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57 pages 1 hour read

Diane Wilson

The Seed Keeper

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Part 5, Chapters 28-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “Wačhékiye: The Earth Hears Me”

Chapter 28 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Ida visits Rosalie, and they talk about how they had both been “throwaway” children. After Ida’s cousin was shot, the police came around asking questions. Ida’s mother defended her, but Ida feels that she did so more to protect the family than out of love for her. She tells Rosalie that she didn’t kill him because she didn’t need to, implying that someone else had already done it. Her communication with her parents is now down to one letter a year.

She gives Rosalie a photo of her Uncle Clarence with Rosalie’s parents on their wedding day. In the background are Lorraine (Rosalie’s grandmother) and Darlene. Ida tells Rosalie how she heard that Lorraine and her two brothers were different when they returned home from boarding school. She offers to take Rosalie to see Wilma Many Horses, a woman who may know more about the family.

Chapter 29 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Ida and Rosalie visit Wilma at a senior center in Milton. She not only knew Ray and Agnes, but she is also somehow related to them. Rosalie also meets Carlos, who remembers her from when she and her dad used to stop for gas at his station.

Ida and Rosalie go to the tribal council to get Darlene’s phone number. The receptionist initially refuses, but she capitulates after she hears the story because she is tired of hearing how so many Indigenous families were broken apart. If Rosalie hadn’t been orphaned until a year or two later, the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 might have prevented her from ending up in foster care.

Chapter 30 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

As Rosalie gathers plants to take to Darlene, Thomas arrives. It is his first time at the cabin, and he points out that Rosalie never talked about her family, so he could only guess about her roots. Though he’s not happy about her relocation, he understands that she may have needed time away to recover from taking care of his dying father. However, his visit is motivated by money issues, and he needs Rosalie to sign the bank paperwork so he can lease more land. Rosalie doesn’t answer directly but tells him her trees are gone, and with them, the birds that used to visit. She agrees to sign his papers, but first, she wants him to visit Darlene with her.

Chapter 31 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Thomas and Rosalie visit Darlene in her senior apartment, but Darlene is tired and not having a good day. She asks if Rosalie named her son yet, and before Thomas can answer, Rosalie says, “Wakpá,” which Thomas hasn’t heard since he was a child. Darlene tells them to return the next day.

Thomas drives his mother back to the farm. She notices that he is silent but not hostile; he’s deep in thought. Without saying so, Rosalie decides that she will not return to live on the farm. They go to visit Darlene the next morning.

Chapter 32 Summary: “Darlene Kills Deer, 2002”

Darlene recounts the day her siblings were taken away and she was sent to live with a cousin. At age 16, she returned to the cabin, as both of her parents were unwell and her siblings—Lorraine, Frederick, and Henry—were coming home from their boarding schools.

All three of them had changed for the worse and drank heavily. Lorraine was mean and would occasionally beat her brothers. She got pregnant, and once Agnes (Rosalie’s mother) was born, she would beat her, too. Agnes was allowed to run wild, and as a teenager, she often ran away. After years with little contact, Lorraine and Darlene received a letter from Agnes inviting them to her wedding to Ray Iron Wing. She was pregnant with Rosalie then.

After the wedding, they fixed up the cabin and lived there. Though Ray loved Agnes, it wasn’t enough to keep her from drinking and running off occasionally. One day, she showed up at Darlene’s place with four-year-old Rosalie. Something about Agnes seemed off or broken. Worried, Darlene followed them when they left. Agnes was about to throw Rosalie off the bridge, but Darlene managed to talk her into letting her hold Rosalie. When Darlene turned away for a moment, Agnes jumped to her death. Her body was never found. Ray wouldn’t say her name again and didn’t want anything to do with Agnes’s family after that.

Chapter 33 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Darlene tells Rosalie that she lied to Lorraine about having the seed basket because, even though she was the rightful heir, “everything she touched withered and died” (327). Darlene gives the basket to Rosalie and hands a cob of preserved corn to Thomas.

At a café, Thomas gets Rosalie to sign the papers. He is upset and disappointed about who his ancestors were. As he drops Rosalie off at the cabin, she tells him that he can run the farm his own way; he doesn’t have to do things like his father because John also did not run the farm just like his father. She invites Thomas to come back when the strawberries are ripe because it will also be time to plant the corn she received from Darlene.

Chapter 34 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Rosalie visits Wilma and Carlos with her seed basket and tells them the story she learned from Darlene. It is very emotional for Wilma to hear. At the bottom of the basket, Rosalie finds the letter that Marie Blackbird’s Até (Rosalie’s great-great-great-grandfather) wrote to his wife from prison. It’s in Dakhóta, so Rosalie calls Darlene, who reads her a translation. Rosalie buries the letter under a cottonwood tree, where a lock of her great-great-great-grandmother’s hair might also be buried.

Chapter 35 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Rosalie plants the Dakhóta corn. The next day, the squirrels have gotten all the seeds, so Rosalie plants more with Ida’s help. Later in the summer, she goes blackberry picking with Ida when a hailstorm blows in. It destroys the plants in the garden, leaving her with only 12 kernels. Rosalie is devastated and rages against Ida, upset that she knows more about Rosalie’s family than she does, that she had invited her berry picking, and that she doesn’t belong. Then Rosalie bitterly sobs in her destroyed garden.

Chapter 36 Summary: “Rosalie Iron Wing, 2002”

Rosalie awakes sometime later in her bed and sees that Ida, Wilma, and Carlos have been taking care of her. Wilma tells her about her great-great-grandmother Susanne, who was the family seed keeper and battled droughts, animals, and insects to ensure a harvest every year. Rosalie feels ashamed, but Wilma reminds her that Susanne had the best teachers, whereas Rosalie had no one to show her the ways. Carlos is cleaning up the garden with Ida, and they’ll replant what they can.

Wilma announces that her niece has arrived, who turns out to be Gaby, making the two friends cousins. Gaby apologizes for not calling Rosalie sooner. She explains that she quit the task force to be more involved with her son, who is now a cook at the casino and has plans to open his own restaurant someday. Mathó wants to talk to Thomas about raising bison for the tribe or even selling back some farmland to the Dakhóta, in part to help clean up the rivers. Thomas came to the cabin when Rosalie was sleeping, and Carlos got him to help form mounds of soil for the corn.

Carlos tells Rosalie that when Thomas returned, he was excited about the corn Darlene gave him and showed it to scientists at Mangenta, who were hoping to do some gene mapping and editing and, thus, be able to patent it. However, Thomas had trouble sleeping after that, recalling how Darlene told him that the corn would help him remember, though he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to remember. He doesn’t think he’s a good farmer, but Carlos said he would be okay if he just remembered that the seed doesn’t belong to anyone. Then he got Thomas to help him plant tomatoes. Carlos believes that the seeds are slowly calling Thomas home.

Ida then appears with a large bone, and they go with Rosalie to where her dog dug it up. They discover the cache pit that Marie’s mother created and the bison clavicle she left there. Amazed by the discovery, Rosalie asks what they should do now, and Carlos responds that they should pray.

Part 5, Chapters 28-36 Analysis

Wačhékiye means “prayer” in Dakhóta, and this final portion of the story provides answers to Rosalie’s and Darlene’s prayers as the book’s timelines converge. Darlene’s prayer is simply to bring her long-lost great-niece home to her family, and after decades, her prayers are answered. Rosalie’s prayer is more complicated, however, and may be seen as representing the first three stages of her life: In childhood, she wanted to know who her mother was and what happened to her; in her teen years as a foster child, she yearned for community; as an adult, she seeks to understand her place in the world. Tied into these prayers is the concept of forgiveness, as harms must be forgiven in order to heal.

Darlene’s story of Agnes Kills Deer is hard for Rosalie to hear. Her mother was mentally ill and tried to kill her. The dream image Rosalie has of her mother with a gutted deer and using deer antlers as a tool may have been something young Rosalie saw, but it could also be an impression she intuited from the “Kills Deer” name and her father’s sad silence about Agnes. He did not want her to “carry that story” (324), but without that burden of the truth, Rosalie was left with a gap, a dark abyss of not knowing. Notably, these chapters reveal a parallel with Thomas, as Rosalie concealed her own traumatic history from her son. This complicates Thomas’s character; even though he aligns himself with Mangenta and against his Dakhóta roots, he is likely dealing with similar gaps in identity as Rosalie.

Darlene sees that for Rosalie to heal, she needs to know Agnes’s story. Forgiveness heals the wounded party, and in this case, Rosalie needs to forgive both of her parents. Darlene does not excuse Agnes’s actions, but she frames them as intergenerational trauma: “Whatever it was that had come home from the boarding school with your grandmother, it lived on in Agnes. She never found a way through it” (324). Ray was also traumatized, not just by his wife’s suicide, which led him never to fish again in that river, but by what Agnes tried to do to Rosalie. Darlene states that when she told him, “his face looked like a mask” (324). After that point, he largely kept to himself with little Rosalie. One could speculate that he did so to shield her from stories about her mother or from others who might harm her. Either way, her unusual upbringing resulted from a protective impulse. This parallels the way Rosalie tried to protect Thomas from emotional harm as a child, unintentionally perpetuating this intergenerational trauma.

From the snippets the author provides of Rosalie’s teen years before meeting up with John, we see a lonely girl who is so accustomed to being alone that it is hard for her to remember basic pleasantries, such as responding to Gaby when she first meets her or saying thank you to John for the quarter. Withdrawn though she is, she always keeps an eye on the door in case someone comes to take her home. She yearns for friends and family, but she has no experience or training in how to get them. Gaby, whose friendship she feared she lost after the newspaper article, proves to be a lifelong friend—and now cousin—in answer to Rosalie’s unspoken prayer and her spoken one begging for forgiveness. The two women possess traits that complement one another: Gaby is outspoken, involved, and constantly moving, whereas Rosalie is still, calm, and observant. She is like a sister to Rosalie, as is Ida. Whereas Gaby shares Rosalie’s culture, Ida shares Rosalie’s emotional scars of having to survive without family as a youth. In addition, Rosalie now has elders, Wilma and Carlos. Together, the assemblage of caretakers makes Rosalie feel “the comfort that comes with belonging to a circle, to a community” (354). This emphasizes the idea that while culture can live on through individual actions, it thrives in communities.

The author leaves some of Rosalie’s last prayer concerning her place in the world unanswered. She has a home now, a circle, and the seeds to connect her to her past. The parts that remain unclear are her relationship with Thomas and what kind of involvement in the community she might have in the future. Carlos believes that the seeds are bringing Thomas back into the cultural fold. However, Thomas’s ambition, which includes promotions with Mangenta, is at odds with his newfound Dakhóta roots. There are hints that he might follow Rosalie’s path, like his unease after thinking to sell Indigenous seeds. Likewise, Rosalie is healing after learning her full history, and Thomas has now learned his. With this, it is up to the reader to decide which way they think he will go.

Gaby serves as a reminder that there are important issues that need fixing in the outside world. Though she has stepped down from her legal work, her interest in cleaning up the rivers, the “first medicine” of Indigenous traditions, may pull Rosalie away from the cabin in the future to lend her writing talents to the cause. In a larger sense, there is a glimmer of hope that Rosalie’s and the Dakhóta people’s place in the world is getting more acknowledgment, as evidenced by Wilma’s mention of Reconciliation Park in Mankato, commemorating the site where 38 Dakhóta men were hanged in 1862. It is a start, Wilma posits, because “Even a city like Mankato has to find ways to ask forgiveness” (352). She adds that forgiveness is not forgetting, but Rosalie needs to heal herself before she can work to fix the world’s larger issues.

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