Page 13 - Cuisione fo Arizona - Volume 8

How an obscure sun ower
saved the world By Mark Lewis!
The Havasupai black-seeded sunflower was the one that saved world commercial sunflowers from extinction in 1994 when Sclerotina wilt rust spread in Helianthus annuus sunflowers all around the world. Because the Havasupai black-seeded was one of only 3 varieties of sunflowers worldwide that preserved demonstrated resistance to the rust (and not just to one strain of the rust, but to three existing strains as well as another, then-new Australian strain), the Havasupai black-seeded was bred with the Russian Giant and other commercial varieties to produce new sunflower lines that defeated the advance of the rust and saved sunflower industries worldwide.
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The story of how it happened that an obscure variety of sun ower and an often forgotten people known as the Havasupai, living in a corner
of the Grand Canyon of Arizona, came to be the saviors of modern sun owers and all the industries supported by them is a telling lesson and cautionary tale in biodiversity and what it really is and how we still need it if we are to move forward to feed the peoples of the world
of the 21st Century.
The black-seeded sun ower
itself is a historic cultivar of the Havsubaja (Havasupai) People, who long ago saved
it so it could save them. Without the agricultural and environmental knowledge and practices of the People, throughout a very long and storied past, there would not have been, in the 20th Century, a black- seeded sun ower for USDA/ Agriculture Department
scientists to nd in 1994. The rst scientists who came calling in August of 1978 -- Gary Nabhan and Karen Reichhardt of Native Seed/Search of Tucson -- collected reference seeds of the black-seeded from Minnie Marshall and other Havasupai farmers. The seeds waited patiently in the Tucson collections of Native Seed/Search until1994whenThomasGulyaofthe
USDA came looking for rust resistant sun ower varieties in a last ditch effort to save sun owers worldwide from the Sclerotina wilt rust. What he found led back to Havasu and Minnie Marshall and the black-seeded sun owers that were then subsequently bred with the commercial varieties to create the modern rust resistant sun ower varieties now enjoyed since 1994.
The story could have gone very differently, though, because the story of the Havasupai People is one typical of the First Peoples of the North American continent. They were hounded and disenfranchised and pushed to the most inhospitable corners of the land. It was not, in fact, until 1976 that the Havsubaja were granted back to them the land where they had grown the black- seeded sun ower for some 900 years (part of a longer 3000- ear tradition of their ancestors). Yes, that’s right. They got back their home and began planting again just two years ahead of the rst collection visits by Nabhan and Reichhardt, who saved the seeds forGulyawhohelpedsavesun owers worldwide. And without Nabhan and Native Seed/Search’s collections, those Havasupai plants might not have been around: there were major oods in the Havasupai home between the time of the NS/S visits in 1978 and the need of Gulya in 1994: in 1990, 1992, and 1993, major oods scoured the Havasu. The overall incredible and harrowing timeline, then, looks like this:
Forever ago, the ancestors of the Havsubaja begin domesticating the
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