes to understand the misunderstanding, he doesn’t forgive Rosalie’s instinct to save the seeds. She, too, doubts her mothering instinct, as she didn’t even think about making sure Tommy was okay until she was already outside. From this point, the way Tommy is raised becomes an issue between the parents.

“Knowing the history, understanding how some of his neighbors regarded Indians, had not prepared him to see his own son treated that way. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that a thin veneer of nice covered a dormant hostility in this community.”

John does not really see his son’s race until he learns how he’s been bullied. He thought that by nature of being his son, he would be safe from the animosity toward the Dakhóta people. He works to inculcate him into his white Protestant culture after that.

“Let love be your vengeance, your honor restored because you did not surrender to their violence.”

Susanne is Marie Blackbird’s daughter, conceived by rape. Her mother, knowing the trauma she sustained, urges her to reverse her violent anger and outrage by loving Susanne. Essentially, Marie enacts her vengeance by surviving, thriving, and raising a blue-eyed Dakhóta girl in a loving home.

“His struggle with drugs and alcohol was the only way he knew to quiet the voices that would not let him rest. He tried so hard to be strong, and instead, he had to learn how to grieve.”

Rosalie makes this observation when she sees Anthony, Gaby’s brother, running to commemorate the 38 Dakhóta men who were hanged in 1862. The atrocities and attempts at ethnic cleansing continued long after that, and all of the characters feel the results of trauma. Interestingly, this quotation could also describe Rosalie’s father and John, both people with alcohol addictions who had trouble handling grief.

“Each seed held a trace of life that would spark when given water, when given the appropriate conditions. Everywhere I looked, I saw how seeds were holding the world together. […] Each one was a miniature time capsule, capturing years of stories in its tender flesh.”

Rosalie reads about the science of seeds and understands that her spiritual understanding of them as the bearers of the past and hopes of the future is tied to biology. The seeds teach a lesson about preserving heritage while planning for the future. The seeds are part of a family, and families survive through the seeds.

“I had begun to see that when we save these seeds, when we select which ones will be planted again, our lives become braided into the life of these plants.”

The interconnectedness of life is a main component of the lesson Rosalie learned from her father. The broader concept is that the choices a person makes affects how their future turns out, as well as the world around them.

“On the seat between us lay the sack from the drugstore, with a bottle of pain medication to be refilled as often as needed. Another chemical to remedy the chemicals that had run the farm.”

Throughout the story, there are references to the chemicals used on the farm, both fertilizers and pesticides. Rosalie notices in drought years how the topsoil in dry fields blows away. Some chemicals give people headaches or make them sick. While there may be other causes of John’s illness, Rosalie sees it as a result of using harsh chemicals to farm instead of taking care of the soil.

“After so many years, I felt the slow rise of a river that would carry me away from the life I knew.”

Rosalie understands now that John is dying. With his death, she does not fit on the farm. The river, which she initially connected to someday taking her home, is now sweeping her away, whether she’s ready or not. The river of her grief guides her actions from this point on.

“I was a burnt field, waiting for a new season to begin.”

When John dies, Rosalie’s life on the farm will be razed. She does not run the farm or do the farming; her presence there doesn’t make sense to her. Often the idea of rebirth is hopeful and optimistic, but here, the process is harsh (fire), and the tone is one of bleak waiting and uncertainty.

“Eventually, worn down, I surrendered my past, my memories, turned them in for a new story of how I came to be. All these years I had been living inside this dream.”

On the night that John dies, Rosalie dreams about when her father died and she was taken away to a foster home. This parallels how she knows she will have to leave the farm when John dies. For much of her life, she has had to quiet her past and her memories, but now they can be given full attention.

“I tell you, it was like something else had moved into her body that night and stolen away her spirit.”

Agnes, her makeup askew and eyes unfocused, comes to Darlene to pick up young Rosalie. Darlene senses that something is seriously wrong, especially when Agnes just says, “It’s better this way,” so she follows and prevents Agnes from killing Rosalie. Her spiritual damage has the same source as Lorraine’s, though filtered through a generation.

“She hated me for keeping these seeds from her. They were her birthright, the only thing left from her old life. But when she came back, everything she touched withered and died.”

The importance of taking care of the seeds runs throughout the story. Here, Darlene lies to her sister because she sees the anger and violence running through her after her time at the boarding school. She beat both of her brothers and her daughter, so Darlene does not want to risk the fragile seeds.

“This is what he would not tell me: that she had never left, would never leave. She was there now; I could hear her voice in the roar of the current, calling to me.”

Rosalie’s father kept the circumstances of her mother’s death a secret because he didn’t want to burden her with that tragic knowledge. However, Agnes’s pain lingers and influences Rosalie, even without her consciously knowing. Only by knowing and forgiving can Rosalie move forward with her life.

“Whatever it was that had come home from the boarding school with your grandmother, it lived on in Agnes. She never found a way through it. It lives on until something finds a way to stop it.”

Multigenerational trauma runs throughout this story, with the Lorraine-Agnes example being the most prominent. Though Lorraine had started to recover by gardening, the damage had already been done by the violence and neglect she showed Agnes early on.

“People don’t understand how hard it is to be Indian. […] I’m not talking about all the sad history. I’m talking about a way of life that demands your best every single day. Being Dakhóta means every step you take is a prayer.’”

Carlos reflects on how much of the Dakhóta history centers on food, whether the starvation leading to the 1862 war or the high rates of diabetes from commodity foods on reservations. He speaks of the reverence a Dakhóta person must have for their relationships—to family, clan, community, water, land, and everything on it. The prayer is one of gratitude and forgiveness, both giving it and seeking it.