By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Redell Collins, a Lumbee and Tuscarora man born 70 years ago to a share-cropping family, planted tobacco last week outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Photo by Katherine Fogden National Museum of the American Indian. For the first time, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian invited Native farmers to Washington to guide spring planting of historic crops, such as tobacco, on its grounds.

Collins, daughter Beverly Collins Hall, and 20 young friends traveled six hours from North Carolina to the museum, where they were welcomed by elders of the Piscataway, the original residents of the Washington metropolitan area.

“I had the most powerful ancestral feeling I have ever had,” said Beverly Hall, a farmer and president of the nonprofit rural service organization American Indian Mothers. “I was handing out tobacco and cotton plants, and then I turned and saw people of all races planting in the museum garden.”

All spring, federal agencies in Washington have ripped up lawn and jackhammered concrete to make way for new gardens. First Lady Michelle Obama worked with schoolchildren to plant a White House kitchen garden on the South Lawn. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a new 612-square-foot “people’s garden” features organic vegetables, culinary and medicinal herbs, and flowers to attract pollinators.

Photo by Katherine Fogden National Museum of the American Indian Incorporating traditional ceremony into the practices of the NMAI garden, a song of blessing was offered during last month’s tobacco planting, led by two Native farmers from North Carolina.

By contrast, the five-year-old National Museum of the American Indian is an old hand at planting crops in its landscape. On its sunny south side, the museum employs the traditions of many indigenous nations in the planting and care of crops grown across the United States, including tobacco.

But the idea of inviting Native American farmers, the keepers of knowledge about indigenous plants, to demonstrate their practices in the garden represents a new dimension this year. Glenn Burlack, a procurement officer at the museum and descendant of Lumbee tobacco farmers, developed the idea for a pilot project that would bring traditional prayers and horticulture onto museum grounds. He hopes that the program can grow to include Native farmers from other nations in the future.

Genetic lines tracing back 10,000 years are among the tobacco seeds that Hall and her friends grow on their own land. She plans to send some plant starts descended from ancient tobacco to the Piscataway she met at the museum, so they can establish them in its beds next year. Cultivation of ancient indigenous plants is occurring across the hemisphere, part of an effort by Native peoples to preserve important heirloom species in an era of herbicides and hybrids.

Hall and her father plan to return in mid-summer to pinch sprouts off the tobacco, a process called suckering. They will return again in late summer for harvest. Afterward, Redell Collins will demonstrate how to string up the tobacco for curing in a heated barn, just as his family did in the 1930s. Others will show how to tie up the plants for air curing. Both techniques remove bitterness.

“Tobacco was like money to our people,” Hall said. “It was done in ceremony. The medicine man was the only one who had the right to use it, and the rest of the people weren’t puffing and picking and chewing.”

Burlack, the procurement officer, hopes to bring planting and harvest traditions to the museum, where visitors can experience the sacred and celebratory traditions of Native American horticulture.

“Being the first Native Americans to be able to plant at the museum,” Hall said, “we made history.”