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There are all these tips and tricks to help us remember things, but think about it. Would you even want to remember everything?

I'm Kate the Chemist. How we remember on Seeking a Scientist from KCUR, part of the NPR Network.

On The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money.

There are all these tips and tricks to help us remember things, but think about it. Would you even want to remember everything?

I'm Kate the Chemist. How we remember on Seeking a Scientist from KCUR, part of the NPR Network.

There are all these tips and tricks to help us remember things, but think about it. Would you even want to remember everything?

I'm Kate the Chemist. How We Remember on Seeking a Scientist from KCUR, part of the NPR Network.

I cannot permit this opportunity to pass by without describing to you, in the best way I am able, a most extraordinary phenomenon.

The vessel shortly after entered a vast body of water of the most dazzling brightness and of highly phosphorescent nature. In fact, it looked as if we were sailing over a boundless plain of snow or a sea of quicksilver.

On The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money.

On The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs.

For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money.

There are all these tips and tricks to help us remember things, but think about it. Would you even want to remember everything?

I'm Kate the Chemist. How we remember on Seeking a Scientist from KCUR, part of the NPR Network.

He has many names. That is one of them. It translates to the angry one. He took our family to an area where there were still orchards that existed that the cavalry lost their trail and they weren't found.

And when the people came back, because he was giving them startup herds of livestock to reestablish themselves in the homeland, they started calling him the good one or the generous one.

She said, I want to be able to be a person that can help support bringing this crop back in addition to many others that are being lost within our communities. And he kind of tipped me off and was like, That sounds really interesting. Let's get you on a research project.

They were planted like that among the tribal nations in the Southwest. Vast orchards grew along the Rio Grande. All the way out into Hopi and a lot of the Grand Canyon communities.

The trees have been dying off in large numbers, and the original caretakers have been passing away. So now we're going through a period of our young individuals, including myself, are trying to seek and understand, well, who are we? What did we lose? How much can we hold on to? And what is it that we need to preserve and protect?

And, you know, what's the most important pieces and how can we retain this and get it back?

They're not being taken care of and they're not necessarily producing fruit anymore. So the trees may be alive, but the fruit's not there to be able to source from.

Yes, I was very nervous. I immediately called my dad and I was like, hey, we're going to see if we can get some funding. He says, OK, sounds good. So then I got funding within a few months later. And here we are scheduling a trip to go and find seeds. And I told my dad, I was like, can you be my translator? They started knocking on doors, looking for peach seeds.

He started taking us into some of these very, very remote rural areas. And he's like, I know there were trees down here. Let's go see if somebody still lives down there and see if maybe they'll give us some seeds. So he was taking us to a lot of places.

And it wasn't just him for the Navajo, but my late husband, Anthony White Salusi, he did the same for me, taking me into his home communities in the Zuni Nation and also into Hopi.

And these seeds, she gave them to me. She said that she had them sitting around since she had a crop in the 80s. And she gave me these handful. I germinated them. I think I planted about 15 seeds and had 13 trees germinate. About three years later, the trees had their first fruit that set on them.

And when the peaches are done blooming, then they stop their dances. Even for Navajo, there's sacred prayers given to the peaches during certain times of the year.

And I took them and I shared them and I sliced them and I, you know, that's when I tasted my first peach. How'd you feel emotionally? I think I just felt humbled but just privileged, I guess, to be able to taste this fruit that is very hard to find and very few people are growing them.

One of the locations that we've been gathering most of our seed from is out by Navajo Mountain area, and I still have good close connections with the family there. That's probably the most versatile and the healthiest orchard I've seen. It's isolated away from any other types of, you know, nursery stock orchard, guaranteed.

So we can guarantee that any seed that we get from there is going to be genetically pure and we can sample it. And that matters to Regan.

At the time, you know, I'd been trained, very whitewashed, going into school, being trained to be a scientist, but also had to step back from both of those and realize, like, how to grow humility, how to grow a lot of respect for different groups of people, and how to listen to receive information and to have patience when working with traditional elders in the community.

Yeah, I was able to start comparing westernized practices for food production versus Native American traditional practices of food production.

Even though Native Americans don't have... A large, like, written, documented process of their history or methods in all the things that they do, it's all orally taught, does not mean that it's not valid. Or because there's no scientific, hard data to correlate with it, that it should be negated as a truth.

And I... Took samples from dead trees, from orchards that were no longer being taken care of. We did tree ring analysis and saw that the tree ring growth patterns and the variability between the tree ring growths correlated very well with just what was verbally communicated.

There's asexual propagation techniques that go into play to make sure that everything is very uniform. The peach trees are all the same in many duplications, whether they're grafted or not. whatever it is. So that way harvesting is the same or harvestability or shelf life is the same.

And so every tree is its own individual unique.

They've been reaching out from all over the country saying, we have peaches that look exactly like yours. And Similar places of remote locations. Nobody's taking care of them. We don't know that there's anybody that owns them and they've been getting samples and sending them to me. Also, a lot of people that have reached out and been like, can we have some seeds? We just want to start some trees.

We want to support this. We would like to have these be a part of our backyard fruit trees.

You know, it's just kind of... I feel... I just feel blessed to... be doing this project. I always prayed to ask for guidance for this project. And there's multiple times where I have been given direction. I have been shown through dreams, through many things of all the things that I need to do and all the things that will come. I feel very confident to say that this is my calling.

And it was kind of the final act of destruction of livestock and destruction of other crops that caused the Navajo people to surrender to the government and go on over a 400-mile journey. over to Bosque Redondo and lived there for four years. So that's, you know, massive destruction within what we call the breadbasket of the Navajo Nation. That journey became known as the Long Walk.