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Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System — Robin Wall Kimmerer.

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by
Robin Wall
Kimmerer

Listen to this story


Narrated by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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I remember. How their songs drew
us up through the warming earth
just for the joy of hearing them.
How we stretched in the sun and
turned air into sugar, my sisters
and I, leaves and roots entwined.
It’s lonely without them.
Grandfather Teosinte has been
gone for so long; where is that
gentle guidance when we need it
most? And our good people—with
toes and hoes in the soil, fulfilling
the agreement made so long
ago? What happened to the songs
we knew? I remember how they
celebrated my beautiful children
with feasting and honor and
passed them hand to hand in
thanksgiving. I remember when
they knew my name. The people
have forgotten, but the seed
remembers.
I hold in my hand the fruit of
genius, a miniaturized product
that powers itself by unfurling
self-generated solar cells. Its
sophisticated internal codes
enable it to replicate itself ten
thousandfold without need of a 3-
D printer. Under its glassy
surface, an intricate network of
membranes harness whizzing
electrical circuits to sequester
atmospheric carbon, purify water,
and produce breathable oxygen.
And if these features are not
enough, it is the most
sophisticated food production
technology ever devised. With
multiple apps already installed, it
can make tamales, bourbon, soda,
muffins, and diesel fuel. This
marvel of science comes to us, free
of charge, not from the high-tech
engineers of Silicon Valley, but
from the high-TEK developers
living in the Balsas River Valley
of central Mexico more than nine
thousand years ago. It comes to us
not from Apple, but from Maize.
I hold in my hand four seeds in
the colors of the medicine wheel:
thundercloud black, solar yellow,
pearly moonlight, and blood red.
I hold in my hand the memory of
my ancestors in the garden. The
DNA in every cell carries the
story of brown fingers poking
these seeds into the earth, fingers
just like mine, with dirt under
their nails. These farmers
nurtured not only food but
extraordinary genetic diversity,
with the capacity to adapt to
changing climates and an always
uncertain future. I could use some
of that now. This is the fruit of
sophisticated indigenous science:
traditional ecological knowledge,
known as TEK. The DNA
beneath the shiny seed coat is the
source of resourcefulness, the
creativity of corn married to the
nurture of the human. I hold in
my hand the multicolored fruit of
collective genius, an agreement
between sun, soil, water, plant,
and farmer. They have entered
into a covenant of reciprocity: if
the maize will take care of the
people, the people will care for
the maize.

WHEN WE SPEAK of “technology,”


we’re often thinking of the
consumer electronics and
industrial processes that tint the
cultural landscape of the Digital
Age. But, a grinding stone, an
irrigation system, and an ear of
corn are also technology, a word
that derives from the Greek
tekhne, meaning an art or craft.
Technology is simply the
application of human knowledge
to solve problems, fulfill needs, or
satisfy wants. A factory
synthesizing high-fructose corn
syrup is technology born of
science and engineering, and so
is the process of domesticating,
breeding, and processing corn by
indigenous farmers. The heritage
corn seeds in my hand and the
corn products on your plate are
manifestations of both high tech
and high TEK.

The tools we choose to adopt


influence how culture develops
and also reflect a culture’s
values. Corn is central to both
indigenous and agro-industrial
societies, but the way in which
Zea mays is understood and used
by each could not be more
different.

Maize or corn? This remarkable


plant has been known by as many
names as the peoples who have
grown it: The Seed of Seeds, Our
Daily Bread, Wife of the Sun, and
Mother of All Things. In my own
Potawatomi language, we say
mandamin, or the Wonderful
Seed. The scientific name is Zea
mays, “mays” referring to the
Taino name that Columbus
recorded in his journal when first
tasting “a sort of grain which they
call mahiz, which very well tasted
when boiled, roasted, or made
into porridge.” Mahiz, meaning
the “Bringer of Life,” became the
word maize in English. These
indigenous names honor maize as
the center of culture and reflect a
deeply respectful relationship
between people and the one who
sustains them.

The term used for the modern


crop carries none of this feeling
and is rooted in intentional
blindness to the original meaning
of the plant. Rather than adopt
the reverent indigenous name,
English settlers simply called it
corn, a term applied to any grain
—from barleycorn to wheat. And
so it began, the colonization of
corn.
I live in the lush green farm
country of upstate New York, in a
town that likely has more cows
than people. Most everyone I
know grows something: apples,
hops, grapes, potatoes, berries,
and lots of corn.

As I carry my seeds to the garden,


I can hear the growl of my
neighbor’s tractor and catch a
whiff of the ammonia fertilizer
that he is spraying on the fields. I
saw his tractor headlights going
back and forth late last night,
getting ready. It’s an intense time
of year, so much rests on
preparation and timing. He’s
oiled every gear and loaded the
seed. We both know the rain is
coming; it’s planting time. I’m
getting ready too, preparing the
ground with a whiff of a smudge,
asking permission of Mother
Earth to receive these seeds, and
celebrating the life inside each
kernel with a song.

My handful of Red Lake flint


corn seeds were a gift from
heritage seed savers, my friends at
the Onondaga Nation farm, a few
hills away. This variety is so old
that it accompanied our
Potawatomi people on the great
migration from the East Coast to
the Great Lakes. If you could
carry only a single pouch of seeds,
this would be the one to choose,
with nutrition for physical health
and teachings for spiritual health.
Holding the seeds in the palm of
my hand, I feel the memory of
trust in the seed to care for the
people, if we care for the seed.
These kernels are a tangible link
to history and identity and
cultural continuity in the face of
all the forces that sought to erase
them. I sing to them before
putting them into the soil and
offer a prayer. The women who
gave me these seeds make it a
practice that every single seed in
their care is touched by human
hands. In harvesting, shelling,
sorting, each one feels the tender
regard of its partner, the human.

My neighbor bought his seeds


from the distributor. They are a
new GMO variety that he can’t
save and replant but must buy
every year. Unlike my seeds of
many colors, his are uniform gold.
They will be sown with the scent
of diesel and the song of grinding
gears. I suspect that those seeds
have never been touched by a
human, but only handled by
machines. Nonetheless, when the
seeds are in the ground and the
gentle spring rain starts to fall, I
suspect he looks up at the sky and
prays. We both stand back and
watch the miracle unfold.
OUR DIFFERENT WAYS of planting
reflect not only the different
scales and goals of our work, but
also our fundamental
relationships with the plant. In
the western worldview, the plant
is understood as a
photosynthetic machine of sorts,
without perception, will, or
personhood. The seeds my
neighbor drills into the ground
are thought of as objects, hardly
different than the fertilizer or
herbicide, another cog in the
farm-become-factory. In this
worldview, plants are placed low
on a hierarchy of life—a
perception which is flipped
upside down in indigenous ways
of knowing. Over the hill at the
heritage farm, plants are
respected as bearers of gifts, as
persons, indeed oftentimes as
teachers. Who else has the
capacity to transform light, air,
and water into food and medicine
—and then share it? Who cares
for the people as generously as
plants? Creative, wise, and
powerful, plants are imbued with
spirit in a way that the western
worldview reserves only for
humans.
Science and technology go hand
in hand, each spurring the other
forward. Western science is a
powerful way of generating
knowledge, but it is not the only
one. Long before colonists came
to our shores, there were
scientists here of every kind,
including botanists, agronomists,
and geneticists, practicing
indigenous science and
developing regenerative
technologies. The nature of these
two ways of understanding the
world is written in vivid green ink
in our respective cornfields.

Western science makes the claim


to pure objectivity and
intentionally banishes
subjectivity from its explanations
in favor of reductionist, strictly
materialist approaches. I’m
trained as a scientist, and I honor
the importance of this method.
There’s good reason for it when
the questions to be answered are
“true or false.” But there are
other, bigger questions, for which
exclusion of human values may
lead to unintended outcomes.
The four colors on my Red Lake
flint cob are said to represent the
four colors of the medicine
wheel, which is a symbol of the
holistic indigenous approach to
knowledge making. Among their
many meanings, the four colors
remind us that we humans have
four ways of perceiving and
understanding the world, with
mind, body, emotion, and spirit.
There is no strict separation
between subjective and objective
but rather encouragement to
consider what we might learn
from using each of these
powerful abilities. The
combination provides insight into
not only questions of “true or
false” but also questions of “right
and wrong.”

Maize is so central to life that it


holds a powerful place in the
creation stories of the Maya.
After making the beautiful Earth,
the creator gods set about
making beings worthy of these
gifts. After several failed
attempts, the twin creators took
two different colors of corn and
formed them into humans. People
made of maize were most
pleasing to the gods for their
gratitude for life, their care for
other beings, and their joy. Maize,
the Mother of All Things, gave life
to the People. The books that
recorded these stories were
burned by the colonists, who saw
themselves as made in the image
of God, not from a lowly plant.

Biochemists confirm that we are


indeed people made of corn.
Because of its unusual
photosynthesis, corn leaves a
signature in our tissues written in
its particular ratio of carbon
isotopes. Corn-eating peoples of
the Americas carry a very
different ratio of these isotopes
in their flesh than the wheat
eaters of Europe or the rice
eaters of Asia. One biochemist
concluded that Americans are
basically “walking Fritos.” If you
walk through the grocery store
reading labels, you’ll find that
nearly 70 percent of processed
foods contain corn in some form:
corn syrup, corn oil, corn starch,
and more. Eggs, dairy, and meat
find their way to our plates and
into our cells through feed corn.
Corn is the keystone of our food
chain. How ironic that the
conquistadors were at first
fearful of eating this delicious
grain, thinking that if they ate the
food of “savages,” they would
become like them. Unfortunately,
that fear proved to be
ungrounded.

Despite millions of acres of


waving green leaves and golden
ears to remind us, processed corn
is so ubiquitous in our lives that it
makes us think of corn as a
product and not as a plant being.
What is our relationship to the
plant that has quite literally made
us?

The writings of some early


colonists reveal that they thought
corn a primitive crop, because it
did not require machines or draft
animals to cultivate and process,
as did their familiar wheat. They
mistook the apparent ease with
which corn fed the people for a
lack of agricultural
sophistication, rather than
recognizing the genius of the
system. Corn did not happen by
happy accident; Charles Mann
has called its evolution a “bold
act of conscious biological
manipulation” by Mayan farmers.

Unlike other cultivated plants,


corn has been called a “human
invention that does not exist
naturally in the wild and can only
survive if planted and protected
by humans.”1 The process of
domestication dramatically
changed the plant to the maize
we know today. Artificial
selection by observant and
knowledgeable farmers led to a
plant whose form and function
allowed it to become one of the
most efficient food producing
technologies ever invented. By
6500 BC, corn was cultivated
more widely across the Americas
—with higher yields and multiple
uses—than any other plant.

How did this come to be? It’s a


story of the dance between the
plant’s unique gifts and the
human gift for technology: not
technology in the sense of
autonomous machines that
separate us from the living world,
but a sacred technology, which
unites us. Using indigenous
science, the human and the plant
are linked as co-creators;
humans are midwives to this
creation, not masters. The plant
innovates and the people nurture
and direct that creativity. They
are joined in a covenant of
reciprocity, of mutual flourishing.

One corn origin story of our


Potawatomi people names corn
as the first mother of the people,
a woman who trailed a green leaf
behind her. Out of love for the
hungry children to come, she
gave up her own life, and when
laid in the fertile ground, she
became Mother Corn, sacrificing
her own beautiful seed children
to all the generations that follow.
Maize agriculture is
simultaneously pragmatic and
sacred. In dominant society, we
would not consider cornbread a
sacred food; it is simply a
product, a foodstuff, so removed
are we from its origins. In purely
objective western scientific
thinking, corn is simply a package
of starch, protein, and lipids
conveniently held together in a
seed. But, when corn is called
“Wife of the Sun” or “Mother of
All Things,” we remember that
the kernels are not just “stuff”
but a gift from the plant, a being
created of light and air and water,
the inorganic brought to life in a
union of sky and earth that we
ourselves might have life. This is
medicine wheel thinking that
allows spirit and matter to
converse.

Reverence for maize has been


lost in industrial agriculture but
vibrates in the air at the heritage
seed farm at the Onondaga
Nation, where braids of
multicolored ears hang from the
rafters. Onondaga Nation is the
center of the Haudenosaunee
(Iroquois) Confederacy, whose
skilled farmers once tended
cornfields that stretched for
miles. “These seeds are our
ancestors,” says farmer Angie
Ferguson. “Each seed carries the
knowledge of the gift it was
given. It knows what to do. It’s a
miracle to put a seed in the
ground and watch what
happens.” Angie is a leader in the
Braiding the Sacred movement,
which stewards the seeds and is
revitalizing indigenous
agriculture, farmer by farmer,
seed by seed, and song by song.

They call the process of bringing


back the seeds and the respect
for them rematriation.
Seedkeeper Rowen White writes
that “the word ‘rematriation’
reflects the restoration of the
feminine seeds back into the
communities of origin. The
Indigenous concept of
Rematriation refers to reclaiming
of ancestral remains, spirituality,
culture, knowledge and
resources, instead of the more
Patriarchally associated
Repatriation. It simply means
back to Mother Earth, a return to
our origins, to life and co-
creation, rather than Patriarchal
destruction and colonization, a
reclamation of germination, of
the life giving force of the Divine
Female.” They are replanting the
sacred. Here, they remember the
Corn Mother’s name.

Angie was given the


responsibility of caring for a seed
collection that represents a
legacy of sacred technology. In
gleaming rows of jars are
hundreds of ears unlike any you
have ever seen: four-inch ears of
popcorn with seeds like jade,
fourteen-inch ears, nearly black;
magenta, ochre, speckled pink,
blue, white, red, and calico; ears
like wampum purple and white,
colors of sunset, kernels marked
by eagle wings; 6-row, 8-row, 20-
row, straight, spiraled; corn for
flour, corn for mush, corn for
roasting, corn for soup, for
chicha, for medicine used in
ceremony; deep-rooted corn for
the desert, short season corn for
the north. If corn and farmer
could think of it, it is in those
jars.

The intent of indigenous corn


breeding was to promote genetic
diversity, for in diversity lies
stability and food security.
Farmers worked with the plant,
skillfully guiding it to meet the
nature of the landscape and the
needs of the people.

The precise details of how maize


was domesticated from its wild
ancestor remain a bit of a
mystery. Archeological and
genetic analysis reveals that corn
was likely first domesticated
about 9,000 years ago from the
ancestral wild grass teosinte, Zea
mays ssp. parviglumis. “Teosinte”
is an indigenous Nahautl word
meaning “sacred ear of corn.”
Teosinte can interbreed with
maize and is welcomed at the
edges of traditional farmers’
fields, where it is greatly valued
for its ability to “strengthen” the
vigor of the corn crop. Genetic
research shows that crossing
between ancestral teosinte and
the evolving corn seems to have
played an important role in the
changes that accompanied
domestication. This process of
backcrossing a hybrid with an
ancestor, known as introgression,
is an engine of genetic diversity,
creating new genetic
combinations that the farmer can
then select from her field and
propagate. Introgression is still
used in contemporary corn
breeding, but the innovations
that agribusiness claims with
patents, in fact, originated in
indigenous science, which grew
from intimate knowledge of the
nature of maize and its ecological
needs.

But let’s be honest—we can’t fully


credit humans for inventing corn.
Maize is such an innovative
departure from her grassy kinfolk
that, if an original patent was to
be granted for brilliant design, it
should be awarded to the plant
herself. Humans noticed what
maize invented and then adapted
it to support their own lives.

A hallmark of many technologies


is that they harness energy other
than our own to accomplish a
task. Maize, the Life Bringer, is a
master of energy transformation,
accomplishing a feat that
engineers have yet to duplicate:
photosynthesis.

Part of the story of maize’s


exceptional productivity lies in its
supercharged C4 photosynthesis
—present in only 5 percent of
flowering plant species. The C4
process enables high efficiency
in converting atmospheric carbon
dioxide to the sugary building
blocks of plant life. Corn can be
as much as 50 percent more
productive than typical C3 plants,
like wheat or potatoes. If you look
closely, you can see where the
magic happens. Each of the long
veins in a waving corn leaf is
surrounded by a circle of chubby
green cells. They seem a different
shade of green than the leaf cells
—and they are, which is due to a
different kind of chloroplast, the
cellular engine responsible for
turning carbon dioxide into food.
These special bundle sheath
cells have unique carbon-
capturing enzymes, which are
very good at what they do. If you
imagine yourself inside the leaf,
you could watch carbon dioxide
molecules shuttle across the
glistening membranes in the
clutches of a specially designed
enzyme. Unlike the C3 apparatus,
which can get hijacked by errant
oxygen, every single CO2
molecule they grab gets turned
into the precursor of your
cornbread—sugar which is then
polymerized to starch for easy
storage in the seed.

Maize shares the fibrous roots,


wind-pollinated flowers, and long
leaves of the grass family, but in
many ways it is an outlier, not
least by its extraordinary size,
earning it the description of “a
monstrous grass.” It lives at
human scale, defying the
inconspicuous nature of its
relatives in ways that reveal its
long domestic partnership with
people. Corn is the only food
plant I know that shares the size
of the human body—trees are far
larger, most crops are smaller,
but corn and people can stand
face-to-face. Many grasses, like
the ones in your lawn or a
tallgrass prairie, spread and make
many identical shoots from a
single seed, which is known as
tillering. However, corn does not
tend to tiller; instead, it focuses
all of its energy to make a single,
genetically unique stalk as tall
and sturdy as a farmer.
The distinctive way that corn
flowers made it ideal for
breeders. The male and female
flowers are on different parts of
the plant, making it possible to
influence the parentage of the
seeds. The male tassels shed
pollen from the top of the plant,
and the female flowers, sheathed
inside the ear, are connected to
the outside world only by the
corn silk, the long tubes that are
the conduit for fertilization. Each
strand of corn silk leads to a
waiting ovary, which if pollinated,
becomes an individual kernel.
The astute farmer can cross
males of one type with females of
another to get new varieties. With
whole cobs of different offspring
to choose from, the farmer
selects the best genetic
combinations every year,
gradually improving and changing
the plant through artificial
selection. Whether open-
pollinated or the result of careful
matchmaking, maize is a plant of
extraordinary genetic diversity.
Modern corn of industrial
agriculture grows a uniform,
homogeneous product, so unlike
the riotous variety of indigenous
maize.

An ear of corn represents an


entire family of seeds anchored
to the cob. No other plant
packages its energy-rich seeds so
efficiently. This is good for the
plant and good for the people.
Singly borne seeds are each
vulnerable to pests, disease, and
hungry birds, but corn protects
them all together in sheathing
layers of husk. It’s much easier to
harvest seed-packed ears than
individual seeds. This efficiency
means a single plant will
generously fill the soup pot for its
caretakers. With all those
offspring wrapped in a husk
blanket, maize embodies her
name, the Corn Mother.

These same traits that make


maize so valued by humans also
make it impossible for her to
survive without us. With all those
kernels packed tightly together
and completely enclosed by the
husk, the seeds are trapped. They
can’t disseminate themselves.
They need human hands to
liberate them from the husk, to
twist them from the cob and to
sow them in fertile soil. They
need us to poke them into the
earth every spring. People and
corn are linked in a circle of
reciprocity; we cannot live
without them and they cannot
live without us.

As spring progresses my
neighbor’s sprouting corn
inscribes glowing green lines
against the dark soil, drawing the
contours of the land, like isoclines
on a living topographic map. Its
hypnotic evenness makes it look
like it was planted by machine,
which of course it was. I smile at
the occasional deviation where
the lines go askew for a few yards.
Maybe the driver was distracted
by an incoming text or swerved to
avoid a groundhog. His
distraction will be written on the
land all summer, a welcome
element of humanity in a food-
factory landscape.
My garden looks different. The
word “symmetry” has no use
here, where mounds of earth are
shoveled up in patches. I’m
planting the way I was taught,
using a brilliant innovation
generated by indigenous science:
the Three Sisters polyculture. I
plant each mound with three
species, corn, beans, and squash
—not willy-nilly, but just the
right varieties at just the right
time. This marvel of agricultural
engineering yields more nutrition
and more food from the same area
as monocropping with less labor,
which my tired shoulders
appreciate. Unlike my neighbor’s
monoculture, Three Sisters
planting takes advantage of their
complementary natures, so they
don’t compete but instead
cooperate. The corn provides a
leafy ladder for the bean to climb,
gaining access to more light and
pollinators. In return, the bean
fixes nitrogen, which feeds the
demanding corn. The squash with
its big leaves shades the soil,
keeping it cool and moist while
also suppressing weeds. This is a
system that produces superior
yield and nutrition and requires
no herbicides, no added fertilizers,
and no pesticides—and yet it is
called primitive technology. I’ll
take it.

Across the valley, the uniform


corn rows in their high-tech
isolation look lonely to me. But
they are visited regularly by
tractors spraying chemicals.
01 02 03

MY NEIGHBOR IS GROWING feed


corn for livestock, which is
harvested when dry and hard.
Thankfully, a few of my other
neighbors have fields of sweet
corn for fresh eating. Sweet corn
is a sugary mutant that arose
from the huge storehouse of
genetic diversity held by Zea
mays. I like to get mine from the
farm stand where it is picked
each afternoon; so when you stop
by on the way home from work, it
is only hours off the plant.
There’s a coffee can next to the
heap of still moist ears where you
leave the money. Corn tastes best
on the honor system.
The modern maize that we enjoy
as fresh-picked sweet corn,
dripping with butter on a summer
evening, has not always had this
abundant form. In fact, we might
not recognize its ancestor at all.

The story of corn domestication


can be read in archeological
strata, from pollen cores, from
old fireplaces and cooking pots,
and from middens abandoned
millennia ago. Corn kernels and
cobs are well preserved, and
layer by layer of painstaking
excavation at archeological sites
—like Bat Cave, New Mexico—
record the long and changing
relationship between maize and
the indigenous peoples who
cultivated it.

The earliest cobs that have been


unearthed are only an inch long
and hold just two short rows of
kernels. These very early corn
seeds were only a tenth the size
of modern kernels and hard as
stone, which made them nearly
inedible. So why did people grow
them? Ancient farmers found a
way to use this otherwise
unavailable resource by
developing a technology that
made these jaw-breaking seeds
edible. The earliest known
method of processing corn was to
heat the seeds in a dry ceramic
vessel over a hot fire. This caused
the moisture inside the seed to
rapidly expand and explode
through the seed coat in a puff of
white. Popcorn! Our modern
snack is an ancient technology
for converting an inedible seed to
a staple food. Garlands of
popcorn were used in ancient
ceremony to celebrate this tasty
gift.

Archeological strata also include


the early stage variety of maize,
known as pod corn; today
referred to as “grandfather corn”
for its great antiquity. Each
individual seed was held in its
own short husk, like a papery
wrapper. Centuries of artificial
selection and skillful breeding
led to a corn cob that has up to
twenty rows of large seeds,
collectively wrapped in one husk.
Under cultivation, the plant went
from having a short stature, with
many long branches and
numerous small cobs, to the
stately architecture of modern
corn, with larger ears and softer
seeds.

The corn I am planting and that


Angie grows carries the genes of
many corn lineages that were
stewarded by their partners, the
farmers. The diversity arises from
the intrinsic genetic makeup of
the plant. It needs to be said, that
all of the genes—wildly
recombined with encouragement
from the farmer—are corn genes.
The identity and genetic
sovereignty of Mother Corn is
intact.

The corn my neighbor is


planting, like nearly all of the
corn planted in the United States,
is genetically modified. Genetic
engineering has been used to
forcibly insert foreign genes from
other organisms into the DNA of
maize. The genes of bacteria are
introduced to make the corn more
resistant to disease and insect
attack, both of which plague crop
monocultures. Monsanto
Corporation, in concert with
manufacturers of herbicides, have
inserted foreign genes that allow
the corn to survive being sprayed
with Roundup, while the weeds
are killed. This technology most
certainly increases production
efficiency but also poses a threat
to beneficial insects, to soil, and
to traditional farmers whose crops
have been contaminated by pollen
flow from GMO corn. This is a
technology that uproots the
original agreement between maize
and people and makes corn
subservient to the needs of
agribusiness. The genetic integrity
of The Wife of the Sun has been
compromised. There’s a word for
forcible injection of unwanted
genes.
INNOVATION TENDS TO SPARK
more innovation, and ancient
farmers were part of this cycle,
finding new uses for corn in
making materials, such as
cordage from leaves, medicine
from the silks, and delectable
ways of cooking the seeds, from
dumplings to tamales. Among the
most important inventions was
nixtamalization, a kind of applied
biochemistry that dramatically
improved the nutritional content
of the grain. Corn is an excellent
energy source, but a diet based
entirely on maize can lead to
pellagra, a nutritional disease
caused by low niacin. However, if
the maize is processed in a
strongly alkaline solution, the
niacin present can then be
readily absorbed by the body. So,
traditional people have cooked
maize with whatever calcium
hydroxide sources are at hand—
from ground seashells to lye. That
technology continues today.

When I make our traditional


Potawatomi corn soup, I begin by
boiling the stony seeds in a pot of
hardwood ash. They do the same
at Onondaga and wherever corn
soup is made. The kernels
emerge from the gray slurry with
the hulls loosened and the niacin
in place. Nixtamalization has a
host of other benefits. Lye-
treated corn can be formed into a
dough as the polysaccharide
bonds are loosened, while
untreated corn is too friable.
Nixtamalization also removes any
traces of aflatoxins, a serious
toxin produced by the mold fungi
that may inhabit stored corn. This
is a bioprocessing technology
that increases nutrition, uses all-
natural materials that are close at
hand, and produces no waste
with minimal energy expended—
the sophisticated application of
indigenous science.

As contemporary bioengineers
learn more about corn’s chemical
constituents, they too are
developing promising new
materials from corn, such as
bioplastics, textiles, adhesives,
and biofuels. This new demand
produces competition between
hungry people in some regions of
the world and hungry cars in
need of cheap gas in others, and
you can predict who is winning.
Western science and its
worldview allow us to answer the
question “Can we do it?” but are
ill-equipped to address the
question of “Should we?”
When harvest time rolls around,
my neighbor and I are grateful for
the warm, windy days that make
dry corn rattle in the breeze. At
this end of the season, we watch
for rain again in order to bring in
the crop before it gets wet.

It takes a fleet of vehicles for my


neighbor farmer to bring in the
harvest. Hopper trucks sidle up to
a ceaselessly moving combine,
which shoots a golden stream of
grain from a chute into the truck.
An empty one takes the place of
the full ones heading to the barn.
My road is crunchy with spilled
kernels, and the squirrels are
delighted—and plump.

On the heritage farm at


Onondaga, the community
gathers the ears in big baskets. In
the barn, everyone gathers to pull
back the husks and braid them
together so they can be hung from
the rafters for drying. Usually
there is much laughter and
chatter, but some days the barn is
quiet while everyone is at
ceremonies, giving thanks for the
harvest. Once the corn is dry, the
shelling starts. Kids at the school
love this part: twisting the kernels
from the cobs into cardboard
boxes. Other hands will sort the
abundance into three bins under
Angie’s guidance. The perfect
seeds go into a bin for next year’s
planting, preserving the age-old
process of artificial selection, of
planting the best and eating the
rest. Kernels of unusual color or
size are set aside for consideration
of their potentials. The next best
seeds, the ordinary ones, go into
the food bin. The promised
reciprocity is underway; the
agreement is alive—the people
cared for the corn and now the
corn will care for the people. The
people here remember what the
Corn Mother taught them.

There are always a few misfits,


the shrunken or broken or
immature. These are not thrown
away but kept in the third bin.
Angie and the farm crew scatter
them outside, sharing with wild
relatives in the hungry time of
winter. The squirrels are fat here,
too.

Most all of the Onondaga corn


harvest is shared by the
community, as corn soup, corn
bread, and cornmeal mush with
maple syrup and berries. Angie
and the crew are traditional chefs
as well, restoring food culture and
its nutritional benefits. All the
summer’s work of people and
plant fills the bellies of friends and
family and takes its rightful place
at traditional ceremonies,
nourishing people and culture at
the same time. This harmonious
image is far from the norm.
MOST CORN IS EATEN by no one.
Less than 10 percent of the US
corn crop ever finds its way to
your table, and much of that is in
the form of high fructose corn
syrup in soda and processed
foods. The middle of our country
is a cornfield roughly 1500 miles
long. What happens to all that
corn if it’s not feeding people?
About half of it fattens cattle,
pigs, and chickens and fuels
dairy production. In a hungry
world, we have to remember that
the efficiency of converting corn
calories to animal calories is low.
For every 100 calories a person
could receive from eating corn,
only 15 of those calories will
make it to your plate in the form
of animal protein. Since 2011,
however, more corn has been
used for ethanol production than
for consumption by humans and
livestock combined. At what
cost?

Corn production today uses more


natural resources than any other
crop. Around 90 million acres are
planted in corn, and the last
remaining remnants of native
prairie and grassland are being
plowed under for corn every year.
Corn is a hungry crop and a
thirsty one. Vast amounts of
water are consumed, and a
staggering amount of fertilizer.
Corn not only consumes a great
deal—it produces a huge amount
of waste. Much of that fertilizer
never even makes it into the
plant, instead it is washed
downstream, producing toxic
algal blooms in waters
everywhere along the way and
ultimately creating the growing
dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dead rivers, lost biodiversity, say
farewell to prairies and bobolinks
and meadowlarks, to say nothing
of precious topsoil leaving the
fields and silting the rivers. The
economic pressure behind this
ongoing expansion of cornfields
has little to do with filling empty
bellies. In today’s agribusiness,
we feed more cars than people.

I don’t blame my farmer neighbor


for industrial agriculture. He’s
been harnessed to a system that
treats him like a cog, too. His
family has farmed this valley well
for generations and had to adapt
to changing pressures in order to
stay on the land. The honorable
calling of farming is being
dishonored by a worldview and
economic institutions that
relentlessly demand taking more
without regard for giving back.
He’s been colonized, too.

Watching train cars of golden


yellow kernels unload into
ethanol factories creates a
gnawing pain in my gut; it’s the
pain of betrayal. The Mother of
All Things, the Wonderful Seed,
did not agree to this. It’s a long,
long way from seeing her as a
sacred being to an industrial
commodity. How did we get here?

Colonization is the process by


which an invading people seeks
to replace the original lifeways
with their own, erasing the
evidence of prior claims to place.
Its tools are many: military and
political power, assimilative
education, economic pressure,
ecological transformation,
religion—and language.

Colonists take what they want


and attempt to erase the rest.
Conceiving of plants and land as
objects, not subjects—as things
instead of beings—provides the
moral distance that enables
exploitation. Valuing the
productive potential of the
physical body but denying the
personhood of the being,
reducing a person to a thing for
sale—this too is a manifestation
of colonialism.

There is another word tugging at


my sleeve, asking for recognition.
That word is slavery. Standing
alone in straight lines in poisoned
fields, forced to carry genes not
their own, today sacred maize is
enslaved to an industrial
purpose: feeding cars and
factories.

Corn? Maize? Mother of All


Things? Renaming is a powerful
form of colonialism in which the
settler erases original meanings
and replaces it with meanings of
their own. This practice of
linguistic imperialism also
diminished corn from its status
as Mahiz, the sacred life giver, to
an anonymous commodity.
Indigenous languages, lifeways,
and relations with the land have
all been subject to the violence of
colonialism. Maize herself has
been a victim, and so have you,
when a worldview which
cultivated honorable relations
with the living earth has been
overwritten with an ethic of
exploitation, when our plant and
animal relatives no longer look at
us with honor, but turn their
faces away. But there is a kernel
of resurgence, if we are willing to
learn.

The invitation to decolonize,


rematriate, and renew the
honorable harvest extends
beyond indigenous nations to
everyone who eats. Mother Corn
claims us all as corn-children
under the husk; her teachings of
reciprocity are for all.

I’m not saying that everyone


should go back to Three Sisters
agriculture or sing to their seeds;
although I admit that is a world I
want to live in. But we do need to
restore honor to the way that
food is grown. Agribusiness is
quick to point out that we cannot
feed a world of nearly eight
billion people with gardens alone.
This is true but omits the reality
that most of the corn we grow is
not going to hungry people: it is
feeding cars. There is another
kind of hunger in our affluent
society, a hunger for justice and
meaning and community, a
hunger to remember what
industrial agriculture has asked
us to forget, but the seed
remembers. Good farming should
feed that hunger, too.

I’m thinking of the way that


grandfather Teosinte mingles
with corn at the edge of a
traditional cornfield, welcomed
as a source of guidance and
diversity. Might we invite
ancestral knowledge into our
fields for these same virtues?
Unsustainable industrial
agriculture needs philosophical
gene flow from indigenous
knowledge, a cross-pollination of
respectful relationship to breed a
new agriculture that honors the
plants as well as the people.
Together we can remember our
covenant with corn, that she will
care for the people, if we will care
for her.

Corn tastes better on the honor


system.

1
Gail Woody, “Where Corn Is King,” West Virginia
Living, May–June 2013, 18–19.
Credits

Writer
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen
Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific
Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a
SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and
director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Experience Design
Studio Airport
Studio Airport is Maurits Wouters and Bram Broerse. Together with a small team of creatives,
they run a design practice based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The studio has been recognized
with international awards for projects such as Hart Island Project (New York), Amsterdam Art
Council, and Greenpeace International.

Paper Artist
Suus Hessling
Suus Hessling is a stop-motion designer and animation director based in Utrecht, the
Netherlands. She is a graduate of University of the Arts Utrecht and specializes in working
with paper to build sets and sceneries that bring stories to life.

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