Pod Insights Short Wave The Comeback Of The Southwest Peach About this episode Centuries ago, Southwest tribal nations tended vast orchards of peach trees. But in 1863, thousands of those trees were cut down by the United States government when it ordered the Diné to leave their land as part of the Long Walk. Horticulturalist Reagan Wtysalucy wants to bring that those Southwest peaches back.
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0:15 Emily Kwong? You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
0:21 Emily Kwong? Reagan Whitesalusi was eight years old when her dad told her a story. How centuries ago, at the four corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet, there were thousands and thousands of peach trees.
0:36 Speaker 02 They were planted like that among the tribal nations in the southwest.
0:39 Emily Kwong? Vast orchards grew along the Rio Grande.
0:42 Speaker 02 All the way out into Hopi and a lot of the Grand Canyon communities.
0:46 Emily Kwong? Growing up as a member of the Navajo Nation, Reagan had never seen a peach tree, but she learned the stories. How the peaches were a vital food source, eaten fresh, or boiled, or dried in the sun and stored. How many tribal communities in the southwest begin their spring dances when the peaches start blooming.
1:04 Speaker 02 And when the peaches are done blooming, then they stop their dances. Even for Navajo, there's sacred prayers given to the peaches during certain times of the year.
1:15 Emily Kwong? The peaches were so important that they became part of a scorched-earth policy to drive the people out. It happened in 1863, when the US government ordered the Navajo, also known as the Dine, to leave their land, to move to an internment camp called Bosque Redondo. And Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson led his cavalry regiment to cut down over 4,000 peach trees.
1:36 Speaker 02 And it was kind of the final act of destruction of livestock and destruction of other crops that caused the Navajo people to surrender to the government and go on over a 400-mile journey over to Bosque Redondo and live there for four years.
1:53 Speaker 02 So that's, you know, massive destruction within what we call the breadbasket of the Navajo Nation.
2:01 Emily Kwong? That journey became known as the Long Walk.
2:05 Emily Kwong? But some escaped that ordeal. Among them, as Reagan later learned, her third-generation great-grandfather, Chief Hoshkennini.
2:15 Speaker 02 He has many names. That is one of them. It translates to the Angry One. He took our family to an area where there were still orchards that existed, that the cavalry lost their trail, and they weren't found.
2:32 Emily Kwong? For four years, Hoshkennini stayed hidden, subsisting on peaches and food stores in the canyon. He raided the cavalry camps to steal livestock, and he rounded up feral livestock that remained, so that when those who survived the poor conditions of Bosque Redondo returned, Hoshkennini could help them replant peach trees and other crops, and essentially rebuild their lives.
2:55 Speaker 02 And when the people came back, because he was giving them start-up herds of livestock to reestablish themselves in the homeland, they started calling him the Good One or the Generous One.
3:10 Emily Kwong? Today, the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States. And when Reagan was in college studying agriculture, she told her adviser all about these heirloom peaches. She said,
3:21 Speaker 02 "I want to be able to be a person that can help support bringing this crop back in addition to many others that are being lost within our communities." And he kind of tipped me off and was like, "That sounds really interesting. Let's get you on a research project."
3:36 Emily Kwong? Her dad, who told her about the peaches and their significance to the Denai people, encouraged her to pursue this research, too. But there was a problem. In 2013, when Reagan began this project, there weren't that many peach trees left.
3:52 Speaker 02 The trees have been
3:55 Speaker 02 dying off in large numbers, and the original caretakers have been passing away. So now we're going through a period of our young individuals, including myself, are trying to seek and understand, well, who are we? What did we lose? How much can we hold on to? And what is it that we need to preserve and protect? And, you know, what's the most important pieces? And how can we retain this and get it back?
4:22 Emily Kwong? Today on the show, bringing back southwest peaches. The race to recover an heirloom crop and bring together indigenous knowledge with agricultural science. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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7:32 Emily Kwong? Join today. Go to plus.npr.org, plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. Thanks for listening. Back to the show. Reagan says there are a lot of reasons why southwest peaches are in trouble at the Four Corners. There's land loss, water scarcity. As elders have passed away and their descendants have left the reservation, there's just fewer people to care for the trees and to pass on the traditional knowledge.
7:59 Speaker 02 They're not being taken care of and they're not necessarily producing fruit anymore. So the trees may be alive, but the fruit's not there to be able to source from.
8:08 Emily Kwong? Reagan took her determination to revive the peaches all the way through a master's degree in plant sciences at Utah State University. OK, so you set out into the Navajo Reservation with your father and two Utah State University professors to track down, record, and collect seeds from the ancestral peach trees in the area. And it was based on like your dad's memories of where he saw them growing as a child.
8:33 Speaker 02 Yes, I was very nervous. I immediately called my dad and I was like, hey, we're gonna see if we can get some funding. He says, OK, sounds good. So then I got funding within a few months later. And here we are, scheduling a trip to go and find seeds. And I told my dad, I was like, can you be my translator?
8:52 Emily Kwong? They started knocking on doors, looking for peach seeds.
8:56 Speaker 02 He started taking us into some of these very, very remote rural areas. And he's like, I know there were trees down here. Let's go see if somebody still lives down there and see if maybe they'll give us some seeds. So, so he was taking us to a lot of places and it wasn't just him for the Navajo, but my late husband, Anthony Whitesalusi, he did the same for me, taking me into his home communities in the Zuni Nation and also into Hopi.
9:22 Emily Kwong? It took months, but finally Reagan found seeds from an 85-year-old elder in northwest Arizona.
9:29 Speaker 02 And these seeds, she gave them to me. She said that she had them sitting around since she had a crop in the 80s. And she gave me these handful. I germinated them. I think I planted about 15 seeds and had 13 trees germinate. About three years later, the trees had their first fruit that set on them. And I took them and I shared them and I sliced them and I, you know, that's when I tasted my first peach.
9:57 Emily Kwong? How'd you feel emotionally?
9:59 Speaker 02 I think I just felt humbled, but just privileged, I guess, to be able to taste this fruit that is very hard to find and very few people are growing them.
10:13 Emily Kwong? Reagan started going door to door throughout the Four Corners area and in the last few years has gathered seeds from over half a dozen locations.
10:22 Speaker 02 One of the locations that we've been gathering most of our seed from is out by Navajo Mountain area and I still have good, close connections with the family there. That's probably the most versatile and the healthiest orchard I've seen. It's isolated away from any other types of, you know, nursery stock orchard guaranteed. So we can guarantee that any seed that we get from there is going to be genetically pure and we can sample it.
10:46 Emily Kwong? And that matters to Reagan. She wants to sample the genetics of as many regionally-adapted peaches as possible. She estimates her team has grown nearly 300 trees from these heirloom seeds, but it's taken over a decade to get to this point. And she told me, learning whole new ways of thinking that she just didn't learn in school.
11:06 Speaker 02 At the time, I, you know, I'd been trained... Very whitewashed, going into school, being trained to be a scientist, but also had to step back from both of those and realize like how to grow humility, how to grow a lot of respect for different groups of people, and how to listen to receive information and to have patience when working with traditional elders in the community.
11:39 Emily Kwong? Wow. So you kind of had to unlearn some of the things you were learning.
11:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, I was able to start comparing westernized practices for food production versus Native American traditional practices of food production.
11:52 Emily Kwong? Practices based often in observation, in changes that people have witnessed with their own eyes, and practices that have been passed down through speech.
12:00 Speaker 02 Even though Native Americans don't have a large, like, written documented process of their history or methods in all the things that they do, it's all orally taught, does not mean that it's not valid. Or because there's no scientific hard data to correlate with it, that it should be negated as a truth.
12:25 Emily Kwong? For instance, the elders she spoke to said the traditional peach trees, once they matured, actually didn't need a ton of water.
12:32 Speaker 02 And I took samples from dead trees, from orchards that were no longer being taken care of. We did tree ring analysis and saw that the tree ring growth patterns and the variability between the tree ring growth correlated very well with just what was verbally communicated.
12:50 Emily Kwong? And that's just one example of how gathering both the traditional knowledge and these heirloom seeds has helped Reagan put the puzzle back together. She dreams of one day establishing what she calls genetically pure orchards in rural areas. Those would be really different from commercial breeding programs where peaches are selected to enhance the size of the fruit and the sugar content, and all the trees are genetically identical.
13:13 Speaker 02 There's asexual propagation techniques that go into play to make sure that the, you know, everything is very uniform. Every, you know, the peach trees are all the same in many duplications, whether they're grafted or whatever it is. So that way harvesting is the same or harvestability or shelf life is the same.
13:36 Emily Kwong? By comparison, her orchards are propagated purely from the seeds. So each tree comes from a seed in the ground.
13:44 Speaker 02 And so every tree is its own individual, unique characteristics.
13:48 Emily Kwong? From seeds that are uniquely adapted to the local climate. Preliminary studies have even shown that southwest peaches are more drought resistant and have a higher pest tolerance. And that could be critical to peach production in the future. But for now, Reagan is focused on gathering genetic information about the peaches of the Four Corners region. And word about her project is traveling among southwest tribal nations.
14:10 Speaker 02 They've been reaching out from all over the country saying, "We have peaches that look exactly like yours in similar places of remote locations. Nobody's taking care of them. We don't know that there's anybody that owns them." And they've been getting samples and sending them to me. Also, a lot of people that have reached out and been like, "Can we have some seeds? We, you know, we just want to start some trees. We want to support this. We want, we would like to have these be a part of our backyard fruit trees."
14:36 Emily Kwong? I mean, how do you feel about the fact that this was a community effort in the sense that you would not have these trees if the southwest communities hadn't held on to these seeds at all?
14:47 Speaker 02 You know, it's just kind of, I feel, I just feel blessed to be doing this project. I, I always prayed to ask for guidance for this project. And there's multiple times where I have been given direction. I have been shown through dreams, through many things of all the things that I need to do and all the things that will come. I feel very confident to say that this is my calling.
15:32 Emily Kwong? If you have a story about plants and Indigenous science you'd like us to look into, send us an email at [email protected] . And follow our show on Apple and Spotify. It makes a huge difference.
15:51 Emily Kwong? This episode was produced by Jessica Young. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you, as always, for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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