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Mother Corn: Native America's Legendary Staff of Life
| Article
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19537 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
4,124 Words |
| Author
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
Among many tribal peoples throughout the Americas, corn is planted, tended, harvested, then eaten or drunk after grinding, parching, fermenting, roasting, boiling, baking, or frying. For these peoples, even today, corn is more than a source of food: It retains its ancient role on the meta-physical plane as an object of wonder and veneration.
Typical of native America's corn complex--a collection of cultural beliefs and behaviors characterized by physical reliance on and spiritual commitment to the plant--is the story told by the Arikara, who lives along the Missouri River in what is now the state of North Dakota. A Great Plains group, the Arikara planted corn and augmented their diet with buffalo obtained on the prairies. Long ago, they say, the divinity Nishanu took an ear of corn from his field in the sky and transformed it into Mother Corn. When Mother Corn came to earth, she led the Arikara's ancestors up from their dark underground home. Thereafter the Arikara, grateful for the gifts of the brilliant creation they found on the earth's surface, sang a poem to Mother Corn, "through whose mediation we enjoy all these benefits."
Revered as Mother Corn, source of life, the plant is widely perceived in native America as the most fundamental element required for promoting human existence. To understand why this is so, how corn became the legendary staff of life and rooted itself firmly in ethereal soil, we must consider its extraordinary value as a source of food.
Corn as maize
The pastoral shepherds among the Navajo of North America's arid Four Corners region--where the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet--looking to more than mutton for sustenance, put the matter succinctly: "Corn is life itself."
Corn, a member of the grass family, exists in a number of varieties (the Inca of Peru grew about three hundred). The basic types are dent corn, flint corn, flour corn, popcorn, and the sweet corn sold in supermarkets. Each subspecies is adapted to a different climate: Flint corn was favored by the Indian peoples of cold, moist New England; dent corn grew in the moist but warm Southeast; and southwesterners still cultivate flour corn in their arid region. Over the years, intense hybridization has transformed corn into the staple food in Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, and parts of Asia.
Corn is thought by some scholars
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