Seed banks housed in universities, governments, and even global institutions such as Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault serve as biodiversity archives, but their structure reflects a colonial approach to preservation and perhaps inadequate solutions to a problem that requires active cultivation, rather than passive storage. For Indigenous communities, the ability to save and exchange seeds is an assertion of sovereignty, a powerful act of reclamation and resilience—a resurgence of Indigenous wisdom that industrial and colonial agricultural systems have suppressed.
