‘It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization

Indigenous women in North and Central America are coming together to share ancestral knowledge of amaranth, a plant booming in popularity as a health food

Just over 10 years ago, a small group of Indigenous Guatemalan farmers visited Beata Tsosie-Pena's stucco home in northern New Mexico. In the arid heat, the visitors, mostly Maya Achi women from the forested Guatemalan town of Rabinal, showed Tsosie-Pena how to plant the offering they had brought with them: amaranth seeds.

Back then, Tsosie-Pena had just recently come interested in environmental justice amid frustration at the ecological challenges facing her native Santa Clara Pueblo - an Indigenous North American community just outside the New Mexico town of Espanola, which is downwind from the nuclear facilities that built the atomic bomb. Tsosie-Pena had begun studying permaculture and other Indigenous agricultural techniques. Today, she coordinates the environmental health and justice program at Tewa Women United, where she maintains a hillside public garden that's home to the descendants of those first amaranth seeds she was given more than a decade ago.