It’s November and it’s unseasonably warm as John John Brown, a Muscogee elder, works to replant peach seedlings. “I haven’t had much luck growing them from seed,” he says. The reason, he thinks, is because peaches need lower temperatures.
Around him, tiny peach trees the size of pencils stand above the browning grass beneath their parent tree. Brown harvested about 200 peaches from his small orchard this year – enough for his family and neighbors – but he had competition: A jackal was lurking around. “The animals know when the peaches are ripe faster than I do,” laughs Brown. “They start coming in and stealing my peaches.”
Brown’s peaches are not your everyday peaches, they are heirlooms: direct descendants of peach seeds brought across the continent on the Trail of Tears. Brown calls them “Indian peaches” while other Muscogees call them “Trail of Tears peaches.” There has been little research on this particular variety, and it is unknown how many genes they share with commercial peaches. While grocery store peaches are soft and fleshy, Indian peaches don’t get much bigger than a lemon and are extremely firm but sweet.
The Indian peach is threatened by climate change. As hurricanes, flooding and higher temperatures have major impacts on crops, including peaches, across the country, heirloom varieties, such as the Indian peach, are also under threat. This fruit, which has crisscrossed a planet, been carried by traders and travelers, and finally by some Muscogees along The Trail before finding a new home outside of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, is a connection to another time and place.
“One of the greatest gifts the Creator has given me is these peaches and the ability to share these trees with our community and everyone,” Brown said.
There are only 50 Indian peach trees on the Muscogee reservation that Brown knows of — some growing in some people’s backyards, and some at a local daycare — and between climate-driven changes to growing cycles and high temperatures, they face a tough future . Fortunately, they have people like Brown working to protect them.
Peach cultivation is thought to have started around 8,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China. One of the first mentions of peaches in literature appears in the fictional novel Journey to the Westwritten in 1592, describing peaches as a fruit that can grant long life and “make a man’s age equal to that of Heaven and Earth, the sun and the moon.”
From China, peaches made their way to Europe, then to the Americas in the 1600s on Spanish ships – the beginning of a kind of crop exchange between the continents: potatoes and tomatoes from South and Central America went to Europe while peaches made their way made for the Georgia coast, and quickly, in indigenous diets.
“Indigenous people were already tending and managing forests and other types of tree food,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz at Pennsylvania State University, who studies archeology and ethnohistory. “This would have allowed them to adopt peaches super quickly and know very well how to create healthy peaches.”
Within a few decades, and with the help of a vast network of trade routes, peaches made their way across the continent, as far as the Southwest, where tribes such as the Navajo dried it in the sun and stewed it.
Around 1780, thousands of peach trees tended by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes lined the Finger Lakes in western New York State. was destroyed by President George Washingtonin an attempt to ethnically cleanse indigenous peoples from the region. Washington written in a letter to one of his generals that the aim was “to destroy all the settlements”. He added, “It will be essential to destroy their crops now in the ground and prevent them from planting more.”
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act that led to the Trail of Tears – a death march that forced about 60,000 Native people to leave their homes and move west, across the Mississippi River, into Oklahoma.
Vernon Courtwright grew up eating Indian peaches. Now 75 years old, the Muscogee elder and veteran says his family brought Indian peach seeds and planted them when they finished The Trail. “That was the beginning of our life and the peaches’ life in Oklahoma,” he said. When he was a child, his grandmother, Emma Bruner, was the one who taught him how to grow and care for the fruit. “We grew up eating these peaches.”
Courtwright says in the 1970s he began to see Indian peaches disappear. With each passing year, there were fewer on the landscape. “I just knew our orchard had to be taken care of,” he said. When his grandparents passed away, he took on the job of tending the trees, eventually meeting John John Brown, who helped grow seeds and saplings to give to other Muscogees.
“This is our legacy,” Courtwright said. “This is my family’s legacy to the tribe.”
Georgia, the Peach State, produces nearly 25,000 tons of peaches every yearbut falls far behind California, which produces nearly 475,000 tons each year. Worldwide, almost 24 million tons of peaches are grown each year, with most from China.
However, climate change is having a major impact on those numbers. One of the biggest threats to the peach industry is rising temperatures. Peaches require “peach chill” – a certain amount of time in temperatures that are below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Without adequate peach chill, peach trees will not produce, and with rising temperatures, flowers will sprout too early. In 2017, about 70 percent of peach losses can be attributed to a lack of peach chill. “Lack of cold is something that we think is going to be the biggest problem for us and our industry,” said Dario Chavez, a peach geneticist at the University of Georgia. “When you’re in a northern climate, you don’t worry too much about the cold. But I think they are starting to see the physiological responses to problems with cold.
Then there are extreme weather events fueled by climate change that can cause immediate, widespread damage. this year, Hurricane Helene at least killed 226 people. It also nearly ruined Georgia’s agricultural economy $6.5 billion dollars.
But Helene’s path was just the beginning. Hurricanes bring flooding, which is especially bad for peaches – peach trees don’t like to be too wet and can drop fruit prematurely if they are submerged. They are also susceptible to diseases such as brown rot, which can be caused after heavy storms.
For the Indian peach, peach frost and extreme weather are not as big a threat as in the South. However, Oklahoma is expected to get round two and a half degrees warmer in the next 20 years. Even though the peach is a resilient plant, peach chill will become a problem. Natural disasters such as floods become more of a threat to the lives and livelihoods of tribal members – tribal lands in Oklahoma are the most prone to flooding in the state.
But to protect Indian peaches, and a small part of the tribe’s history, John John Brown has been giving out saplings for the better part of a decade to anyone interested in growing them.
Brown frequently travels to Georgia and Alabama to visit the proposed Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve – located on Muscogee homelands. On his drives, he often passes peach orchards full of the variety most Americans are used to. “You don’t think they’ll be able to produce peaches,” he says as he looks at the tightly pruned rows. “They cut them back very small.”
He goes down to the homelands to remind settlers in the area that the Muscogee survived despite the United States’ attempts at genocide and demonstrations making canoes and bows the traditional way from local wood during the annual Ocmulgee Native Celebration. For Brown, the peach is a symbol of resilience.
“When our ancestors brought these peaches up from the South, you think about how devastating it was, losing loved ones, not knowing if the seeds would sprout,” he said. “I do this to honor them and their strength.”
