The Comeback Of The Southwest Peach
14:56 Share

This message comes from Greenlight. Parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach. With Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families, kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. Get started today at greenlight.com slash NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Reagan Whiteselusi 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

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 Diné, 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 Bosque 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. 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, Hoshkinini 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, Hoshkinini 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 herds 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 advisor 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,

That sounds really interesting. Let's get you on a research project. Her dad, who told her about the peaches and their significance to the Diné 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. ♪

This message comes from Capital One. Say hello to stress-free subscription management. Easily track, block, or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app. Simple as that. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

This message comes from Schwab. With Schwab Investing Themes, it's easy to invest in ideas you believe in, like online music and videos, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and more. Schwab's research uncovers emerging trends, then their technology curates relevant stocks into over 40 themes to choose from. Schwab Investing Themes is not intended to be investment advice or a recommendation of any stock or investment strategy. Visit schwab.com slash thematic investing.

Support for NPR and the following message come from Indeed. When it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search. Match with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash shortwave. Terms and conditions apply.

Hey Shorewavers, Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, I have an update about planet Earth. It's almost completed its 365-day, 6-hour, and 9-minute orbit around the Sun. Those 6 hours add up to an extra day every fourth year, and that's why we have leap years, and 2024 was a leap year, which means we had one more day this year to bring you stories about...

Astronomy, scuba diving lizards, social media algorithms, the COVID endemic. Yes, not pandemic. How Rubik's cubes work. What happens to your brain when you sleep? Extreme rainfall. All of that. Skincare trends on TikTok. Noise pollution. It's possible because space blindness. Invasive spiders. Of you. Honestly, your monetary support of our work. Geomagnetic storms. Either through a classic donation or by joining programs like NPR+.

With NPR+, you know this, you donate a small amount each month and get special perks for more than 25 NPR podcasts. You're going to get sponsor-free listening bonus episodes and even exclusive and discounted items from the NPR shop. NPR Plus members, you help us continue to bring you stories about, gosh, lead water pipes, needle phobia, whale menopause, nuclear fission. If you've been sitting on this all year, maybe head into 2025 with NPR Plus in your back pocket. With your help,

We can keep this going every week, bringing you stories you're curious about, stories you didn't know you were curious about, stories that are fun to tell your friends, stories that make you think about your place in the universe. Join today. Go to plus.npr.org, plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. Thanks for listening. Back to the show.

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 they're not being taken care of.

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

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, OK, 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 seeds. 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 sat 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'd 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, you know, 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 Regan. 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, you know, I'd 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, like, how to grow humility, how to grow a lot of respect for others,

different groups of people and how to 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 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 elder she spoke to 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 growths 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 in 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 her 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 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

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 confident 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.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Merrill. Whatever your financial goals are, you want a straightforward path there. But the real world doesn't usually work that way. Merrill understands that.

That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.

Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. What is rich? Maybe it's less about reaching a magic number and more about discovering the magic in life. Edward Jones Financial Advisors are people you can count on for financial strategies that help support a life you love. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com.