The seeds were descended from those saved by survivors of the Trail of Tears, a forced migration in the 19th and 20th Centuries, when indigenous tribes were driven out of their homelands by the United States. The Choctaw community is now helping with an experiment that tests if some of these seeds can survive the harsh environment of space and help future astronauts thrive.

Heirloom seeds are often defined as seeds that have been open-pollinated and have been cultivated for at least 50 years. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University sent these seeds up to the International Space Station so they can experience space radiation and microgravity, an experiment in collaboration with tribal students.

Astronauts transported a total of 16 ounces of the seeds of wild lamb’s quarters (Tvnishi), Choctaw sweet potato squash (Isito), Choctaw flour corn (Tanchi Tohbi), rabbit peas (Chukfi) and Smith peas (Tobi) up to the ISS on SpaceX’s 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in November 2023.

Once the seeds return to Earth on Dragon, Choctaw middle-school students at Jones Academy will conduct experiments to see whether the seeds still germinate and grow well enough to be used for space agriculture. The students will compare the seeds that have been on the ISS with similar seeds that have stayed on Earth at the CNO. Dragon is due to undock from the Harmony module’s space-facing port on April 26th if weather cooperates, and splash down off the coast of Florida the following day.

Based on previous experiments with tomatoes, it is likely that the seeds that have been to space will perform less well than the control group, according to Ian Thompson, tribal historic preservation officer at the CNO.

Thompson said the Choctaw community has been collecting wild plants for over 12,000 years and has been growing agricultural plants for around 2,500 years. They developed tribal varieties of squash, corn, beans and other crops. These agricultural skills promoted stability within the community helped them survive during and after colonization. There were around 20,000 Choctaw people before their migration. They have over 159,000 descendants in the 21st Century. Today, the Choctaw community lives mainly in Oklahoma and Mississippi.

The Trail of Tears was an unjust and terrifying experience for the Choctaw communities that were forced to migrate west from Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana to Oklahoma. Thompson said in a PBS interview that during the first wave of the Trail of Tears, in the 1830s, between 1,500 and 4,000 of the 12,000 displaced people died. (The CNO website says the total number was 15,000, 25 percent to 33 percent of whom died.) Subsequent waves of this forced migration continued until 1903.

“Sometimes, Choctaw people were forced to stay in open camps in the middle of winter with no tents, no shoes, almost no food,” Thompson told PBS. “In some of those camps, they were fed rations that had been declared spoiled by the United States military that were still fed to them. Lots of people died.”

“Through the colonization process, eventually our food system was shoved to the side along with our communities,” Thompson said. “Unfortunately, many of our seeds were marginalized as well… [and] became rare or endangered.” 

Sometimes, only a handful of a type of heirloom seeds were left, Thompson said. The CNO’s Growing Hope program gathered these seeds and cultivated them to prevent their extinction. As of April 2023, according to an article in the journal Health Promotion Practice, Growing Hope had provided 214,377 seeds to 1,179 Choctaw families.

“If you think about those hundreds of years of work being condensed down to just eight seeds for some of these varieties, it's worth more than diamonds,” Thompson said. “It's worth more than almost anything per weight.”

Jacqueline Putman, program coordinator for Growing Hope, watched the seeds being launched into space on November 9th. “It was absolutely spectacular,” she said. “I have no words for it. Just to think about the seeds that our ancestors fought so hard to keep and to think that... they looked into the heavens and our seeds are in the heavens that they looked at. It just amazes me.” 

The idea for this project came from a brainstorming session where Putman envisioned the future of Growing Hope and imagined that her community could send seeds to space. She said she made a drawing on a whiteboard during a planning session.

The seeds are considered sacred by the Choctaw community, Thompson said. There are legends about some of the seeds being gifts from a higher power. The seeds are considered sacred partly because they have been grown by dozens of generations of the ancestors of the Choctaw community. The research team consulted Choctaw elders to obtain their approval for this project, Thompson said. Communal decision-making is always involved when the heirloom seeds are concerned.

“I'd like to emphasize that the seeds are part of a viable foodway that our ancestors created,” Thompson said. “That traditional foodway was functioning perfectly well a couple hundred years ago before the Trail of Tears. When we work to bring that back, it's an opportunity to combine cultural revitalization and wellness.”

The standard American diet does not work well for the Choctaw community, Thompson said. Diseases related to processed food, saturated fat and refined sugar are common.

“When we have an opportunity to go back to our traditional foods, especially the plant-based foods, for a lot of people that comes with a significant improvement of health,” Thompson said. The traditional Choctaw diet is based on many native plants, along with animals, fish and shellfish. It is high in vitamins and minerals. 

Funding for this project was provided by Boeing through a collaboration with Kat Gardner-Vandy, assistant professor of aviation and space at OSU. She played a key role in making this idea a reality.

OSU offers a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Science Activation program called Native Earth | Native Sky. The developers of this program will integrate the story of this experiment into its middle-school curriculum, which will be available for free this year. 

Seeds and informational resources are available to Choctaw community members through the Growing Hope program. Applications are accepted yearly from January to April. Applicants can call the program office at (918) 567-3709 ext. 1016 for details. Seeds are available on a first come, first served basis.