Sacred seeds provide pathway for Native preservation

HARLEM, Mont. – While working with Indigenous people on six continents, ecologist Cristina Eisenberg has found a common thread – seeds are sacred.

“There are seeds in medicine bundles in almost every culture,” she said. “There are seeds in burial mounds. Seeds are sacred. Each seed is a life.”

On the northern plains of Montana, Eisenberg is one of several persistent, professional women who created a program based on humility, healing tribal relationships and Indigenous people while also working to restore native habitat.

People are collecting native seeds from species like green needlegrass, June grass and blue gramma for restoration projects through the Bureau of Land Management’s Seeds of Success program – a national native-seed collection initiative.

But it’s so much more than that.

Oregon State University, the Society for Ecological Restoration and the Fort Belknap Indian Community have all joined to offer select tribal members education and employment through the program.

So emotionally charged is the task before the women that, unlike any other agency meetings, hugging has replaced handshakes when greeting.

“We’re doing best Western science, but we’re doing it to the best of our ability in keeping with the cultural traditions and the Indigenous knowledge here,” Eisenberg said.

Flowing effort

To grasp what is occurring takes a bit of explaining as these women were brought together by a confluence of events, like streams joining to create what appears to have become a powerful river.

Eisenberg was working on a long-term ecological restoration project with the Kainai First Nations people in Canada. Peggy Olwell, BLM’s Plant Conservation Program lead, heard about the project and invited Eisenberg to replicate the program in the United States.

“What I said to Peggy is it will only work if it’s done on a community’s terms,” Eisenberg said. “Each community is different. Each tribe is different and will have different priorities.”

Perhaps no one at BLM’s Montana office had more understanding of the difficulties of establishing Native American programs than Wendy Velman, the Botany Program leader.

Since 2011, Velman said she has been managing for the tribal interest first. In projects with the Crow and Northern Cheyenne the loss of staff, funding and the pandemic eventually scuttled the work.

Despite the setbacks, Velman persevered.

The agency created programs at the Missoula Field Office collecting camas, bitterroot and whitebark pine with Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal members, and the Dillon Field Office is working with the Shoshone-Bannock in Idaho on a bitterroot project, she said.

“It’s been a really long journey since I got here, but this is kind of a culmination of tons and tons of conversations and putting people together,” she said.

Federal friends

One of the people Velman credited with giving the Seeds of Success program credibility was Marcia Pablo, the BLM’s tribal liaison.

As a Kootenai tribal member and a Western-educated woman, Pablo said she has a foot in two different worlds.

While sitting at a meeting with federal officials, she noted the spirits of her dead ancestors were all around her, so she was not alone and the room was more crowded than it appeared.

Pablo said one of the first things she asked Velman is: What can we give back to the community?

In a nod to tribal heritage, the program underway includes conversations with elders, spirituality in the gathering of seeds by saying prayers, giving offerings of tobacco and conducting sweat lodge ceremonies.

She called the current project the highlight of her career, which included a stint as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

“The biggest thing about all of this is healing,” she said. “We are healing past history, and we are building for the future. So it’s bigger than all of us.”

One individual exemplifying the potential of the program is 19-year-old Savannah Buckman Spottedbird.

The Fort Belknap (Montana) youth was recruited into the program last year and said the work of learning about plants, soil and collecting seeds has dramatically altered her life.

“It kind of gave me a purpose,” she said while leaning on a soil auger.

“It gave me peace and happiness. This is quite literally my home away from home.”

Spottedbird is employed year-round by the Seeds of Success program through Oregon State University where she plans to pursue an education. It’s quite the turnaround for Spottedbird.

“I hated school and science,” she said. “It was so boring to me.”

The tie to Oregon State is Eisenberg. Last August, she was hired for two newly created programs in the College of Forestry – the associate dean for Inclusive Excellence and the Maybelle Clark Macdonald director of Tribal Initiatives in Natural Resources at the Corvallis, Oregon-based institution.

Forestry

The two positions were established under the leadership of Tom DeLuca, dean of Forestry at OSU and former Forestry dean at the University of Montana.

DeLuca has worked to elevate tribal initiatives at OSU. When Eisenberg was hired, and DeLuca learned about the Seeds of Success project, he saw an opportunity.

“I was so blown away by it because of what she was doing by combining this wonderful Seeds of Success program within BLM, but also combining it with social justice issues and specifically empowering tribal youth and trying to bring science and bring opportunities for tribal youth into their lives through this really unique program,” DeLuca said.

“This is an area where a lot of individuals are wanting to effect change and see the need to overcome a lot of past wrongs and to create opportunities to do things right,” he added.

After hiring Eisenberg, OSU took over for the Society for Ecological Restoration, a global program providing leadership and expertise on restoration. That effort had partnered with the BLM on the Native Seed and Grassland Restoration Program in Fort Belknap.

The connection, again, was Eisenberg. She is a director at large for the Society for Ecological Restoration.

Interested partners

Lathered in sunscreen on a warm and windy July day, with prairie dogs chirping warnings in the background, Eisenberg gave a brief tutorial on the implementation of the Seeds of Success program on the Fort Belknap Reservation.

Listening intently were BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning and BLM Montana-Dakotas director Sonya Germann.

They, along with a group of tribal and BLM representatives, were spread out amid a cactus-riddled grassland just north of the Little Rocky Mountains, marveling at the growth of grasses, flowers and other plants following a wet spring.

The BLM’s Montana-Dakotas office was recently awarded $1.5 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for two years of Seeds of Success work.

In a partnership that began in 2019, the restoration society and the BLM joined with the Fort Belknap Community – composed of Assiniboine, or Nakoda, and Gros Ventre tribal members – to employ them in native seed collection.

Under the five-year partnership with the tribes, the seeds will be used by agencies like the BLM for restoration at places like abandoned mine sites.

Eisenberg credited Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Cabinet-level Native American woman, for fostering the “rapid change at the federal level.”

The change may now include an interagency tribal co-stewardship program within the BLM and Forest Service to replicate across the nation what is being done in Montana.

“So things are moving really fast,” Eisenberg said. “How can we develop the leaders of tomorrow within tribal nations?”Seven of the nation’s largest charitable organizations have also reached out to Eisenberg offering financial assistance to cover any federal funding gaps for such a program, she said.

In her humble fashion, Eisenberg credited Olwell with the vision to create the program, calling it her legacy.

“Now, how do we build this to capacity?” Eisenberg asked. “I think that we’re onto something. But we’re running out of time.”

Federal funding

The Biden administration is investing $200 million into the National Seed Strategy, Stone-Manning said.

Of that, $130 million will go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture with the other $70 million split up within the Department of Interior.

Stone-Manning called the Seeds of Success program a “confluence of so much we are working on.”

“And here we have this remarkable, once-in-a-generation – although it should be a regular thing – opportunity with a bunch of funding for restoration, and that restoration needs native seed,” she said. “We’re behind, but programs like this are going to help us catch up and in a meaningful way.”

As a Native American and Latinx ecologist, Eisenberg said she experienced many of the same hardships and barriers as those she is now helping, including homelessness and transgenerational trauma.

Now she stands at the nexus of a program with potentially life-changing ramifications for what could be generations of Native Americans.

The seed she has planted is already growing; just ask Savannah Buckman Spottedbird.

“Honestly, what I just want to do for my community is have people know that they’re heard or they’re seen, or that they’re not really alone,” Spottedbird said. “Because there’s a lot more of us – not even just us teenagers and kids going through trials and errors – but a lot of our adults on the (reservation) too … think there is no coming back, that there’s no hope, that nothing is ever going to change.

“But change is in ourselves. We just want to find it. We need someone to spark the light, and someone to not give up and give us hope.”