 All right. Thank you so much for inviting me here. I really appreciate it. And thank you to Sarah for funding this. This is actually our, we got two years in a row of funding for this. So this is our, this is our second year of receiving this and we really appreciate it. And it's a little bit different than a than a traditional partnership grant. So you'll, you'll see, you'll see why as, as we go through. But what we did in applying for the Sarah grant is basically said to Sarah this is a model other people can use to partner with and share resources with indigenous communities. And, and let's, let's get going. First, I want to give you a little bit of context. If people don't know who seed savers exchanges and what we are, we are actually a nonprofit organization started in 1975. And our mission is to steward America's culturally diverse and endangered garden and food crop legacy for present and future generations we educate connect people through collecting regenerating sharing heirloom seeds plants and stories. So some of the pictures of what we have up in Northeast Iowa and decor Iowa which is where we're located. The first picture is our visitor center with our evaluation garden, you have a shot of the seed collection, the quote the vault, and some of the the fields and gardens that we have around the property which is almost 900 acres. But the way seed savers exchange was actually through family tradition so Diane out wheelie was one of our co founders along with her husband at the time Kent wheelie. They were new newlyweds and Diane received some heirloom varieties from her her grandfather, and she had no idea that those varieties were brought over by her relatives and ancestors from Bavaria back in the 1800s. One of them was this morning glory that you see around grandpa and the other one right here and this other one is this German pink tomato. You can actually find those all over the country and multiple different organizations offer those now. And so as Diane and Kent realized that these are family heirlooms they wondered if other people out there had family heirlooms that they wanted to share and so in 1975 they put out a letter to mother earth news magazine which maybe a lot of you know about and Kent wrote that he, they had a plan to form the true seed exchange. And in that very first year, about 29 people joined, and it just expanded from there. We still facilitate that seed exchange program. This year for 2022 about 450 people that have participated and list seeds to share amongst others. So this is a little bit of a background on the exchange and the yearbook so in 1975 29 listers 70 the height of it was in the mid 90s where we had about 1000 people listing in this print publication called the yearbook. But in 2022 we had about 430 and in that book and in those listings over almost 22,000 varieties, and about 15,000 of those are unique that you cannot find anywhere else. So these are people's family heirloom varieties varieties that have been around for for a while and they just want other people to grow and share. And so this is called participatory conservation so we believe that seeds are safer being grown by many people and not just centrally located. They're able to adapt to local climates, people offer their own seeds to other gardeners around the country. This is just a map of some of the people that participate in our community science program. So it's people from all over the country. But we have connections to indigenous seeds in the 80s as this network expanded indigenous people started to list seeds and develop relationships one of them is is a Mohawk elder named Steve silver bear McCumber he just sent me this picture a couple weeks ago with this amazing Tuscarora white corn that he's holding there. And he actually, this book was developed by a man by the name of Doug eggland and he and Steve actually started to collect earquake bean varieties and Steve and Doug started to list them on the seed savers exchange yearbook. So you could start finding indigenous varieties in that yearbook, going back into the 80s. This other man by the name of Carl white eagle barns. He passed away in 2016 but he was a seedkeeper of Cherokee origin and he started listing in the 90s varieties that he was looking for and keeping. But we also have other other organizations that have listed indigenous seeds so native seed search, which was started in the mid 80s. And then people started to get indigenous seeds out of the USDA list them in the yearbook donate them to seed savers exchange. This other real interesting organization from Maine called Dharma farm. The people that started that have have indigenous origin as well and they started to look for indigenous varieties and donate them to seed savers exchange as well so as time went on. And so Rowan white came to a Mohawk seedkeeper chair of our board started as on the board in 2014. And she recognized that there were a lot of indigenous varieties in the collection here that needed to be with indigenous people that did not have them anymore. She approached me in 2017 and Rowan actually started the indigenous seedkeepers network. And she said, asked me if we wanted to participate and former collaboration with the indigenous seedkeepers network so they came here in in 2018 and we talked about it and kind of threw around some ideas and what we could do and for the first couple of years, Rowan helped us select varieties to grow on the farm here and then we would give them to Rowan and she would take them to the communities that we're looking for those particular seeds. And that was highlighted by this amazing Taos Pueblo squash rematriation ceremony in New Mexico. This squash was grown here in 2018 and we sent a lot of seeds to the Taos Pueblo people for a large rematriation ceremony. But what does seed rematriation refer to and what does it actually mean, it's the returning of seeds to the community of origin specifically indigenous communities. Many people hear of the word repatriation indigenous people use the word rematriation because historically speaking the women were the seedkeepers. So everybody farmed but it was the, the tradition and the job of the women to keep the seeds so when you are rematriation when you're sending seeds back to communities of origin, you typically are sending them back to the women who are going to be the seedkeepers of those communities. So that's why they are starting to use rematriation. So then we started to talk a little bit more about how we can expand the rematriation project, how can we partner with indigenous seedkeepers network, and how can we send seeds to partners to grow and share so the idea is to not have seed savers exchange exclusively growing these varieties on our farm here to rematriate but to send seeds back to the community so they can grow them themselves, save seeds and share them. And so we submitted a grant in 2020 to SARE, the North Central SARE region, and we with Rowan's guidance, we connected with Shelley Buffalo, the Misquaki food sovereignty coordinator, Dr. Rebecca Webster of the United Nation and Jessica Greendier, who is a whole chunk seedkeeper with Dream of Wild Health, and we were funded. It was amazing. And we were so stoked to have this, this happen. And then, at the end of 2021, we thought, well maybe we should try again because one of the critiques of that first grant was that we didn't have enough farmers and so Dr. Greendier actually recommended a couple more people to participate in and this year's cycle for rematriation Shiloh Maples who is now the program manager at Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, but Bear Schneider, who is the farm manager at Zebe Mung Wong Farm up in Northern Michigan, Earth the Borer Bell, who is an environmental justice consultant in the Twin Cities, Sue Menzel, who is farm manager at Lakuta Ray Ojibwe College in northern Wisconsin. And then Kelly's on is the agriculture agent at Stockbridge Muncie Community in Wisconsin. Shelly Buffalo had moved on and so new people came in to the Misquaki food sovereignty Christina Black Cloud, Luke Kappayu and Avis Bear Bass. And so we expanded from three to eight. So that's that was really great, just for Jessica to recommend other people to participate in this, this, this grant. The other amazing thing. A big shout out to Sarah is that the bulk of the grant actually went to the farmers themselves. So seed savers exchange the first year we got a little bit more of the cut but this year, we did not at all. The bulk of that money went to the farmers to support growing those varieties on their farm to share them and find people to to be seedkeepers of these particular varieties. The other great thing is that Jessica Greendier, even though she is with Dream of Wild Health. She has her own farm in Hudson, Wisconsin called Little Skies Farm and so she was growing at her farm in Wisconsin as well. So what are some of the the partnership project goals. Well, each partner chooses and grows varieties that they want to rematriate and share with their community or family. They don't dictate that whatsoever. It's solely based off of them. We have a large spreadsheet of potentially indigenous varieties that we have shared with them, and they just pick and choose what they want to grow. We continue to grow on site here to support what what the farmers are doing. And then the big thing is it's an exchange of ideas and exchange of cultural awareness about how indigenous cultures and communities. Respect these seeds and how they grow them and it really informs us how to do that on the farm here as well. And then also, for example, Kelly's on at Stockbridge Muncie, she didn't have a lot of seed seed saving experience and so we shared a lot of educational materials that we already had at Seed Savers Exchange with some of the more novice seed savers in the group. And at the same time, people like Jessica and Becky, and Luke down at the Misquaki who have been seed saving for a really, really long time. It was a platform and it was a way to connect people together to to not just share what we do at Seed Savers Exchange but what other more of these indigenous farmers do. So, these are some of the numbers that we we've grown these past couple of years so in 2020, 2021, it was 28 varieties. And as you can see in 2020, 2022, there was a lot more varieties we actually grew about 20 varieties ourselves here. And then on top of that it was about 40 other varieties so it was about 60 varieties for rematriation to this past year alone. This picture that you see here was Becky's harvest from 2020 and you can see how incredible her harvest was. And I'll talk a little bit more about what Becky Becky does. So we're some of the challenges some of the highlights that that we've we've experienced over these these past couple of years. I'm sure most of you had to kind of pivot from what you were hoping for and what you were hoping to plan for 2020. We had built in a lot of field days and onsite field visits in 2020 so we could go to Misquaki nation so we could go over to Becky in Wisconsin. We could go up to the dream of wild health in the twin cities unfortunately COVID hit and we're kind of stuck like wondering what to do. We continued to meet once a month via via zoom. But I was inspired by a video that I saw a couple years ago from the indigenous seedkeepers network about seed rematriation. It was about a five minute long video and I thought let's just make a video of featuring Becky and Shelley and Jessica. And so, if you, if you go to our website, I won't play the whole video because it's seven and a half minutes long. But if you go to our YouTube page you could click on it right from our seed savers exchange website. Here is the video. Check it out. It's really incredible. It's a it's quite beautiful. We hired a videographer that Shelley and the Misquaki nation had worked with for for quite a while and he did some really great great shots and videos and interviews. So check it out. It's really quite amazing. As you know, some of you may remember if you're from Iowa or bordering states in August 2020 we had a horrible derecho just run right through the center part of the state and it totally impacted the Misquaki nation. This is a picture taken by the Des Moines register. Some of the corn that Shelley was growing that year it was completely knocked down. And so they had complete losses of corn. But Shelley went out there and basically harvested every single year off of those so that they could do a boil. And that's one of their traditional methods of growing corn and eating. It's a green corn boil. So she went out there with a bunch of other people and they harvested every single year because they did not want to let that go to waste. So that was a big challenge. One of the great things is that they grew this really old watermelon called Illinois that came from the Cahokia site. Illinois border and from Missouri and I said it was one of the best watermelons they've ever grown and they saved seed and they saved enough seed to share with other people and also grow this year as well. So that's that's amazing. Jessica Greendier being Ho-Chunk she's on the lookout for Ho-Chunk corn varieties that she has not grown yet. And so we were able to reunite her with several Ho-Chunk corn including this one called Winnebago spotted. Winnebago is the name that the French gave to the Ho-Chunk people. So Ho-Chunk and Winnebago it's the same. She had been looking for this this variety for for quite some time so we were super thrilled about that. Unfortunately one of the Chippewa Bear Island corn the deer absolutely she said that that was the only corn that year that the deer ate. They left all the other corn alone except for that particular one. So that was a little bit of a bummer for her. And then really cool thing that Becky Webster did is she started a bean growers co-op with 10 O'Nita families. So she was centrally she was like the central farm where she was growing these varieties and then sharing with these 10 families to grow themselves. One amazing thing that so Becky has 10 acres just outside Green Bay Wisconsin which is where O'Nita Nation is and they bought this land several years ago and they are slowly building up the soil and restoring it to really rich farmland. And one thing that Becky does is she grows three sisters gardens in these mound systems. So the traditional Haudenosaunee Confederacy three sisters gardens are in these big mound systems and these mounds are several feet tall and you can see the picture here she has two gardens and she had like 200 some mounds and this is how she still grows today and she did a little bit of comparison and it was really interesting to hear how the corn and the plants grew in the mound system compared to like the traditional row system. And I want to I want to go back to this picture of all these corn that were blown down by the derecho because Shelly said that these these corn varieties were all grown in a traditional row system. Some of the other misquaki people were growing on the mounded systems and they noted that after the derecho went through and knocked over the corn, the corn in the mound system actually started to grow back up a lot better than the row crop varieties. So these mound systems there's a lot of knowledge traditional indigenous knowledge about how to grow these varieties in a mound system. And just I just love this this drone shot picture of these mounded gardens so you can see the contour and how they're laid out and they take tractors out there and they build up the soil, which is really amazing. The other really cool thing is, is sometimes we at Seed Savers Exchange we don't know what a name of a particular variety is. I had the PI number and the PI refers to the number that the USDA gave to that particular variety. And when Becky saw the scan of it she said well that's Seneca bird egg bean that I grew last year and so she sent me a picture and sure enough, identical and so now we know that this bean is actually Seneca egg bean instead of this PI 276298 so that's the exchange of knowledge that that we're looking for as well along the way. What were some of the challenges and highlights this year. Sue Menzel the farm manager at Lakuta Ray ended up retiring mid summer. She said it was so dry at the beginning of the growing season that she could not plant a thing. She retired. She still has all of her seeds she has not been able to grow them and she's looking forward to moving back to Chicago, where she grew up and and doing some work with Indigenous communities down there and doing rematriation work there. The Misquaki Food Sovereignty people came to visit here in August which was amazing. Becky Webster has officially a non-profit. Here is her website. She also has a great YouTube channel about everything she does. So if you go to that website and and click on the YouTube channel she has tons of videos to watch about how they grow traditionally how they cook their food. It's really quite amazing. As I mentioned, Jessica Greendier grew at her home farm. Another thing that Rosebud and Shiloh did is that because they are both in Michigan that they wanted to grow and Shiloh's in Southern Michigan Rosebud is way up north. They wanted to grow several of the same varieties to do comparisons. We're still working on that that'll be in our final report for this year. But that was a really great thing just to see how climate, even in the same state, affects how these varieties grow. Kelly's on mentioned that their traditional stock bridge bean, which you see here, they did not have a couple years ago and now they have enough. They are never going to be able to never lose that variety again. And I chatted with Irtha Borbell and she said she's taking all of her varieties with her when she visits her family down in Oklahoma this summer. So if you go to the video and watch the video hit some quotes. Jessica says that for them, you can't have food sovereignty without seed sovereignty so they need the seeds back to where they belong. And she specifically said it's the seeds of their ancestors that's where they came from. And so this is welcoming someone home that you haven't met before and you just can't describe that. And Becky put it right out there and said, you know, we had been assimilated we lost a lot of our varieties through forest relocation. And now we're reconnecting to our foods we're making that available to our community which he's doing through our co hop, and they're doing that out in the open, and it's a way to reclaim who they are, and this quote from Shelly. So with seeds there isn't a language barrier when you grow them out and complete the cycle of keeping the new seeds you're connected through the process to your grandmother's going back thousands of years. So, what are some of the takeaways that me, I personally have learned through these two years of working with indigenous seedkeepers network. It's really rewarding to engage with others and meaningful work. And it's not just, you know, a lot of people know seed savers exchange as a seed company and people buy seeds from us but there's so much more we do than than just that. And engaging others to find seeds that they want to welcome home is just incredible. Talking to Shelly this week she said that, you know, one of the things that happened for her in that first year. On the grant, because COVID hit a lot of people lost their support systems, and she said with Becky and Jessica, it created this new support system for her. And Shelly got to travel with Kale to shoot these videos, and she felt refreshed, and she came to seed savers exchange this past year to work in our gardens as a seasonal seed steward to check us out a little bit more. So that was really great. And then a lot of people I was wondering like, well, if I want to do this work and if I want to partner like what what we do and I give Sarah a lot of props for saying, if you want these grants, you need to support the farmers that you are working with and we will do that. So financial support information for this, for this purpose it was like seed saving information. We can do field visits now I think that's really important we're talking about that for next year how we can get more people here how we can get more people to the field sites where everybody is. And it also gives a platform for voicing concerns desires how they see protocols and procedures here at seed savers exchange. We have a frequent check in once a month with everybody sharing of information and decide how to move forward together. It's not ready yet but because we didn't have on the farm field visits we're doing some webinars coming up and the first one is actually going to be on the 18th. We have not advertised for them yet because we're just getting that together and it should be out next week. But we're going to have four webinars to in January and to in late February into March featuring the partners so we will forward that over to Sarah and they can help promote as well. So that's kind of our field days featuring the partners on these webinars. So with that, I think that is my last slide.