Short Wave - The Comeback Of The Southwest Peach

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

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. Want to hear more Indigenous science? Email us at [e-mail] to let us know!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. 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. They were planted like that among the tribal nations in the southwest. Vast orchards grew along the Rio Grande. All the way out into Hopi and a lot of the Grand Canyon communities. 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. 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. 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 U.S. government ordered the Navajo, also known as the Dene, 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. 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 Bosca Redondo and live there for four years.

So that's, you know, massive destruction within what we call the breadbasket of the Navajo Nation. That journey became known as the long walk. But some escaped that ordeal. Among them, as Reagan later learned, her third-generation great-grandfather, Chief Hoskinini. He has many names. 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. For four years, Hushkinini 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,

Hoskinini could help them replant peace trees and other crops and essentially rebuild their lives. And when the people came back, because he was giving them startup hurts of livestock to reestablish themselves in the homeland, they started calling him the good one or the generous one. 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 advice her

all about these heirloom peaches. She said, 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, this sounds really interesting. Let's get you on a research project. Her dad, who told her about the peaches and their significance to the Dene 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. The trees have been 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? 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 Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. Hey, ShoreWayers, Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, I have an update about planet Earth. It's almost completed. It's 365 day, six hour, and nine minute orbit around the sun. Those six hours add up to an extra day every fourth year.

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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. 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. Reagan took her determination to revive the peaches all the way through a master's degree in plant sciences at Utah State University. Okay, 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. Yes, I was very nervous. I immediately called my dad. And I was like, hey, we're going to see if we can get some funding. He says, okay, 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? They started knocking on doors, looking for peach seeds. 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

seats. So he was taking us to a lot of places, and it wasn't just him for the Navajo, but my late husband, Anthony White Salusi, he did the same for me, taking me into his home communities in the Zuni Nation and also into Hopi. It took months, but finally, Reagan found seeds from an 85-year-old elder in northwest Arizona. 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. How did you feel emotionally? 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. 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. 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 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. And that matters to her. 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.

At the time, I've 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 how to grow humility, how to grow a lot of respect for different groups of people and how to live. listen to receive information and to have patience when working with traditional elders in the community. Wow. So you kind of had to unlearn some of the things you were learning. Yeah. I was able to start comparing westernized practices for food production versus Native American traditional practices of food production. Practices based often in observation in changes that people have witnessed with their own eyes and practices that have been passed down through speech. 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. For instance, the elders, she's speaking. who said the traditional peach trees, once they matured, actually didn't need a ton of water. 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 grows correlated very well with just what was verbally communicated. 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. 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 and 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. By comparison, her orchards are propagated purely from the seeds. So each tree comes from a seed in the ground. And so every tree is its own individual unique characteristics. 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 our project is traveling among southwest tribal nations. 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 would like to have these be a part of our backyard fruit trees.

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? You know, it's just kind of, I feel, I just feel blessed to be doing this project. 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 confidence to say that this is my calling. If you have a story about plants and indigenous science you'd like us to look into, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org and follow our show on Apple and Spotify. It makes a huge difference. 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 Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.