by Lauren Palmer
Every Autumn, pumpkins are collected on porches. They sit beside doorways, bright against the golden world, while their name appears on menus announcing the return of familiar seasonal drinks. We know their silhouettes. We recognize their colors. We have learned to anticipate their arrival in the marketplace. But, how well do we know them?
Before ever being sipped from a cup or served in a pie, there is a field. There is a harvest. There are bees. There is fruit. There are vines and broad leaves. And before any of this, someone kept a seed.
For Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, pumpkins and other squash belong to long relationships with cultivation, nourishment, and place. Our ancestors observed these plants across generations and learned their habits—tending their differences and carrying forward varieties that could feed a household, keep through colder months, and offer seed for another planting. Our ancestors' knowledge lives in the harvest and in the hands still tending it.
Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of the Three Sisters in Braiding Sweetgrass, I find myself considering the shape of a garden and the shape of belonging.
Corn rises. Beans climb. Squash tendrils outward, laying her broad leaves over the ground. Her shade helps hold moisture in the soil and quiet the growth of competing plants. Beneath the taller sisters, she tends the conditions of their growing. I keep thinking about that low, spreading work. There is a kind of belonging I understand here as the corn sister of three sisters, myself.
Squash has a deep history in eastern North American agriculture. Some early cultivated forms were hard-shelled plants whose edible seeds were an important source of food. They differed from the thick-fleshed squash familiar in our kitchens today, reminding us that the harvest itself has a history of change, shaped through generations of relationship between people and plants. And through it all, seeds are integral to the story. In some way, they are its beginning and its end. A seed holds the possibility of another plant, but it also comes from a life already lived. It holds an inheritance from its predecessor. Its beginning belongs to an ancestor’s ending. And then the seed, too, goes back to the earth.
Mohawk seed keeper Rowen White writes about reconnecting with ancestral seeds in “Planting Sacred Seeds in a Modern World,” a chapter in Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States. Her account is rooted in her own Mohawk and Haudenosaunee relationships. Reading it, I am moved by the intimacy of seeking the plants that nourished one’s ancestors: wanting to know their faces, wanting to bring them home.
Her words turn me toward a question of my own. What does it mean to recognize a relative whose nourishment may already be part of us, even when we have never learned its name?
Here in the foodways of Southeastern nations, that work of recognition continues. Choctaw Nation’s Growing Hope program grows ancestral crops and shares seeds along with knowledge of planting, harvesting, and cooking. Among those crops is isito, the Choctaw sweet potato squash. Cherokee Nation grows Georgia Candy Roaster squash in its Heirloom Garden, helping replenish a Seed Bank that supports citizens in cultivating traditional Cherokee crops. While colonization and forced removal tore through our communities, Choctaw Nation’s accounts of its heirloom crops remember varieties that were lost, alongside seeds that survived removal. To tend them now is to work within that history.
The harvest asks us to consider nourishment with the same attention. What makes this fruit capable of giving so much sustenance?
Within its flesh are carbohydrates, fiber, and potassium. In orange-fleshed varieties, carotenoids such as beta-carotene contribute to the color; our bodies can convert beta-carotene into vitamin A. The seeds hold protein, fats, and minerals, including magnesium and zinc. Different parts of the same fruit offer different forms of nourishment.
Then there is the nourishment made possible by keeping. Choctaw sweet potato squash is valued for its sweetness and its ability to store for months. A harvest can continue feeding a family after the vine has returned to the ground.
In “Touching the Earth,” bell hooks remembers the gardens of her Black Southern family and the pride of those who tended them. “When we love the earth,” she writes, “we are able to love ourselves more fully.”
As an Afro-Indigenous woman of Choctaw descent, I sit with that thought, reflecting on the dignity of feeding people from something you have tended—the memories a kitchen can hold, and how a familiar taste may return us to someone whose hands we can no longer reach. This is what I want to remember when I enjoy the pumpkin harvest in soups, pies, and warm drinks.
We can become so familiar with a pumpkin as an image that we stop being curious about its life. We know where it will look beautiful. We know the season its name will help sell merchandise. But do we know how their lineage is connected to our own? Do we consider the ancestors that held their seeds in safe keeping for us to plant one day? Are we reverent to the way Squash sister gives of herself for our good?
Closer to the seed, I find both nourishment and obligation. Something was kept for us. Something remains ours to tend.
That is the spirit I hope we bring as we celebrate pumpkins and their squash cousins this season: curiosity about the harvest, gratitude for those who carried it forward, and a willingness to let celebration deepen into relationship.
Celebrate the harvest with us at Culture Hub’s Pumpkin Fest on Saturday, October 31, from 1–4 p.m. Come taste the season’s goodness, share in Indigenous storytelling, and enjoy pumpkin decorating and games for the whole family. A warm afternoon to gather, give thanks, and make memories together.
About the Author
Lauren Palmer is an Afro-Indigenous, Afro-Latina heirloom artist, writer, and community archivist from Oklahoma. A Choctaw descendant with Gullah, Malagasy, and Mexican ancestry, she explores how knowledge and memory take form and travel across generations. Her practice brings together flowers, beadwork, music, writing, and archival research through The Wild Mother Creative Studio, Landmark Beadwork, Corn Sister Studio, and For Our Healing. Guided by her matriarchs, she approaches art as a living record of inheritance and community care. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Music from Oklahoma Baptist University and serves on Culture Hub’s board.
