Traditionally, the beans were eaten dried, cooked in soups or stews, and often with the corn and squash it was grown alongside. “One of our traditional foods is bean bread,” Feather Smith, ethnobiology manager with the Secretary of Natural Resources Office for the Cherokee Nation, tells me over the phone. “It’s sort of like making a corn masa and mixing the beans in with it and then steaming it.”
According to the Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans entry on the Ark of Taste, the beans were given to the nonprofit seed company Seed Savers Exchange in the 1970s by “Dr. John Wyche, a retired dentist and former circus owner who gardened atop a rock mountain in Hugo, Oklahoma.” The beans had traveled in the pockets of Cherokee who had been forced off their homelands in the Southeast by the American government in the 1830s, “removed” to Oklahoma. Seventeen-thousand Cherokee were the last of five tribes forcibly removed from the area. During the long winter trek to Oklahoma, 6,000 men, women, and children died. Wyche’s ancestors survived to put these black beans in the earth in the new Cherokee Nation. His family planted, harvested, and seed-saved these beans for 140 years before Wyche shared the seeds with Seed Savers.
What does it say about the significance of these beans that in a time of great distress, they were saved, carried, and replanted? Can our crops connect us from one homeland to our next?
“They didn’t have a chance to go back and grab everything, but if all they could grab was one thing, it was these seeds,” Smith says.
Even if both the knowledge-holders and the seeds made the journey, the new land was not always accepting of these crops. “Most of these are plants that thrive in eastern deciduous forest regions,” Smith tells me. “They don’t necessarily struggle here. They just grow very differently here. Our beans prefer a little bit of a cooler temperature. So it takes concessions to make them grow here. Some years are better than others, which is always true in gardening.”
In the early 2000s, the Cherokee Nation was invited to contribute native seeds to Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault. While the Tribal government agreed that as a Sovereign Nation, their seeds should be represented, they discovered it was actually very difficult to find Cherokee heirloom crops within the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. “We had stories about the crops coming over on the Trail of Tears, but we could not actually get our hands on any here within the Nation at the time,” Smith says.