Sunday Supplement: Native American Space Seeds
November is National Native American Heritage Month, a time for the US to celebrate the significant contributions, rich and diverse ancestry, cultures, traditions, and histories of its first people.
Hello, Gardeners of the Galaxy, and welcome to the GotG Sunday Supplement, premium content for my top Rocket Boosters!
When CRS-29 blasts off (currently scheduled for 8:28 pm ET on Thursday), it will carry roughly 500 grams of heirloom seeds from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma to the International Space Station (ISS). According to the write-up in NASA's Space Station Research Explorer, "This is the first time Native American heirloom seeds have flown to space". But it isn't.
In 2011, the first Native American space experiment flew on the very last Space Shuttle flight. When Atlantis blasted off on STS-135, it carried indigenously cultivated tobacco seeds from the ethnobotany collection at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Combining scientific tools with American Indian cultural knowledge, the experiment aimed to test germination in microgravity and a soilless environment. Staff at the museum and students from the Nawayee Center School and the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center planned to carry out control experiments on Earth.
The project, called "Indigenous Star Seeds for Life", showcased the museum's ethnobotany collection, which included indigenously cultivated corn, beans, squash and tobacco. The museum worked with the American Indian community to germinate, grow, and harvest seeds from its permanent collection, bringing cultural anthropology, archaeology, and American Indian perspectives together.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Gardeners of the Galaxy Mission Report to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.