Past and Purpose: A Review of The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper is part novel, part history, part treatise, and part nonfiction. These elements weave together in the story of Rosalie Iron Wing, a Dakhóta woman whom we first meet during a major turning point in her life. Wilson, who is herself Dakhóta, composes a narrative that moves back and forth in time, filling in Rosalie’s backstory and family history. During these movements through time, we meet Marie Blackbird, Rosalie’s great-great-grandmother. Marie describes running from US Indian Agents who, among other things, took children away from their families and placed them in boarding schools to convert them to Christianity. Rosalie is, body and mind, a product of the transgressions and violations her family and the Dakhóta have endured, from the loss of their lands to the loss of their traditional food and their children. As one character says, what happened is “something we have to carry all our lives” (336). The novel is in many ways an exploration of how to reclaim the past by reconnecting with ancient purpose, not just ancient wounds.

The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. Milkweed Editions, 2021. 400 pages. $16.

The Seed Keeper asserts that much of the past does not go away, but continues to exist in the present. In some ways, this novel reminded me of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks because it details the way history runs through the bloodstream, through the DNA, through the bones, through the water, and through the land, affecting every life that steps forward into the present. We primarily experience this idea through the eyes of the Dakhóta, but during one scene, Rosalie’s white husband, John, takes her to see a monument commemorating the Sioux Indian War of 1862, one of the many events that transformed and devastated Rosalie’s family—but also John’s family. The monument expresses the white point of view, “whereby the depredations of the savages were confined to the border...[after] they massacred nearly all the whites in and about the agencies” (117). John explains that the white people celebrate “this history. It’s their way of remembering the family they lost” (118). But these acts of remembering don’t acknowledge the original transgression of taking the Dakhóta land, or the violence inflicted upon the Dakhóta outside the fields of war. 

“Before my father died, he told me that we each had a path,” Rosalie recalls, “a purpose that the Creator had chosen for us. Just as a warbler knows how to sing, and build its nest, and fly south in the winter, I was supposed to learn my purpose through the choices I made” (211). Rosalie compares herself to a maple samara riding the wind, with no purpose, until it finds a place to take root. The question of how purpose—the will to live, self-worth—is tied to landscape applies to both the white and Dakhóta communities in this story, but it is particularly apt as a way of looking at injustice and history. Rather than simply inserting a relationship with the land as a feature of Dakhóta culture, Wilson writes about that relationship on almost every page, weaving in the violent history the characters have experienced. As Rosalie gardens, she feels “the sweet gift of purpose that went beyond taking care of a family. The seeds reconnected me with my grandmothers, and even my mother...Here in these lonely woods, I felt as if I belonged once again to my family, to my people” (342).

Purpose is a means of reclamation and recovery, not only for the characters who are Dakhóta, but also for those who are white. The Seed Keeper advocates for the history of the Dakhóta, but it is not without empathy for the white farmers who populate its pages, despite the fact that the ancestors of these farmers violently took Dakhóta land and persecuted Dakhóta people. Rosalie’s husband John, in an early scene, tells Rosalie that his father “used to say that farming was about taking care of your family. If you had it figured right, everything worked together” (107). Later, Rosalie looks with compassion on a white neighbor who loses his farm, and thinks with regret of the farmers who have fallen prey to the chemical companies and seed companies like Monsanto, who don’t care about soil or livelihood. “Who are we if we can’t even feed ourselves” (120), a woman named Iná says in 1862, when the Indian Agencies have forced the Dakhóta to get food in sacks instead of from the earth, but this sentiment applies equally to farmers dependent on Monsanto (or Mangenta, as it’s called in the novel), which essentially chains farmers to genetically modified seeds and synthetic pesticides that will slowly ruin their land and their livelihoods.

This novel feels distinctly 2020 despite spending so much of its time in the past. While its concerns about Indigenous narratives, social justice, and environmental justice are not new, moments of the story, like Rosalie’s visit to the battle monument, or her friend Gaby’s 1977 comment, “If I have to sit through one more lecture on white-guy classic literature, I will kill myself” (87), evoke issues of the present, issues of representation and who has the privilege to tell their story. As I read about the separation of families, I thought of ICE and detention facilities, and the fact that the government has not learned from the past, but continues a practice with clear consequences that last for generations. Part of this novel’s intent seems to be to illuminate history, but I suggest that it attempts not only to tell a story that is outside the mainstream historical narrative, but also to use non-mainstream techniques to do so.

When I first began reading, I had a hard time becoming involved in the story. The tenses shifted in a strange way, perhaps auguring the chronological shifts that occur throughout. The structure of the novel makes use of four narrators, yet two of them hardly appear at all, and sometimes the shift to another narrator seems forced, as if it is only there to be utilitarian. While the novel in some ways reclaims narrative and representation, it also makes use of familiar gestures in ways that don’t feel reclamatory. For example, when a young Rosalie lies to cover for her friend Gaby, Gaby ends up busted in a drug deal and on her way to a home for unwed pregnant teens. Some of the circumstances of these characters come from the facts of Native American history and persecution: the prevalence of alcohol abuse and diabetes, the lack of plumbing, fresh food, and access to education. However, as a reader I ask myself, always, whether these characteristics are necessary to the narrative and/or organic to the characters. Does Gaby’s story add to our understanding or our empathy? Or do these circumstances simply advance the plot? These are important questions to ask as both readers and writers.

Another important question is that of stereotypical representations of Indigenous people as connected to the land. Wilson adds complexity to this representation through the depth of the story’s concerns with plants, soil, and ecology. As Wilson herself notes in the end matter, the novel was inspired by a story of Dakhóta women saving seeds, even as they were forced at gunpoint to a concentration camp after the U.S.–Dakhóta War, and, in her acknowledgements, Wilson first thanks “the seeds themselves.” And it is here where both the novel’s heart and its strength lie.

This story explicitly equates soil and seeds with survival. It is a claim of interconnectedness, which is not simply framed as a Native American belief, but rather as scientific fact. John tells Rosalie that his father used to quote FDR: “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself” (111), and the novel takes on, through Gaby, who becomes a lawyer and a river activist, the idea that chemicals in the river are chemicals in human bodies. When Rosalie thinks, “If I take care of the oak trees, I am also taking care of my family,” the sentence has two meanings: That the health of the land affects the people, but also that the oaks are family (212). Later, she realizes that planting seeds means “our lives become braided into the life stories of these plants” (239).

While there is a great deal of ostensible realism in this novel, there are also elements of magical realism—connections between humans and animals and plants and soil. Dreams. Coincidences. Visions. When it comes to emotional realism, Wilson is primarily concerned with collective emotion, emotion held by all of the Dakhóta—or even groups of farmers—rather than the emotional depth of individuals. I had a sense, throughout the story, that I didn’t know much about Rosalie at all. The times when she seemed most vivid were the moments in which she interacted with nature, especially in struggles with cold, snow, weather. This is not a judgment against the novel. I don’t believe the novel’s purpose is to make us understand a marriage or a relationship between mother and son. Wilson is working on psychological depth of a different kind, a historical and cultural depth. As Rosalie puts it, “History might have cost me my family and my language, but I was reclaiming a relationship with the earth, water, stars, and seeds that was thousands of years old” (343).