Seeds, Grief, and Memory with Rowen White
In this episode, Prentis sits down with farmer, seedkeeper, and indigenous seed and food sovereignty activist, Rowen White. Rowen is the founder and Creative Director of Sierra Seeds, an organic seed cooperative focusing on local seed production and education. Listen as these two explore how seeds operate as gateways to our lineage and how our current disconnection manifests as grief. Rowen invites us to remember and reconnect to our histories, the wisdom of our ancestors, and to the collective as our source of sustenance.
Rowen White is a Seed Keeper/farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for indigenous seed and food sovereignty. She is the Educational Director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds, an innovative Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization located in Nevada City CA. Rowen is the Founder of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network, which is committed to restoring the Indigenous Seed Commons. She facilitates creative hands-on workshops and strategic conversations in community around seed/food security around the country within tribal and small farming communities. As a farmer, mentor, leader, writer, and storyteller Rowen is deeply committed to a lifelong practice of embodied prayer that contributes to cultivating a culture of belonging in our ways of nourishing ourselves. She is part of a collective movement to reseed imaginations of a more beautiful and nourishing future through uplifting and mentoring emerging changemakers, visionaries, community members, creative humans who are making nourishing contributions at the intersections of the landscape of food sovereignty and cultural revitalization. She believes through the power of cultivating creative supportive learning spaces, by reclaiming narratives, and practicing radical imagination we can work together to seed the change for a more equitable and beautiful relational, kincentric food system that centers around a deep sense of belonging and connection.