Nampeyo's Seeds: Recovering Women's Contributions to Ethnobotany Collections

• In Event: Preservation, Decolonization, and Knowledge Passing Over Time

Abstract

From the late 19th century through the 20th century, non-Indigenous researchers and United States government officials traveled to the Hopi Mesas in what is now northeastern Arizona to collect seeds and plants that sustained one of the world’s most biodiverse food systems for more than a thousand years. From dry farmed fields, irrigated terrace gardens, and rocky talus slopes, researchers extracted ethnobotanical collections that traveled far from the high desert environment to which they had adapted over millennia. Ears of violet corn and jars of yellow lima beans were exported to museums and herbaria across the United States, where they remain to this day. The men who used these collections to cultivate their careers did not collect just seeds and plants. They also interviewed (and even argued with) Hopi and Tewa women and girls about biodiversity, plant use, and how to prepare, cook, and preserve foods made with gathered and cultivated plant species. Researchers and federal officials depended on Indigenous women to not only secure seeds and plants for their collections, but also to document the cultural, environmental, and agricultural contexts of botanical specimens. Yet Indigenous women’s contributions to the emerging field of ethnobotany and the collections in which it was rooted went unrecognized by male researchers. This paper explores that historical lacuna by examining plants and seeds extracted from the Hopi Mesas between the 1860s and 1960s. By documenting the critical roles played by Hopi and Tewa women in the creation of ethnobotanical museum collections, the paper calls for a deeper examination of how Indigenous women’s work and environmental knowledge contributed to the vast ethnobotany collections that remain in museums and herbaria around the world today.

Author

• Tai Elizabeth Johnson, Longwood University