Citing Seeds, Citing People: Bibliography and Indigenous Memory, Relations, and Living Knowledge-Keepers

Abstract:This piece explores Indigenous knowledge-keeping and -sharing of Turtle Island, the place currently called the United States, especially as it relates to ancestral knowledge, oral tradition, and the living place of our knowledge—the land, and the fields of bibliography and book history. More specifically this article focuses on the seed as a site of Indigenous knowledge and how structures of knowledge corralling (book, library, collection) and knowledge managers (reader, librarian, archivist, collector) do not equally or easily map onto Indigenous knowing. Book history and bibliography as of this moment have no way to consider in their field discourse the symbiotic and living familial relationship between knowledge, DNA, culture, environment, and tradition embodied in seeds, the gardens, and lands where they grow, and the human relatives who interact with those seeds in the continual living process of creating, planting, growing, sharing, eating, and living Indigenous knowledge—that is, Indigenous texts. This article exposes the ways that Indigenous peoples are living with knowledge traditions embodied in our more-than-human relatives. That knowledge exists because some being is continually living some part of it and communicating it with other beings. Central to many of these knowledge traditions are seeds.