num_pages: 372
description: A haunting novel spanning several generations The Seed Keeper follows a Dakota family's struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father Ray a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants of the stars of the origins of the Dakota people. Until one morning Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato--where the reserved bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited.On a winter's day many years later Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now grieving Rosalie begins to confront the past on a search for family identity and a community where she can finally belong. In the process she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron--women who have protected their families their traditions and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.Weaving together the voices of four indelible women The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and through them to our ancestors.
language: English
title: The Seed Keeper
publisher: Milkweed Editions