Indigenous Voices Book Club: "The Seed Keeper" by Diane Wilson
About this Event
The Indigenous Voices Book Club is devoted to reading and discussing books by Indigenous writers, bringing together fiction, memoir, history, poetry, and more. Each month, we'll encounter stories and perspectives that deepen our understanding of Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, and contemporary life.
This month, we're reading Diane Wilson's The Seed Keeper—a novel about four generations of Dakhóta women and the seeds, stories, and responsibilities passed between them. After the death of her husband, Rosalie Iron Wing returns to the childhood home she left decades earlier, where memories of her father, her family, and the land begin to bring her back to a history from which she has long been separated. Moving between Rosalie's story and those of the women who came before her, Wilson traces a family shaped by forced assimilation, displacement, loss, and the enduring work of keeping both culture and community alive. At the center of the novel are seeds: saved through winters, carried across generations, planted again when the time is right. The Seed Keeper is a quiet but sweeping story about returning home, remembering what has been lost, and caring for what can still be saved. It's also a beautiful exploration of our relationship to the land—and what it means to be responsible for what we leave behind.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award in Fiction
A BuzzFeed Best Book of Spring
A Book Riot Best Book of the Year
A Bon Appetit Best Summer Read
A Ms. Magazine Best Book of the Year
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Diane Wilson (Dakota) is the author of The Seed Keeper. She is also the author of a memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past, which won a Minnesota Book Award and was selected for the One Minneapolis One Read program, as well as a nonfiction book, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life, which was awarded the Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado. Her most recent essay, “Seeds for Seven Generations,” was featured in the anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. Wilson has received a Bush Foundation Fellowship as well as awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the East Central Regional Arts Council. In 2018, she was awarded a 50 Over 50 Award from Pollen/Midwest. Wilson is the executive director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to create sovereign food systems for Native people. She is a Mdewakanton descendent, enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation, and lives in Shafer, Minnesota.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 21.28
