I n 1917 Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa seed keeper, described her nations relation-ship between plants and people: We cared for our corn . . . as we would care for a child; for we Indian people loved our gardens, just as a mother loves her children.1Bird Womans words provide a glimpse of the reciprocal connection that Nativepeoples across the Americas established with plants. Plants have nurtured theircommunities physical, spiritual, and social well-being, while people reciprocated not only in caring for plants as treasured children but also in cherishing them as ances-tors who are integral actors embedded in a wider ecosystem. With encroachment of non-Native peoples, however, the oppressions Native peoples have suffered fromsettler colonialismdisease, violence, containment, and assimilationhave alsothreatened the well-being of this wider web of relationships among people, plants, and the landscape, including the relationship with indigenous seeds. Certain settler-colonial practices threatened indigenous agriculture directly, such as removal of Native peoples from their homelands, destruction of indigenous ecosystems through resourceextraction (including Euro-American farming), assigning Native families allotments of land, degrading local indigenous diets, forcibly assimilating children through Euro-American education systems, and disenfranchising women from their roles in farming by coercing men to use Western techniques

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