I scramble through a Rocky Mountain meadow, heaped with piles of snow, searching for stalks of flowers, clusters of seeds.

[Prologue] Cupping my two hands together, I can hold a single seed of each plant that grows on the acres of desert lands where I live.

[Foreword to 1st edition] Gary Nabhan's work reminds us of what I can describe only as a sort of historical wonder: that we have paid an immense amount of attention to American Indian crops, or at least to some of them, but almost no attention at all to American Indian farming.

[Foreword to 2nd ed.] The people of the land, the Indian farmers of North America--like their counterparts in Mesoamerica, the Andean region, and the Amazon--have continuously cultivated maize, beans, squash, and other crops for more than five thousand years.