Households across the West are increasingly ditching the smooth green lawns of the stereotypical American dream and attempting to grow native plants instead — a practice Indigenous communities mastered centuries ago to sustain themselves.
The new approach to landscaping is championed by activists, government agencies and universities as a simple solution to water and climate woes. But the Indigenous farmers who originally cultivated and cared for some of these plants are often left out of the narrative sold to consumers. And the native plant movement could impact Indigenous communities unexpectedly by taking away resources like crops, seeds and income.
“What’s growing out there is not considered a commodity for us,” said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a member of the Hopi Tribe and assistant specialist at the University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment. “It’s considered a way of life and our key to survival.”
Take the chiltepin chile pepper, for example, which grows wild throughout much of the Sonoran Desert. It’s considered a traditional food of Indigenous peoples in the region, including the Tohono O’odham Nation, but can be sold for hundreds of dollars per pound.
Unregulated harvesting of wild chiles “can be very destructive to the environment,” said Ian McFaul, co-chair of the Phoenix chapter of the international movement Slow Food USA, and can “certainly take food away from folks like the Tohono O’odham people.”
Crops endemic to different parts of North America fall under the wide umbrella of native or indigenous plants, which Native American tribes have cultivated for millennia. The current push to make indigenous plants trendy bothers Johnson because it fails to respect their inherent sacredness to Indigenous people.
“Talking about it as being ‘vogue’ — it’s missing the whole point here, and that’s part of the problem,” he said.
Meanwhile, the commercial industry reaps the financial benefits of selling native crops and other plants, with Johnson pointing to “Big Ag” corporations as violators that have taken advantage of Indigenous cultivation to develop their new crop varieties. For example, Monsanto, which was acquired by Bayer in 2018, has patented seeds derived from native varieties and sued farmers who cultivate them over claims of patent infringement.
“What’s growing out there is not considered a commodity for us. It’s considered a way of life and our key to survival.”
“We have a history here of exploitation,” Johnson said. He argued that Native American people should be among the first to get proper credit for their contributions.
Johnson suggested developing partnerships with them and supporting Indigenous-led food organizations. For instance, the Plant Conservation Alliance — a non-Native public-private partnership backed by the U.S. government — launched the National Seed Strategy in 2015 to tackle native seed shortages by ensuring seed availability, enhancing seed production technology and engaging tribal communities. Johnson depicted it as “a start” toward recognizing the contributions of Indigenous people, although he’s pushing to expand its access to more Native Americans.
Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, Arizona, conserves and distributes seeds — primarily food crops like corn and beans — to tribal members in the Southwest and northwest Mexico, as well as non-tribal retailers, community gardens, food access initiatives and the general public. For Andrea Carter (Powhatan Renape), the nonprofit’s director of agriculture and education, giving proper credit to Native American seeds means specificity: labeling a variety as Hopi blue corn instead of just blue corn, for example, and at times including its cultural use.
Native Seeds/SEARCH goes beyond the standard practice of donating a portion of its proceeds to Indigenous communities; it also offers knowledge and technical assistance to Native American agricultural producers to help them successfully grow from seed to plant.
“These are someone’s seeds — these are a people’s seeds, these are a culture’s seeds, and to ignore that is a great disservice,” Carter said.
The Diné Native Plants Program, a grant-funded program established in 2018 in Fort Defiance, Arizona, under the Navajo Nation’s tribal government, uses outreach and education to reconnect people with native plants. Jesse Mike (Diné), program coordinator and forester, said the team teaches them the plants’ names and brings in traditional practitioners to explain the memories interwoven with the plants and teach related uses and traditions like basket weaving.
“We’re losing a lot of the traditional knowledge,” he said. “It’s not being passed down to our younger generations.”
The program also restores ecologically degraded areas across the Navajo Nation and collects seeds from native plants, including grasses, wildflowers, shrubs and trees, for a seed bank. Although Mike’s team follows strict rules that limit the number of plants and seeds that can be collected, he worries that others in the commercial industry won’t take the same precautions as the native plant movement grows.
“You definitely want to make sure that you’re buying and sourcing your plant material from people who know what they’re doing and people who respect all the nuances of native plant production,” Diné Native Plants Program horticulturist Dondi Begay Jr. (Diné) added.
And while books like Native Harvest: Authentic Southwestern Gardening by Kevin Dahl encourage everyday gardeners to plant corn, squash, beans and more as an opportunity to “benefit from the centuries-old agricultural legacy of this region,” they skate over the historic injustices that prevented Native Americans from doing the same for hundreds of years.
Indigenous people were forced onto newly created reservations in the 19th century by the U.S. government and compelled to abandon their traditional farming practices. The federal rations they received often included unhealthy foods, such as lard, wheat flour and canned meats, which led to health disparities and high mortality rates from heart disease and diabetes. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the problem remains, with one in four Native people experiencing food insecurity.
Now, government institutions from the U.S. Forest Service to the Salt Lake City government are encouraging the public to make use of native plants. Native plants differ from other flora because they’ve adapted to specific habitats and regions after thousands of years. Their deep root systems help the soil absorb heavy rains, reducing runoff that sweeps surface pollutants into local watersheds, meaning they can serve as a cost-effective, easily maintained means of cutting water pollution, while also reducing erosion.
One in four American adults intentionally bought native plants in 2021, jumping to 25% from 17% in 2020, according to the National Gardening Survey. Close to 20% of survey respondents planned to turn part of their lawns into native wildflower landscapes, which more than doubles the results from 2019 at 9%.
The Southwest in particular faces serious issues like drought and overgrazing, so “native plants are absolutely key in xeriscaping,” or landscaping based on the natural water needs of an area, said Mary Phillips of the National Wildlife Federation. Xeriscaping utilizes plants that aren’t extremely thirsty.
“We’re losing a lot of the traditional knowledge. It’s not being passed down to our younger generations.”
Ian McFaul, who has worked with various Indigenous communities as a Slow Food board member in Arizona and California, spent the past few years “re-indigenizing” his yard with plants native to Arizona and other North American deserts. Now, hundreds of plant species, including wolfberries and saguaro cacti, are thriving feet from his house.
However, McFaul considers growing native plants to be a “complex” issue, particularly when it involves crops stewarded by Indigenous communities.
For example, Ramona Farms, an Indigenous-run farm on the Gila River Indian Reservation, serves as the biggest supply of tepary beans for food. Farmer and co-owner Ramona Button and her family helped save the beans, traditionally known as bavi (pronounced bahfv), from extinction for their community.
“If this is an Indigenous food, and non-Native folks are planting it to themselves sell in commerce, does that take away from what the Buttons and other Native businesses and communities are doing with their crops?” McFaul asked, referring to the potential impact on the market demand for their beans.
Ultimately, gardeners who seek to grow native plants ethically are encouraged to start by acknowledging where their plants come from. But that alone is far from enough.
They need to be mindful of the fact that “they’ll never understand them completely,” Johnson, the specialist at the University of Arizona, said. “They don’t have that intimate relationship.”
As Carter at Native Seeds/SEARCH put it: “There’d be nothing to preserve had communities not saved seeds for generations, and that’s a really remarkable thing.”
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This article appeared in the April 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The complex case of growing native plants.”
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