The Cherokee Nation will bank corn, bean and squash seeds in the Arctic “doomsday vault”, becoming the first US-based tribe to safeguard culturally emblematic crops for future generations. The Svalbard seed vault, the world’s most sheltered storage facility, currently holds 992,039 crop seeds from across the world. It was created on a Norwegian archipelago about 800 miles from the North Pole in order to safeguard as much of the planet’s unique genetic material as possible. Losing a crop variety is as irreversible as the extinction of an animal or bird. On 25 February, nine Cherokee seeds will be deposited into the vault, deep inside a mountain on permanently frozen ground called permafrost. The seeds chosen are Cherokee white eagle corn – the tribe’s most sacred corn, used for cultural ceremonies…
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