Alliance of Native Seedkeepers · Roots before 2018 · Still growing
It is the story of Native seedkeepers trying to build the land, tools, relationships, and freedom our seeds and communities deserved. It is a love story, a survival story, and a story that is still being written.
Begin the storyFrank J. Cain and Elizabeth “Beth” Roach Cain, co-founders of Alliance of Native Seedkeepers.
Before there was a store
Alliance of Native Seedkeepers did not begin as an online store. It began with relatives, gardens, memory, land and water defense, and the older responsibility of keeping seeds alive across our homelands. Before there were order numbers, packet printers, shipping bins, or a storefront, there were Native seedkeepers visiting one another, talking story, planting where they could, and trying to repair relationships that colonization had worked hard to sever.
Beth came to the work through Nottoway tribal governance and public service across tribal, state, and federal policy systems. She advised two Virginia governors on environmental justice while working across clean-water protection, climate resilience, public policy, and coalitions. She had learned that a seed cannot be protected apart from the water, land, laws, community decisions, and cultural knowledge surrounding it.
Frank, a Tuscarora seedkeeper, came through farming, emergency medicine, dialysis care, and biomedical engineering. In clinics he saw food access, clean water, chronic illness, and environmental injustice meet inside real bodies. A Monacan patient spoke with him about seeds every day during her treatment. Before she lost her battle, those conversations became part of what he carried home. He still carries them in AONSK’s mission.
Their paths met in the same question: what would it take for Native communities to build food security and cultural continuity on their own terms?
Years before the Alliance had a name
Years before AONSK became a company, Frank was growing on any land he could use across North Carolina. Those gardens were a way to help reconnect our people with land, language, the seasonal calendar, and foodways that colonization had worked to break apart. Every planting carried more than a crop. It carried names, timing, relationships, and memory.
In 2017, the main garden holding ancestral seeds was firebombed. The attack destroyed more than plants. It sent a clear message that the return of those seeds, and the relationships gathering around them, was not welcome there. The work did not stop, but it had to move.
By 2018, Frank had relocated to Richmond, Virginia, to build a life with Beth. The North Carolina gardens, relationships, and responsibilities came with him. In Virginia, the work continued across whatever pieces of land people made available until the Alliance gave that long-running work a public name.
2016 and the early Washington years
Frank and Beth first stood together in Washington with red corn between them. Later, at a separate gathering, Beth was invited to speak before the Lincoln Memorial. Different days, the same current: seeds, land, and Native responsibility moving into public view.
2017 · North Carolina
These are among the last photographs of the garden before the firebombing: amaranth, corn, beans, furrows, and the long work of making a place for ancestral seeds. The attack destroyed a season, not the responsibility.
“A seed is never alone. It carries the water, the land, the hands that tended it, the ancestors who remembered it, and the children it may yet feed.”
The work existed before the company
By 2018, a network of Indigenous seedkeepers was already working to protect endangered seeds, strengthen community seed banks, share skills, and reconnect Native people with ancestral foodways. Alliance of Native Seedkeepers gave that growing network a name and a shared container. It emerged from the same relationships that were addressing pipelines, sacred places, water protection, coastal resilience, and tribal environmental justice. Saving a variety made little sense if the land and water required to grow it were still being lost.
At Natural Bridge, we carried seeds down the long Cedar Creek trail to the Monacan Living History Village, then back up the mountain after days of visiting and exchange. In the gardens maintained by Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson, other Monacan people, and volunteers, we planted Native plants and foodways alongside the knowledge held there. Vicky is a deep well of living knowledge, the kind no label or exhibit can replace.
The staffed village has since closed. Older Virginia State Parks materials named the Monacan village along the trail; the park’s current description names the same trail without it. To us, that disappearance feels like a quieter repetition of removal: the landscape remains public while Monacan people interpreting their own living culture become less visible. The seeds, gardens, and relationships carried there remain. Around Capron, planting corn on Nottoway land also helped rekindle ceremony, gathering, and responsibility. Frank’s growing continued across Tuscarora homelands in eastern and central North Carolina.
The Alliance was not invented by two people alone. Frank J. Cain, Elizabeth “Beth” Roach Cain, Dwayne Painter, and Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson were its co-founders, each carrying different relationships, knowledge, and responsibilities into the work. Elders, growers, relatives, organizers, and seedkeepers across many tribal communities shaped what the Alliance became, but Dwayne and Vicky were not background influences or later collaborators. They helped found it.
Dwayne Painter of the Monacan Nation was among the earliest seedkeepers to work closely with Frank. Alongside Vicky Ferguson, he helped form the relationships that became foundational to the Alliance.
Together, seedkeepers reintroduced ancestral corn to parts of Virginia and North Carolina where it had been absent for generations. Some communities now remember those corns simply as their own again. We do not mind who receives the credit. What matters is that the seeds are alive, growing, and being carried forward.
Historical context: Monacan Indian Nation history · an earlier Virginia State Parks description · Natural Bridge State Park today · Rassawek, historic capital of the Monacan Indian Nation.
Ancestral land, extreme heat, and the first season of the store
People sometimes call those first gardens “borrowed land,” but that phrase is too gentle. We were Native people inside our own homelands, asking permission to plant a few feet of our ancestors’ seeds on property controlled by someone else. Around Richmond we planted wherever anyone offered room: North Side, South Side, Varina, Jackson Ward, Bon Air, a yard corner, a community-garden row, a small opening beside someone else’s plans.
Then the heat came. The summer of 2019 nearly wiped out dozens of varieties, including seeds that had come to us as the last known samples. We could not build permanent irrigation, shade, or soil systems on land we did not control. The grief was not only losing plants. It was knowing those seed lines had already survived removals, boarding schools, dispossession, migration, and generations of pressure, only to reach us without the infrastructure we needed to protect them.
That loss forced the work to change shape. On April 1, AONSK became the first seed company to register as a benefit corporation, so public benefit and environmental responsibility could be built into the company itself. We chose a business because we needed a way to fund the work directly, without waiting for a grant cycle or reshaping the mission to fit someone else’s priorities. The public store would sell common, already-commercialized heirloom varieties. Culturally sensitive and community-held seeds would remain outside retail.
The work also traveled through relationships. Beth worked with Ashley Senegal, an enrolled Chickahominy citizen, in Ashley’s home garden on traditional Chickahominy land. Beth and Frank also carried seedkeeping, food sovereignty, and Native public storytelling into Richmond and other public spaces.
At the 2019 Nottoway pow-wow, seeding okra became an accidental tradition because of the season. We often kept our tent open for people escaping the heat. While we talked story, relatives and visitors sometimes sat down and helped seed. Terry Price and his granddaughter examined Cherokee white flour corn we had helped plant, and Beth carried harvests from the growing spaces that kept the work rooted in land and relationship.
The first store was a purple-and-white Wix site with roughly 111 varieties. Packets were counted by hand, glued shut, written on, or covered with Avery labels. A cheap inkjet printer made beautiful packets when it worked and jammed constantly when it did not.
There was no warehouse or fulfillment team. After their day jobs, Frank and Beth counted seeds by hand. Pegboard walls with labeled bins became the first inventory system. A tiny mesh desk organizer beside the outbound envelopes carried a joking “shipping department” sign, but it was never the seed-room storage. On August 11, Frank placed a test order. On August 12, the first real customer, Virginia B., trusted the new store with an order. By the end of the year, one hundred customer orders had moved through those rooms.
It looked like glue on our fingers, seeds counted by hand after work, and a pegboard of labeled bins becoming a revolution one packet at a time.
Pandemic, panic, return, and the year the world turned toward food
Frank saw the warning signs through dialysis and biomedical engineering work. Long before much of the public understood the new illness, he was watching machines clot, clinics scramble, and vulnerable patients carry the danger in their bodies. Some days stretched eighteen or twenty hours. Then he came home and tried to help catch up with seeds.
Beth’s work moved online, which made it possible for AONSK to survive. She worked from the apartment countertop, assembled orders, and helped send seed-care packages to tribal communities between meetings. Free seeds continued to move even as customer demand surged. Those packages were not a campaign. They were an answer to fear, food insecurity, and the possibility that the loss of an elder could also mean the loss of a gardener, language speaker, cook, story keeper, or person who remembered where something used to grow.
We resisted the language of “victory gardens.” Our question was not only, “How do I feed myself?” It was, “How do we keep each other alive?” We called that sovereignty gardening: a way of growing that restores responsibility and feeds all of our neighbors.
In the middle of the pandemic, we found a small house near Windsor, North Carolina, on 3.14 mostly wooded acres. We moved to Bertie County for more than acreage. This is Tuscarora country, close to Indian Woods and the Cashie River, and just downriver from Beth’s Nottoway homelands where the Nottoway and Blackwater meet to form the Chowan. The move placed the work inside land and water relationships that already shaped us.
Supply shortages and exhaustion turned the move into repeated trips in a small Ford Ranger between Richmond and Bertie County. The store had to pause. Most customers understood. One frightened and angry customer escalated a delayed-order exchange by threatening police involvement. It was unsettling, and it showed how little room a tiny, exhausted operation had to make a mistake. We were afraid too, and still trying to help.
A large storm came through the day we closed on the house and tore down treetops. For a little while the land felt wild and unsettled. Then the storm passed. We looked at each other and said the words we have repeated almost every day since, especially when something beautiful appears: “We live here.”
We did not plant a large production crop that year. We walked. We watched where water moved and how the light changed. We learned what grew on its own, what needed clearing, and what deserved protection. The pandemic taught us that a seed store could become emergency infrastructure. The move taught us that infrastructure also needed a home.
Growth, exploitation, collapse, and a hard boundary
We had finally reached land of our own, but Frank was rarely there. A nearby community venture promised cultural work, economic development, food work, and community support. He believed in that vision and gave almost everything to it. In practice, employment, volunteering, contracting, cultural responsibility, and personal sacrifice blurred into one endless demand.
The more problems he solved, the more problems arrived. Pay and reimbursements did not match what had been promised. There were no real days off. The AONSK store moved into one small corner because it was the only way to keep orders alive while Frank was expected elsewhere every day. Beth kept AONSK’s accounts, customer communication, and mission from collapsing around the edges, often after her own workday. She sometimes brought food to the site because it was one of the only ways she could see Frank.
Then his body started saying no. Long hours on concrete, poor workstations, stress, and exhaustion became nerve pain, skeletal pain, stiffness, trouble walking, and the return of seizures he had not experienced in years. We had land, but he could not plant it. We had moved home, but the work kept him from being home.
The most painful lesson was that “for the people” can become a weapon when it is used to make boundaries sound selfish. Service is not the same as extraction. Culture is not permission to use someone until their body breaks. The work itself mattered. The way it was being carried did not.
Leaving was not betrayal. Protecting the people carrying the work was part of protecting the work.
AONSK kept proving it was alive whenever it was given attention. Customers returned. Seeds still moved. A used Colordyne packet printer became one of our first major equipment investments and a practical step away from handwritten packets. By the end of the year, pain had become clarity: the Alliance could no longer be squeezed into the margins of someone else’s dream. The work had to come home.
Recovery, rebuilding, and the first building of our own
An unrestricted grant gave us enough room to stabilize and bring Frank into the seed work full time. The break from that venture was painful, but the land began returning him to himself. He noticed the trees, shrubs, birds, insects, mushrooms, animal tracks, water, and changes in light he had missed the year before. On three acres, he eventually recorded more than thirty species of trees and shrubs. The land had been waiting while he learned how to live there again.
Beth and Frank began reclaiming their life together too. They could talk, take small day trips, and work beside one another again. Healing did not mean less work. It meant the work belonged to them again.
Back home, rebuilding looked less like a grand declaration than a handful of corn, a watchful cat, and packets finding their way onto a wall. The company was still small enough to fit inside ordinary life, but it was beginning to take a shape the public could recognize.
The house was about 800 square feet. More than 300 bins covered the walls of one small room, creating space for over 400 varieties if every inch behaved. The room became seed room, office, print shop, inventory wall, communications center, packing station, and fulfillment department.
The used packet printer sat near the window. It had alignment problems, sensor problems, feeding problems, and moods Frank had to learn by trial and repair. It was still a threshold. The handwritten packets had felt like mail from a friend. The printer told customers that the friend was becoming an institution.
A possible downtown Edenton building seemed to offer everything at once: a storefront and offices below, four apartments above, family housing, a place for relatives returning home, and a public home for the seed work. The arrangement was already tilted strongly in the investor's favor, but we were willing to consider it because the building seemed to promise room for the work to grow. Contracts were prepared. Legal fees were paid. Then the investor behind the plan withdrew before signing, without a real explanation.
The loss hurt because it was more than real estate. It was a future woven from business, family, housing, and belonging. In hindsight, it may have been a blessing. We had been ready to accept a deal that leaned heavily away from us because we needed space so badly. But the seed store still needed room. So we financed a prefabricated building and placed it on our land late that fall. It was slightly smaller than what we thought we had purchased, unwired, uninsulated, and unfinished. Compared with the bedroom, it felt like a cathedral. Frank yelled “echo” simply because he finally could.
A huge extension cord brought temporary power. Shelves went in before the building was ready. Seed inventory, printers, counters, and tools followed. The Edenton dream had depended on another person’s signature. The prefab was a door we could build ourselves.
The underdog became visible before the infrastructure was ready
The prefab gave us breathing room for a moment, then filled almost immediately. Shelves, carts, seed counters, printers, work lamps, laptops, dehumidifiers, and hundreds of varieties crowded into a building that was still unfinished. In winter, people worked in freezing conditions with auxiliary heaters and headlamps. The building was both a breakthrough and already too small.
A catalog approaching five hundred varieties could no longer be managed by memory and alphabetical bins. The company needed SKUs, barcodes, flexible locations, batch picking, inventory control, and software that understood a real warehouse. The first Wix site had carried us through the apartment, the pandemic, and the move home, but the operation had outgrown it. Late in the year we rebuilt everything on Shopify.
Rahib, a friend Beth knew from an earlier class, became a crucial technical bridge. He helped translate the lived reality of packets, bins, orders, and bottlenecks into the language of platforms and APIs. The new website looked more professional, which created a new problem: customers increasingly assumed the small team behind it was a large seed company.
The first warehouse system promised relief, but important features were incomplete. Batches mixed orders, postage workflows failed, and holiday support disappeared when we needed it most. December became a war room. Real orders were arriving while we trained people, corrected inventory, printed packets, fixed software, and tried to speak honestly with customers.
A seed company cannot run on vibes alone. Beauty and purpose still need training, systems, accuracy, and people who can depend on one another.
The chaos gave us the shape of what had to come next: more space, a professional team, better software, deeper inventory before peak season, faster packet production, and a facility larger than the building we had only just occupied. Colerain did not appear from nowhere. The freezing prefab and the December war room pointed directly toward it.
Doors, walls, and a Main Street still willing to live
Through friends Heather and Mitch at the Colerain Farmers Market, we learned about buildings nearby. The first option had too many structural problems. Then we looked next door at 124 South Main Street. It had sat abandoned since 2014. The roof leaked. The ceiling was falling. Windows were broken. Weather, animals, and time had entered through the back door.
But the bones were good. The place felt like a town that had been written off and had not agreed to die. It felt like walls rising around the work. It felt like Colerain still had teeth.
It became a castle because, after years of asking permission to plant, pack, store, and grow, the door could finally lock from our side.
Colerain is Tuscarora country, river country, working people’s country. Native, Black, and white families, fishermen, mill hands, farm workers, shopkeepers, elders, and children have all carried parts of this place. We were not coming to rescue it. We came because the town still had life and because our work needed walls. If we were going to build there, we had to build like kin, not callers.
We closed on the building in August. Frank carried much of the daily construction. Beth balanced tribal, state, and federal policy responsibilities with financing, planning, accounts, communications, and hands-on work at the building whenever she could be there. Josh and Stephen Hardy, brothers and members of the Nottoway Tribe, helped. Donnell White became a steady hand in the building’s hardest corners. Together they patched roof problems, pulled down damaged material, measured odd spaces, repaired, painted, cleaned, and kept moving while the electrical work stalled.
Not everyone knew what to make of Native people buying an old Main Street building. Some reactions carried familiar stereotypes about Native ownership and intentions. We do not need to repeat every word to name what it meant. Then something else began. Neighbors stopped in. New council members showed support. People asked questions and started to see the future we saw. Suspicion did not vanish at once, but warmth began to grow.
The plan held more than a warehouse: a seed room, shipping hub, public store, coffee and community space, and a visible Main Street statement. The Edenton dream had been beautiful and ready on paper. Colerain came rougher, without shine or easy promises. Unlike Edenton, it was real. It was ours to finish.
The building became real. The promised shortcut did not.
The electrical work finally finished in the spring. After years of apartments, spare rooms, extension cords, underpowered buildings, and improvised stations, the lights came on in Colerain. A working office, stable packing stations, heating and cooling, and a path out of the house suddenly felt possible.
The bathroom became a symbol of the whole restoration. It had been frightening. Frank rebuilt it until it was beautiful. A bathroom is not glamorous, but every repaired piece said the same thing: this place is not abandoned anymore. Someone cares for it again.
Moving the company to Colerain slowly gave our house back to us. For years it had been home, warehouse, office, print shop, communications center, and seed room all at once. The work finally had walls. The house could begin remembering itself.
The SeedPak arrived at the wrong address, then came to Colerain without the forklift we had said was required. Austin called Colerain Peanuts. Donnell and Big Otis used a pickup truck and a 2×4 to steady the crate while the liftgate dropped inch by inch. Even the driver celebrated when it reached the ground.
The machine had looked ready during training, but it had never been tested there with actual seeds. In Colerain it arrived missing a gate in the funnel, with disconnected parts and packet-feeding problems. Seeds fell to the floor. Cardboard became a temporary guide inside the largest equipment investment we had ever made.
A soft opening brought hundreds of people into a building that had once been left to weather. News media arrived. Council members stopped by. People told us to buy more of the town. Colerain began to feel less like an address and more like a relationship.
Local engineers, Stephen, Josh, Frank, and others spent months trying to make the SeedPak production-ready. The machine that was supposed to release human hands became another demand on them. The lesson was larger than one vendor: a machine is not infrastructure when it is promised, purchased, delivered, or praised. It becomes infrastructure when it works.
Colerain worked. The lights worked. The people began coming. The machine did not. The year held pride and disappointment in the same hands, but beneath the pressure the company was building the systems that would carry the next chapter.
A year still unfolding
Bertie County Seeds officially opened full time on March 21, 2026. More than 400 people came through the doors. Some said Colerain had not seen that many people together in decades. PBS North Carolina recorded a segment. Regional magazines, tourism partners, and the local newspaper helped tell the story. The attention mattered, but the people inside the building mattered more.
Locals thanked us for choosing Colerain. Some told stories about growing up there. Some returned with friends and family because they wanted to show the place off. People wanted to be seen inside the store. That is a different kind of success from an online order. It means a building has entered local identity.
The store is still young. The online shop still carries most of the business, while Main Street does work a sales report cannot fully show. It brings people downtown. It gives tourists a reason to stop and locals something to point toward. It lets online customers see that AONSK is not only a website, and lets Colerain see that Main Street is not only memory.
Inside, a more local and serious team is taking shape. The culture is simple to say and difficult to build: cross-train, communicate, ask questions, do not guess, share knowledge, and respect the work and one another. Donations are moving at scale again with Deborah Bischlar helping organize requests. The land at home is being prepared for a larger return to growing when the people and systems can support it properly.
The SeedPak question is not completely resolved. Capacity still has to catch up with demand. The story has not reached a clean ending, and we do not want to pretend it has. But the lights are on. The town is coming in. Customers are returning. The team is forming. The donations are moving. The land is preparing.
That is not the end of the story. It is proof that the next story is possible.
What remains
The public store exists to build practical infrastructure around seedkeeping, not to turn every seed into a product. Community-held and culturally sensitive ancestral seeds in the AONSK sanctuary are not retail inventory. They remain tied to responsibilities and relationships with their communities of origin.
We do not mind who gets the credit. What matters is that the seeds are being grown.
They carry memory, food, language, ceremony, adaptation, and the work of generations.
The store helps create jobs, equipment, space, donations, and independence from outside permission.
Good intentions cannot replace fair work, healthy boundaries, reliable systems, and accountability.
Richmond, Capron, Natural Bridge, Indian Woods, the Cashie River, and Colerain all live inside this story.
The living archive
Open a photograph to meet another place, person, or turning point that carried the work.
Who is telling this story
Frank J. Cain, Elizabeth “Beth” Roach Cain, Dwayne Painter, and Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson founded the Alliance together. A page can name them, but it still cannot hold every elder, grower, relative, volunteer, neighbor, customer, child, and staff member who carried a box, shared seed, repaired a wall, taught a lesson, brought food, or told the truth when the work needed it.
Co-founder · Nottoway leader and policy strategist
Beth brings Nottoway tribal leadership, experience across tribal, state, and federal policy, and service as an environmental justice advisor to two Virginia governors. She joins water protection, climate resilience, policy, coalitions, finance, and story into structures that keep AONSK accountable.
Co-founder · Tuscarora seedkeeper
Frank joins Tuscarora seedkeeping, growing, health, biomedical engineering, machinery, technology, and daily operations. He builds the practical systems that move seeds into people’s hands without losing the relationships that give the work meaning.
Co-founder · Monacan seedkeeper
Dwayne was among the earliest seedkeepers working closely with Frank and helped establish the relationships, grow-outs, and practical seed work from which the Alliance formed.
Co-founder · Monacan knowledge holder and land defender
Vicky helped found AONSK and has long carried leadership in Monacan cultural work, ancestral agriculture, Natural Bridge, and the Monacan Nation’s effort to protect Rassawek.
Dwayne Painter, Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson, Ashley Senegal, Josh and Stephen Hardy, Donnell White and Big Otis, Susan, Joseph, Wanda, Ryan, Rahib, Deborah Bischlar, and many others belong in this history. Their contributions are not footnotes. They are part of how the Alliance became real.
Meet more of the people carrying the workThe clear reference
The story comes first. These facts make sure the names, places, and relationships remain clear.
More of the record
These independent conversations hold more of the people, places, and ideas behind AONSK.
Alliance of Native Seedkeepers (AONSK) is a Native-led benefit corporation founded in 2018 by Frank J. Cain, Elizabeth “Beth” Roach Cain, Dwayne Painter, and Victoria “Vicky” Ferguson. Its work connects Indigenous seedkeeping, ancestral foodways, seed and food sovereignty, education, seed donations, and a public seed business based in Colerain, North Carolina.
No. AONSK is a benefit corporation, a business structure that allows public benefit, community responsibility, and environmental commitments to be part of how the company is governed. It is different from nonprofit status and from third-party B Corp certification.
AONSK is the company and wider mission. Bertie County Seeds is its public-facing store and retail identity at 124 S Main Street in Colerain. Buying from the store helps support the people and practical infrastructure behind the wider work.
No. Culturally sensitive and community-held seeds in the AONSK seed sanctuary are not retail inventory. The public catalog focuses on already-commercialized garden varieties, while sanctuary seeds remain rooted in responsibilities to their communities of origin.
Bertie County Seeds offers vegetables, herbs, flowers, grains, and other garden crops, with a strong focus on heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. Product pages provide the specific growing and seed-lot information available for each variety.
Visit Bertie County Seeds at 124 S Main Street, Colerain, NC 27924, our “World’s Biggest Little Seed Store.” Please check the contact page for current hours before making a long trip.