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Document Type

Open Access Article

Author Biography

Megan Peiser is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor of literature at Oakland University. Her monograph, The Review Periodical and British Women Novelists, 1790–1820, and accompanying database, The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790–1820, are forthcoming. With Emily D. Spunaugle, she is codirector of the Marguerite Hicks Project.

Abstract

By turning the page or reading further, you are accepting a responsibility to this story, its storyteller, its ancestors, and its future ancestors. You are accepting a relationship of reciprocity where you treat this knowledge as sacred for how it nourished you, share it only as it has been instructed to share, and to ensure it remains unviolated for future generations.

This story is told by myself, Megan Peiser, Chahta Ohoyo. I share knowledge entrusted to me by Anishinaabe women I call friends and sisters, by seed-keepers of many peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, and knowledge come to me from my elders and ancestors in my ancestral-healing journey.

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.

(In the issue section "Bibliographic Knowledge(s)")

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