Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction to Rare and Unusual Fruit Trees
Susan Poizner: As home or small scale growers, it's exciting when we can plant and grow rare or unusual fruit trees. Heirloom apple trees come to mind. There are literally thousands of different cultivars. These varieties have different flavor profiles and each one will look and taste unique, and some are easier to grow than others.
Growing different and unusual cultivars is also great for another reason, it boosts biodiversity in the world of apple trees and biodiversity strengthens the ability of the genus to resist dresses like diseases and pests and even changes in climate. But sometimes you specifically do not want to plant rare fruit tree varieties.
[00:00:50] Heirloom Peach Trees of the Southwest
Susan Poizner: Today we're going to learn about an heirloom peach tree that's been growing in southwestern areas of North America for hundreds of years. These Southwest peaches are still grown in small native communities in parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. And so, my guest on the show today is Reagan Wytsalucy, Extension Assistant Professor of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Utah State University, and Reagan is working hard to protect this endangered variety from extinction.
So Reagan, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Thank you for having me.
Susan Poizner: We're so glad you're here.
[00:01:38] Reagan Wytsalucy's Journey and Heritage
Susan Poizner: And I wanted to ask you how you first came to learn about the Southwest peaches.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yes, so I started down a path of trying to identify what career field I wanted to go into. Once I decided that, my initial career program, which was actually a business school, was not the best fit for me.
I had a one-to-one heart talk with my father, and he said, why don't you go learn about agriculture, bring back a lot of the knowledge that is starting to die off in our communities. And one thing that he also brought up with that was the discussion of the peaches that our people had grown for hundreds of years.
And so, I decided to take that in my mind as I started on the track of learning about plants and agriculture and attending Utah State University, and going through their plant science degree program. That's where I started to take a lot of next steps into finding and rediscovering who I was, and a lot of who our people are and how we connect and tie into the land through a lot of our food system.
Susan Poizner: So you talk about who your people are. And who are your people? So what is your background, and were you very familiar with your culture?
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yes. So I'm half Navajo. Another word that is most recognized for, is "diné'e" (dineh), which means the "people". Navajo is actually a term that was given during a lot of the tribal race and conflicts of meaning "enemy" by other tribes, because the Navajo people raided a lot of other tribal communities. They were given that name Navajo.
But the diné'e is what we call ourselves as a people. Being that, our communities are based off of a maternal pathway, so when a man and a woman marry the man takes up the woman's side of belonging and home practices.
And even through our clan system, it follows the woman path. so I am Naakai Diné'e, which means Mexican clan. My mother is part Spaniard and part Native American. And then also I was born for my father's clan, which is Tsé Ńjíkiní, which is the Honeycomb or Cliff Dwelling clan people.
And then, we also identify ourselves by my maternal grandfather's side. So that is my mother's dad who is, what we call bilagáana or anglo. And then, my last, my fourth clan is my father's paternal grandfather. And he is Tó Dích’íi’nii, which is the Bitter Water Clan, and it's one of the first four original Navajo clans for the Navajo people.
Susan Poizner: What an incredibly rich history, and I understand that there are actually stories within your history of these peaches, and they come from your father that he remembers these peach trees or harvested them as a child? Can you tell me a little bit about that?
[00:05:07] Rediscovering and Preserving Southwest Peaches
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yeah, so my dad, up until the age of eight, he grew up strictly on the reservation in Shonto, Arizona, and he remembered going into a lot of these areas with his grandfather and his parents where they would go and they would harvest peaches during harvest time. And a lot of these areas are canyon areas. Shonto Canyon is one where they had a lot of fruit trees. They had their gardens down there. My dad remembers stories of doing sheep herding as a young boy with his siblings.
He has 10 other siblings, and they would go out at the beginning of the day and take nothing on them, but a tortilla in the morning and maybe have some coffee and they would go for the whole day. And so they had to know where their water was. They had to know where a lot of things were.
Meanwhile, mom and dad, my grandmother was taking care of the younger siblings and then my grandpa was taking care of the garden while the kids were herding the sheep. And so the gardens and the peaches and all of that, making sure that everything had water. And so, my dad, a lot of the memories, just to recall and start asking him questions of what are the traditional management practices?
How did we water them? When was the fruit ripened? All these things. I asked him questions. And so it was bringing back a lot of thoughts that he never really considered because, up until the age of eight, is the full experience that he basically got, experiencing fruit harvest and partaking in how they would preserve the fruit.
That was a very young point in his life. So it was almost digging back into cobwebs of his mind as to what did we do? What did my parents do? What did my grandparents do? And it was through him that he helped me through the research that I did, to the point where I've been able to complete a Master's program through Utah State University.
And he supported me the whole way, taking me into these areas that he remembered where fruit orchards were being produced, and which relatives actually grew them, and where orchards used to be. And there's no longer a single remain of them left over in a lot of these areas, such as Shonto Canyon, where he grew up and where he said there was an abundance amount of fruit trees.
There's no longer any fruit trees growing in that canyon.
Susan Poizner: That is incredibly sad. So this was so much part of the life and the fabric of life for the community. Then, you start seeking out these orchards, and did you eventually find some? Or how did you manage to find the last remaining trees?
[00:07:49] Challenges and Successes in Peach Tree Conservation
Reagan Wytsalucy: So yeah, we did find some. It was through, again, a lot of my father's exploration into the Navajo tribe, specifically, that we went into Navajo Mountain area into some of the most rural areas. It can take about, probably about 30, 40 miles back in towards the mountain. And if you take a look at an aerial map of the canyon lands around Navajo Mountain, it's just very vast. The canyons can reach up to a hundred feet in heights, and then you come down onto these growing plains where a lot of the crop production was done, where a lot of the grazing was done for livestock.
And then even further down, in some cases, there are washes that are another 50 to 100 feet below those plain areas. So the geography is so rugged, and the areas of these production systems are so remote, that only the most traditional elders continue to grow these crops, and continue to do agriculture in the traditional way.
A lot of these relatives that we met along the way, or local Navajo residents that still grow these peaches, a lot of them have passed on now, even after the past couple of years of completing my research, several more of them are gone. And so, it's just a matter of identifying who can take up the trait again and start growing them.
But, it was a very hard process to try and find and identify where original orchards would be located. The one orchard that we found in Navajo Mountain is one that one of my great grandfathers actually planted back in the 1860's, is what they say, during the time when the Navajo went on the Long Walk. He was resilient enough and was able to hide out in the canyons around Navajo mountain area and resist going to Basque Redondo with the rest of the Navajo people.
Wow. So he was able to take care of the lands. He was able to plant fruit trees. He was able to keep our family safe, isolated, hidden in these remote canyons that, even today, to take a motorized vehicle down, you're most likely gonna get stuck. And lots of times like when we would go down, we would take ATVs down in the areas and go down into these canyons and drive in washes and waterways to get to these orchard spaces.
Susan Poizner: It sounds like an incredible adventure. So I'm trying to imagine, inside my head, after this entire quest of yours, what was it like the first time you actually saw the trees? What was it like the first time you tasted the fruit?
Reagan Wytsalucy: The first time I saw trees was actually in Canyon de Chelly. At that point in time, I was at a thought process of, is this possible?
I continue to have troubling ideas with understanding how old these trees were, and what's being told and done, in a modern sense. So trying to merge both different worlds. And so, the first set of trees that I came across was from somebody in Canyon de Chelly that still grows them.
She's actively always living in the canyon throughout the growing season, and she was very skeptical to help me, just because she did not want these to get into the wrong hands. She didn't want the plant to be misused.
I agreed completely, and after trying to have a lot of trust built between the time that we had spent together, it was a short amount of time she had given me some seeds, and I was able to see where the trees were growing. And at that time, I was still very novice in my understanding of how unique and different these trees were. By the time I started growing out the seeds that she had given me and started to have those trees, I started to identify a lot of different unique visual traits that they do have just in the tree itself.
And around the time that we started to get fruit off of them, that's when we came across the orchard in Navajo Mountains. So the feeling that I've had every time that we discover and find a place that has the original fruit that we knew we grew, I start to get overwhelmed. I have a lot of gratitude.
I'm often praying with a lot of thanks to Heavenly Father, saying thank you for leading us here. Thank you for guiding us here. Because a lot of what I've been able to do, I know has been with support from a higher power, not only from my family, but definitely a higher power. It's definitely a purpose of my life to go forward and to preserve these trees.
Susan Poizner: That's incredible. That's so beautiful. So you got the seeds, at first. At some point, there must have been a point where you managed to see the trees when they were actually fruiting and taste the fruit. Is that how it unfolded?
Reagan Wytsalucy: So at the time that I got the seeds, the trees weren't fruiting yet.
The fruit weren't ripening. I think that year it was actually a bad year. So I think in the whole time it had taken me seven years, from the start of this project to graduating and defending my thesis, it had probably taken at least three years in the first part of my research, before I actually tasted a fruit.
Susan Poizner: Wow.
Reagan Wytsalucy: A lot of times that we would go and explore, there was no fruit set on 'em, but there was some seeds, and so it was very limited. The elders were saying we're having a hard time getting fruit because the weather is so different nowadays, that we don't know if we're seeing fruit or not.
When we came across the orchard in Navajo Mountain, it was just like a very wide eyeopener of the reality of what it actually was. And my father will say the same thing, is he feels that a lot of memories just came back of what was left behind in the process of going into school and adapting to modern society.
So it's almost just remembering and knowing that the stories of my grandfather are real. Bringing back and being able to reconnect with our history, with our ancestors, with what is still alive and in existence, even though it's very few in numbers. It's something that I don't know if I can really even explain it.
All of the overwhelming emotions that poured in at the time of even tasting the first fruit.
[00:15:02] Audience Questions and Expert Answers
Susan Poizner: Wow, beautiful. We have a couple of emails. We have one email here from Dawn. Dawn writes, hello, is it hard to grow peach trees?
What type of climate do you need? Can someone in zone 5, north U.S. grow them? Thank you. Now, I know these trees we're talking about are a little different from the kind of peach trees you'll get at a garden center, but what's your feedback for Dawn?
Reagan Wytsalucy: Okay, thank you for your question, Dawn. So these peaches, if you've ever been to the Southwest and the Navajo communities, even any of the other tribal communities in the Southwest that also grew these peaches, the climate is high desert.
So our elevation ranges from around 5,000 to 7,000. A lot of places, where these peaches have grown, have been in the 5,000 foot elevation range to 6,500 elevation range. The soils in a lot of these areas, since they were grown in canyons, is the canyons were a little bit more sandy, so they had well-draining soil.
They can do okay in clay, but it's a little bit harder to grow them. As with any plant, if you have more abundant clay in your soils, in these types of systems growing in the canyons, they had access to groundwater. The water table was fairly high. There was a lot of active natural springs coming out of the washways where they would grow them.
Or, even if it was a little bit higher than the wash, there was still a lot of water in the soil running through the rocks that the canyons, what they call bluff rock structures, which are sandstone, they're very smooth structures. If you ever see pictures of Monument Valley with the red rock, it's a lot of structures like that and just form those into canyon areas and having some flat plane areas just below those massive structures and you've got your gardening areas.
And so what this kind of created is a really unique microclimate where, in the springtime, that rock face from the bluffs would warm up and radiate heat through the night. And it would almost encourage or improve the temperature conditions around those fruit trees as they were blooming. So you had more possibility of getting fruit on a yearly basis, rather than losing it all to late frost.
So these are some of the conditions that you can expect in our area. I have some planted in northern Utah right now. As a result of my research, I have 45 trees up north right now and they're doing very well in a loamy type soil.
As long as you have the well-draining aspect, anything that a fruit tree needs is what these trees will need as well. The one unique thing about these trees, though, is we have studied and found an indication that they are more drought tolerant than a lot of your other peach cultivars that are current.
I'm not sure how to compare 'em to heirloom varieties, but these ones are, for sure, a little bit more drought tolerant. They're more adapted to the climate, the various changes in temperature. One thing that I say is we can have a 50 to 60 degree change within a 24 hour period from the high temperature point of the day to the coldest point in the night because we don't have a lot of structures that kind of retain the air and cause inversions like northern Utah does. The heat just ends up radiating off in the desert climate here. So that's the type of growing conditions that we have here.
Susan Poizner: So they tolerate real extremes, then? These particular types of peaches.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Extreme temperature. They very much so do.
Susan Poizner: Wow.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yeah.
Susan Poizner: So you got these precious seeds, Reagan. You got the seeds from the growers. They trusted you enough to give you the seeds, and it sounds like you planted them out in various orchards. Is that correct? How old are the trees now that you've planted?
Reagan Wytsalucy: I have one orchard that they're planted in.
I've donated a few to Utah State University. All of these trees were planted at different times. I think the first set that I had planted was in 2015, so they're 6, 7 years old and some of the later ones are a couple years younger than that. They are all in full production now at this point in their life.
And so the next thing that we are doing is assessing their fruit quality. And so far with the results of my thesis and the genetic analysis that we did, they are uniquely inbred within their own regions. So I worked with three different tribes. I worked with Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni, and we were able to get seeds from Hopi and several more seeds from Zuni.
And what we saw is that, as isolated as these trees were in the canyons that they were grown, Canyon de Shelly peaches are inbred in their own community, and they don't show very much crossing over into those that we collected in Navajo Mountain.
And the same thing with those that are collected in Hopi.
And we worked in Zuni, and I'm hoping to get some seeds from Zuni.
There's a few orchards there, but a lot of them, again, same instance. A lot of them have passed on. There's a few good trees that we're helping keep an eye on, and we're hoping to get some good seeds off of that. But it's gonna be the same story that we've seen in all of the other areas.
Susan Poizner: So let's go back to what I was talking about in the beginning. We, as growers, are encouraged to try different types of cultivars when it comes to apple trees.
Don't just plant Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and McIntosh. There's lots of those out in the world that's not great biodiversity.
I bet you have people who are knocking on your door saying, I'll take some of those seeds. I'll plant them. And that's a good thing because, then, we are going to save this particular type of plant. Why is that not a good idea?
Reagan Wytsalucy: So at this point in time, a lot of the outreach that's coming on, it's very good. It's a blessing to know that there's a lot of people that wanna help, that wanna grow this.
At this point in time, because there's very few, we're trying to protect what we have now. We're trying to protect the growers that are still growing them. A lot of them are still elderly. A lot of them continue to stay isolated.
One family that helped us, they're related to us by clan, but they never had a day of schooling in their life, so they grew up very traditional. Everything was traditional. This is their life, basically. And so, to take and to spread and to potentially make this come out in abundance at this point in time, it's just a matter of having some respect and reverence for what's going on right now, to have some consideration that it's not widely available.
With time, we're hoping to get it to that point where we can have it in abundance in our communities again. Have orchard spaces that are isolated from other peach cultivars, so that way, we make sure that they will always remain pure and isolated, and we will always have that seed source available for not just our community, but for those that do wanna grow it.
Sometimes when you spread plants in a very fast manner, with these trees being so isolated, we don't know what their disease resistance is. We don't want to introduce something or make it come out in so much abundance that we would be encouraging pathogens to be able to start populating themselves within our local orchards or our historic orchards, if that makes sense.
Susan Poizner: That makes total sense. And I guess the other thing that comes to mind is, when we're propagating apple trees like heirloom cultivars, they're actually grafted trees. They're not grown from seed. So we know that the DNA of the tree is exactly that rare cultivar, like Yellow Transparent or something like that. A certain unique, wonderful cultivar. Every Yellow Transparent apple tree will have the same kind of apples, or Wealthy apple tree or whatever. The difference, here, is that the peach trees are grown from seeds, and the seeds will have some sort of cross pollination with nearby trees. And if these trees are not isolated, then they could be so assimilated and mixed with regular peach trees that they'd be gone.
Is that true?
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yes. Yes. That is a very good point to make and to add.
Susan Poizner: That makes sense.
Reagan Wytsalucy: I believe I was trying to get to that, but you explained it very clear and straightforward, so thank you.
Susan Poizner: Okay, thank you. All right. We got a really good question from Katie. I like this question.
So Katie says, what are the basic differences between the peach trees that Reagan is talking about and conventional peach trees bought at a garden store?
Reagan Wytsalucy: So a lot of your conventional peach trees, when you get to the breeding background, these peaches are selected for their size. So you want a marketable size that's manageable in the industry, that looks big.
You want something with vibrant colors, right? So their peel has some red on it. It's just got a really unique, full color of life that looks very appetizing, right? The next thing you want is when you actually taste the fruit. You want it to taste really good. You want the sweet, the sugars to be there, so that way you get the mouthful of sugar.
Sometimes the thought of having a really juicy peach is of interest.
Then there's the peach fuzz. So some peaches have a lot of peach fuzz on them. And that's not necessarily appetizing. It's more of a bother 'cause you can have allergies. If you don't wash enough of it off after you wash your fruit, you can start getting a lot of itching on your mouth, potentially inside your mouth.
So it just depends on what a majority of the market wants, and that's what the peaches in the grocery store are selected for, is the best overall look and appeal and quality. Storage factors. When it comes to the peaches that we have, we did not select them for that. We selected our plants and allowed them to grow naturally to where, now, they are very adaptable in our climate.
We don't have to water them a lot. There's not a lot of modern management practices that go into play with these trees as far as fertilizers and compost. There's a few things, traditionally, that we talk about. That we do. But as far as things like pruning and thinning blossoms, we don't do any of that.
The fruit itself is very small. It's about the size of an apricot. The most common fruit that everybody talks about is that they're white flesh. They are freestone peach. And the ones that I've tasted, especially the ones out of Canyon de Chelly, the peel is a little tart.
The fruit is not a vibrant red. It has a little bit of a blush on the surface where the sun touches it, but on the underside, it's still mostly green or yellow peel. So it's not very like visually appealing to eat, but when you taste it, the peel is tart and the flesh inside is, what I've tasted, is very sweet. It may not be as sweet as what you get in the grocery store, but to me, it's very sweet.
I don't eat a lot of sugar. I don't eat a lot of sweets. So to me, it's very good and it just has a really good complementing flavor. The other thing that's unique about these peaches is, like a lot of our traditional foods, because we did not have a refrigeration system, is we dried all of our food source to store it throughout the winter to get us through until the next season or for years down the road.
So, like our corn, our beans, everything's dried. The peaches are the same way. So whatever was not able to be eaten fresh at the time, we would split 'em in half and lay 'em out on the sandstone surfaces and that terrain that I explained to you with the canyon lands and let them sun dry for a few days.
And then we would take 'em dried and store them in our sacks, in our pots, and put them in those storage bins. And then when we wanted to cook them, we would rehydrate them in a stew. Sometimes we would utilize those peaches and put them into desserts or have 'em as a bread spread.
They would be mixed in with like corn cakes, which is a traditional cake that we did. Very unique. The other thing is the tree and their growth habit is, in itself...
I have a funny story. The first set of trees that I was growing, we had them in a greenhouse with my advisors' crops that they do the research for food production for the state of Utah, for all the producers in Utah.
And so sometimes we have a variety of melons and peppers. There's chokecherries in the greenhouse.
And so, one of the plants that was in there was peaches that I was growing from seed. And one of my advisors comes into the greenhouse and he's looking at everything, just checking on everything, 'cause I was interning under them and helping them with their research at the same time as I was carrying out my research and going to school.
And he goes, what are these? And I said, these are the peaches. And he goes, peaches? And I said, yeah, these are the Navajo peaches. And he goes, oh, they don't look like peaches.
And so, the funny thing is these trees, their leaves are almost a little bit more flat. They don't have a very tight curl, like you see peaches always have. And so it's just very unique. It's almost as if they're more of a mix of a peach and an almond, like a peach almond hybrid, which is something that is very possible and it happens, if you have those two crops together.
So the fruit being very small, like an apricot, everything about it is just, to me, it's very unique. They're their own type of plant and, even though they are peaches, they're still very much so different, in my mind.
Susan Poizner: It's such a perfect way to describe why you need to protect them, because once they're out and the genetics are mixed, they're gone forever, right?.
We've got another question here, Mick from Toronto writes, and you answered this so beautifully. Do these peaches have a different taste than store-bought peaches? So it sounds to me like they are probably not as sweet because our supermarket peaches are just bred to be like candy.
And they are, and I love peaches. And I love sweet stuff. But, do you agree?
It's sounds to me like it's a totally different thing.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yeah. They can have a pretty good sweetness to them. So the way that sugars are measured, through fruit, is through what they call a refractometer.
And so they'll take the brix, soluble sugar percentage, and they'll get a reading. So a lot of peaches that I've seen, I think in the grocery store, they're in the mid 20 range. 20% is sugar of that juice content that you're eating. With our peaches, they may be a little bit more like a tart cherry, but still a little bit more sweet.
So take out a little bit of the tartness but just keep the sugar in. And so we're around 18% is what the peaches that are grown here, in the Southwest, average to.
Susan Poizner: So that's good. It doesn't sound like it's that tart. It's still yummy and tasty and delicious.
Reagan Wytsalucy: It's still yummy and tasty. Yes.
[00:31:43] Cultural Significance and Historical Context
Susan Poizner: So Reagan, in the first part of the show, we chatted a little bit about the history of the Southwest peach tree. Now, I understand First Nations communities have their lore that says that this tree has been there forever, or a long time. And yet, there are other people who say, no, this tree was brought from somewhere else, maybe China, which is where many peach trees or all peach trees originate.
What are your thoughts about that?
Reagan Wytsalucy: It's a really hard thing to digest. I don't think any one person can make decisions, but I'm happy to tell you the stories that we have. So in working with the various tribes, going all the way back to our people's origin stories, not knowing how far long ago, but we've come into what we call the Fourth World. So we have three other worlds that our people have been in before we are in this world today. And in coming into the Fourth World, taking what the Hopi and the other Pueblo tribes, such as Zuni, Akima Laguna, their emergent stories are out of the Grand Canyon.
And when they came out of the Grand Canyon, part of those stories is that the peaches were growing in the canyons there, as they had come out. And so it was a fruit that had been in abundance in the area, naturally growing.
Some of the things, when talking with elders that I interviewed for this project to understand how we took care of them, ceremonial uses, importance that these peaches are to our communities, some of them said that, as they would eat peaches, they would throw a peach pit out and it would grow in between a rock crevice where the water would flow, but it would get stuck. And so there may be some sediment buildup in those crevices, but it would grow out of the rock, naturally on its own, and not have any assistance from man to help it grow and produce.
If you've ever seen a juniper tree, which are very drought tolerant plants, there's a lot of occurrences where you will see them growing in that kind of a fashion, growing out of a rock, growing through the fractures in the rock, to sustain and establish themselves so they can survive.
So the peaches have been told to have a unique characteristic. Even today, it is still seen that happens where they voluntarily grow. That is recognized as almost like a wild-growing trait, in a sense, to where the peaches may be considered as a landrace type of a peach.
And so, with that, that's just one little thing that we talk about. What we also have a lot of in-depth ceremonies in regards to the peaches. So a lot of our traditional prayers and songs that we do throughout the season revolve around the peaches in some instances. The peach itself has its own prayers and ceremonies associated with it, that are not done basically, in a lot of terms.
In Hopi, they actually will start their spring dances and revolve the dance duration to occur through the duration of the peach and the apricot blossoms. And that's a practice that has been done for nobody knows how long.
The ceremonies and the prayers that the Navajo people do, my understanding is the origin of some of these, is far back more than we know, basically, or what we know time to tell. Taking that, it's so interesting to see how it's impacted our culture. How much embedded it is.
It's not as commonly announced, but we do have the peaches included in a lot of these prayers and songs that are also inclusive of the corn and the beans and the squash.
Melons is another. The native plants. The animals.
But the peaches are included in that, which is something that's not readily discussed. Everybody talks about the three sisters all the time, but a lot of the other crops are not necessarily recognized as widely.
Susan Poizner: So you're painting a picture really of a tradition that sounds like it's been around more than, what 400 years or something. When were peaches supposedly brought in from China, or I think it was the 1600's that they were introduced? The traditional domestic peaches that we eat and we get in the supermarket.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yeah, so the Spaniards, when they came in the 1600's, actually they started maneuvering into Florida before, and they did bring peaches. There's no disagreement that they didn't. There are trails and pathways of Spanish peaches have been introduced, especially when they came into Mexico area.
That's where a lot of archeologists, or individuals that study the foodways, believe all the peaches in America to have traveled through from Mexico and then distributed before the Spaniards had gone into the Southwest, that they were already growing there, basically, when the Spanish arrived. And that's written in Spanish documents.
Today, it's just accepted that the Spanish introduced them. And that's what it is. That's what literature states. There's no discussion, or ability to understand, or to try and recognize that there could be a possibility that the First Nations people, in their arrival in the Americas, also had lots of different food sources with them, that they potentially had brought over, and had been growing here for a long amount of time.
Susan Poizner: So the parallel I see, is a few months ago I did a show on our North American native apple trees. So you could say that apple trees came originally from Kazakhstan, and yet we did have our own native apple trees as well. So it's a possibility that there were native peach trees and maybe one day, with genetics, will discover the truth.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Absolutely.
Yeah, there's no disagreement there. It's something that, if it is true that we can see and show in the genetics work that we're continuing to do, that these are a recognized landrace and they've been here previous to colonization periods, it would be almost something that would give back to our communities.
I feel like it would entice a sense of pride and perseverance to continue preserving and growing these peaches, and recognizing that they are just as precious and they are just as much our people's food to help sustain us and survive as any other food source that we have. And, more so, because of the history that is surrounded by the peaches, and destruction that has inevitably taken place with these, through the times of the U.S. government establishing itself throughout North America.
Susan Poizner: Incredible.
You are now pretty much devoting your life to protecting this beautiful tree.
[00:39:55] Future Vision for Southwest Peaches
Susan Poizner: How are you going to do it, and what do you see its future is going to look like?
Reagan Wytsalucy: I'm, right now, identifying several different partners. I'm identifying partners that are financially more secure at the moment. And then also wanting to identify growers, locally in the Southwest area, where I know these trees are going to thrive and become abundant to help preserve and provide these seeds back to the local communities that are in desperate need of growing them.
Right now, there's so many elders that I talk to, or so many people, and they come up to me and they say, do you have the peaches?
And I tell 'em, yes, I do. I'm trying to create a list of everybody that wants one and needs one. And one day I'll be able to say, here you go. I have enough now.
And still protecting the elders that grow these and have their living off of these to not deplete their source, their life, in asking and over asking, but being able to give back, with due process, that these will become in abundance for our people and everyone in the area that need to grow them.
So that's the look ahead, is establishing isolated orchards, ensuring that the seed purity is guaranteed, and continuing the genetics to understand these peaches, including them in the entire peach genome worldwide. And hopefully, we find something very valuable with these trees that we can have enough support to continue sustaining them that they never die.
Susan Poizner: That sounds like a great vision. I vote for that. That sounds good to me.
Thank you. What a magical conversation. So I hope you'll come on the show again one day and give me an update.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Yeah, I look forward to it. It's been, a great privilege to be asked to speak on this show today and in the audience that is present. I do appreciate everything and the time and consideration that everyone takes away from this conversation.
I'm always happy to answer more questions with the time that I do still have a job to answer to. But this is definitely a lifelong goal of mine to accomplish for my people, for any community, to have some form of local sustainability and have this crop be a part of that process, whatever it may be.
Susan Poizner: Thank you so much for coming on the show today, and we will see you soon. Bye for now.
Reagan Wytsalucy: Thank you.
Susan Poizner: Okay.
[00:42:51] Conclusion and Farewell
Susan Poizner: That was such a magical interview. Wow. I really enjoyed talking to Reagan about the Southwest peaches, and that's the end of the show today. Amazingly, the time has passed very quickly. So we have another episode coming up next month with lots more information about Fruit Tree growing.
If you missed part of this show, you can go to orchardpeople.com/podcast and you can listen back to this show, you can listen to other episodes as well, including the episode that we did on native apple trees. We've done lots of different episodes on lots of topics, so hopefully you'll go back and check it out at orchardpeople.com/podcast.
You can also go to my website, orchardpeople.com to read articles and we will interact on that website as well. So thank you so much, everybody, for tuning into the show today, and we will see you again next month. But for now, goodbye and have a great month. See you next time.