Seeds from a spicy little red chile grown for generations at Ohkay Owingeh pueblo have traveled a long way in the last 20 years — to Arizona, Colorado and now to a "doomsday" seed vault in the icy Arctic.

The possibly misnamed San Juan "tsile" joined seeds from 13 other New Mexico chile species and more than 500 other food crop varieties, such as melons, sorghum and a wild Russian strawberry, delivered a week ago to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The vault now contains the seeds for more than half a million food plant varieties from all over the world, a safeguard against disease, drought or other disaster that might wipe out whole species.

The San Juan tsile's long journey may have begun with Bertha J. Burck's family at Ohkay Owingeh, or one of her neighbors. Burck, 75, has been farming since she can remember. She farms on the same river-bottom acre of land in Northern New Mexico, using the same ditch and water from the same river her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and probably family before them all used. For generations, they grew a "native chile," harvesting the seeds and replanting every year.

In Tewa, the native language of Ohkay Owingeh, the chile is called tsindi."Since then we have been growing that chile. It is a real small chile and it's not as meaty as the Big Jims and some of those from the south," Burck said, taking a break from her garden. "It is a hot chile. Here and there you will find a mild or medium." She and her husband sold the native chile, along with corn, melons, squash and other crops, at the Santa Fe Farmers Market more than 15 years ago.

In the early 1990s, seed collectors from the Tucson-based nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH spotted the "San Juan tsiles" and bought some of the seed from a couple of elderly pueblo farmers, according to information from the organization. (San Juan Pueblo has since returned to its traditional name, Ohkay Owingeh.)

Burck doesn't know if her husband or a neighbor sold the chile seeds to the researchers, and she thinks it is a little "weird" the seeds ended up in a Norwegian vault. The San Juan tsile is described by Native Seed/SEARCH as a mild to medium-hot chile that grows 3.5 to 5 inches long. The group's catalog says the chile is still grown by pueblo farmers. Burck's native chile pods grow 5 to 6 inches long and produce a lot of pods per plant, but with little meat, she said.

"The older people like the flavor though better than some of the new fancy varieties," Burck said.

Herman Agoyo, another longtime Ohkay Owingeh farmer, remembers the Native Seeds group but doesn't know who they might have bought chile seeds from. He said the farming tradition around Ohkay Owingeh used to be a lot stronger than it has been in recent years. And farmers always grew chile and saved the seeds. "We were known as champion farmers even in the surrounding communities," Agoyo said.

He likes the idea of the little chile seeds from San Juan preserved in a vault. It is better than losing it altogether because people stop growing it, like another crop. "I think we lost the wheat strain that was brought here by (Don Juan) Oñate," Agoyo said.

However, the San Juan chile seeds came to Tucson, were grown and collected and sold through the group's catalog. Then in 2000, some of the seeds were sent to the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, a research center managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Fort Collins, Colo. The center, designed to preserve genetic material and seeds from plants, dates to the 1950s.

The center now houses more than half a million seeds, constantly monitored by researchers. It began sending copies of those seeds to the Svalbard vault in 2008 and will continue for several years. "Our goal, over the next 10 to 15 years, is to have the majority of the system's 511,000 collections represented in the Svalbard vault," said Edward B. Knipling, center administrator, in a statement.

The San Juan tsile, perhaps the same grown still by Burck, was in the shipment that arrived to Svalbard on July 11. Another New Mexico chile in the batch was the Wenk's Yellow Hot, collected in 1985 from a "large truck" farmer in south Albuquerque. The chile is descended from an unknown commercial variety, according to Native Seed/SEARCH.

Charlie Marcus, president of a struggling San Juan (Ohkay Owingeh) Agriculture Cooperative, said he doesn't know anything about the so-called San Juan tsile, but he's pleased someone was interested in the little chile.

"I'm glad to know there's a repository that we can fall back on if we ever need to. Course, I wouldn't want to have to go all the way up there to get them," he said with a chuckle.

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.