The Seed Keeper

Times are rough for farm families. One of the worst farm crises in decades has led to water rationing and reports of farmers either attempting suicide or murder in their desperation. John starts drinking again and tries to get a bank loan to buy some of George’s acreage.

On Tommy’s fifth birthday, Rosalie bakes a cake like Edna used to do for John and his brother. She reflects on her favorite birthday when her father took her fishing, and they fried the fish over a fire before sleeping under the stars. Rosalie regularly takes Tommy into the garden with her to teach him an appreciation of nature, and she’s hopeful when he is amazed by a monarch butterfly.

Rosalie gets a job writing obituaries at the local paper to help make ends meet. After she and Tommy are viewed suspiciously at the library’s story hour, she takes him to visit George at the Corn Museum. George is fond of Tommy. There is a photo of Gaby in a newspaper and an article about her work with Save Our Rivers speaking about farm chemical runoff in the Minnesota River. Rosalie asks George’s opinion on the issue, and he gives a fair assessment: The chemicals are in the water, and farmers are worried about the possible health effects. However, migrant workers need these jobs to survive, and most farmers are barely getting by, so it’s a hard choice when they might lose their farms. Rosalie calls Gaby to ask her about it, and Gaby invites her to a powwow in Mankato.

Gaby feels at home when she smells the scents of a powwow. Mathó is in a new grass dancer outfit made by Aunt Vera. When Rosalie and Wakpá arrive, Gaby contemplates how Wakpá was “born from grief” (168) because Rosalie cut her hair in mourning before he was born.

They discuss Gaby’s work with the task force. She was inspired by a dream she had in which the river was crying because there was no one to help it. She explains that seed companies often collaborate with pesticide companies or are one and the same, which impels farmers to keep buying their seeds and using more of their chemicals. She tells Rosalie that the drainage tiles and ditches that farmers put in to prevent the fields from flooding send contaminated water into the river.

Alluding to the history of government agencies trying to turn Dakhóta people into farmers, she chides Rosalie, but Rosalie defends herself by saying that she is gardening, not farming. She also just likes being around plants. Gaby reminds her that she is Dakhóta and must make a choice about remembering and practicing their ways. Gaby and Mathó then begin the dance procession, and Wakpá joins in. Rosalie stays in the shadows, however, and leaves soon after with her son.

A cigarette starts a fire in the farmhouse kitchen one night. In their panicked rush, Rosalie thinks John is getting Tommy, so she goes to the kitchen to put out the fire with an extinguisher. Before she heads out the door, she grabs her packets of seeds. Outside, she sees John hauling in a hose, but Tommy is not with him. He runs inside to get him. So angry that, from his perspective, Rosalie decided to save the seeds instead of her son, he has her spend the night with Judith and George.

Rosalie calls Gaby, who speaks of a “purifying fire” (178). She notes how some trees need fire to germinate their seeds, and perhaps Rosalie is the seed. Rosalie has a dream that night of a Dakhóta woman escaping fire by going to the river. The next morning when John arrives, Judith explains to him how it was all just a miscommunication. John accepts this, but he doesn’t apologize for accusing Rosalie of being a bad mother. Rosalie senses that this issue of her choice to save the seeds first will linger between them.

While taking Tommy harvesting, they see a buck, which reminds Rosalie of the dream she had of her mother with the deer antlers. They go to a parent-teacher conference with John, where the teacher explains that Tommy had trouble with an assignment requiring him to list the names of his grandparents. When Rosalie supplies the names of her parents, the teacher realizes that Tommy is Indigenous and informs them that Tommy has been teased with racial slurs. This inflames Rosalie, who wants the names of the bullies’ parents, but John rushes her out of the school. Rosalie understands that he’s uncomfortable facing “a thin veneer of nice covered a dormant hostility in this community” (185) and that it’s directed at his son.

Rosalie wants to homeschool Tommy, but John points out that she’s already been teaching him, and it’s time for Tommy to learn more about farming. Rosalie continues to bring Tommy with her to gather plants, giving him lessons about the natural world and the cycles of interdependence. She remembers one of her father’s lessons about a chokecherry tree that was ailing because it was sending its resources to heal one of its offspring.

The next day while harvesting beans, they encounter a large flock of blackbirds, which scatter when John calls to Tommy. Later, Tommy tells Rosalie that John wants him to ride the tractor and feed the chickens. John also starts reading to Tommy at night, starting with Bible stories. As time goes on, Tommy spends more time with his father than Rosalie, and she eventually stops asking him to join her in the garden or woods. She feels that this turn in their relationship will be interpreted by Tommy as her abandoning him, for which he won’t forgive her.

The narrative jumps forward to 2002. In her solitude at the cabin, Rosalie nearly freezes to death when she lets the fire go out. Going out for wood, she spies a feral cat she calls “Šazí” (“Orange”). The cat watches her instead of running; it is clearly hungry, so she sets out some food. She feels her connection with the land and animals regrowing.

She recalls her father’s story about the fox and the rabbit, which was a lesson about life’s balance, but she also remembers him drinking and leaving her for days at a time. She allows herself to realize that when he was gone, she was often scared, hungry, and sad. She recognizes that his actions toughened her up, but because of them, she wanted to keep Tommy (who now goes by Thomas) safe from such things. Now she is not so sure that was the right course to take with him. Looking at her father’s map of constellations, she sees an inscription he wrote: “Find the place that Indians talk about,” which is the “place of spirit where all things are created” (199).

The story flashes back to 1889. Marie has been moved to the Santee Normal Training School in Nebraska. She harvests corn—grown from the corn seeds her mother sewed into her hems—leaving some for the deer, birds, and her neighbors. She now has a blue-eyed daughter named Susanne, who attends school there.

Prior to Santee, Marie and her mother were at a government-run camp at Crow Creek. The conditions were awful there, and her little brother died. Marie and her mother also received a long-awaited message from her father. He wrote from a prison in Davenport, Iowa, but they also learned that he died there. Now, Marie is planning to marry the farm teacher, Oliver Bordeaux, and move back to Minnesota.

Before she leaves, a white teacher interviews Marie about her experiences at Santee and what she might miss there when she’s gone. The woman’s ignorance about the atrocities and tragedies that Marie and her people endured makes Marie explode. She answers the woman in Dakhóta: She is leaving behind the bones of her mother, father, and brother, and the sickness and hunger that plagued them when they were forced off their lands. She says that the minister’s insistence that people forgive each other does not account for her people defending their land and their families, for which Indigenous people are still being punished.

Marie says she learned forgiveness after she was raped. The blue eyes of her daughter are a reminder of that crime, but her mother urged her not to hold that against the child and to love her, saying, “Let love be your vengeance” (209). As she and Susanne pack up to leave, Marie brings the willow seed basket that Iná gave her and a lock of her mother’s hair that she hopes to bury under the cottonwood trees by the river.

The narrative jumps forward to 1987. Rosalie has been promoted to write more articles for the paper since they landed an advertising account with Agri-Tech. She would like to write about the farm chemical and water issues, but the editor Ralph denies her, saying that they would lose their account with the company. Even though the year is almost over, he offers instead to let her write about how Minnesota’s Governor Perpich declared 1987 “The Year of Reconciliation” with the Dakhóta. Rosalie learns that Anthony, Gaby’s brother, is doing the run from Fort Snelling to Mankato to honor the 38 Dakhóta men hanged in 1862, and she goes to see him run. She decides that her angle on the article will be about how the run is a prayer of remembrance, of learning how to grieve and forgive. Ralph doesn’t publish it.