The Seed Keeper

The importance of water in Dakhóta culture is emphasized by starting Chapter 1 with Ray’s lesson about Dakhóta origins and place names. The name of the land— now the state name—even highlights water, meaning “water so clear you could see the clouds’ reflection” (5). Bdote, the place where two rivers join, is considered the “center of the earth” (6). By starting Rosalie’s story with this information, the author is centering water’s importance.

As a foster child, Rosalie finds solace by running down to the banks of the Minnesota River. From her father, she knows that Dakhóta families followed the river from the north to where it joins the Mississippi and beyond, so it represents a part of her heritage. She knows if she follows the river, she could go back home, so the river is a link to her past. Even the detritus she spies in the river carries “a story from the north, news from a world that I had been taken from as a child. This water was my only connection to the land where I was born” (50). Later, when she sees the river on John’s property, she feels at peace for the first time in a long time. It is not surprising, then, that she chooses to name her son Wakpá, meaning river. As rivers are a way for her to connect with her home and past, she feels that her son will be a way to reconnect her with family. He is a possible carrier of tradition. However, Rosalie’s past is upstream from where she lives; rivers flow downstream and away. So, too, does her Wakpá flow away from her.

Gaby brings water into the present and fights for its future. At the powwow, she tells Rosalie about a dream she had that moved her. In her dream, “the river was crying, that she had no one to help her. The women, the water carriers, had disappeared. There were no trees, no animals who came to drink. And when I work, I knew what I needed to do. I would help our sister recover” (171). The dream of the river spurs Gaby to go to law school, where she joins the Save Our Rivers task force, speaking out about farm pollution in the Minnesota River. Some years later, she shifts to the Mississippi River after visiting its headwaters. The pure waters there are a “life-giving gift, what the elders call the first medicine. It was the closest [she came] to understanding what ‘sacred’ means” (265). Gaby sees the waterways as they are now—polluted and contaminated—but she also sees that renewing their health is the same as renewing the health and livelihoods of the Dakhóta—and everyone else.

Rivers also symbolize sorrow for Rosalie. When she realizes that John is dying, she describes it as “the slow rise of a river that would carry me away from the life I knew” (273). She does end up going away by going back to her first home. Just like a river current, this movement is inevitable. The sorrowful connections increase when she learns that her mother tried to throw her into the river and then died by jumping in. Learning that her mother’s body was never found helps Rosalie understand why her father never fished in the river—she is still there. When Rosalie dreams that “a river rose from its banks and reached out to [her] with long arms, like a mother reaching to her child,” she knows it is true (331).