Adapting Corn to Place: Indigenous Rerooting and Settler-Indigenous Collaboration

Keywords: Indigenous science, corn, place, Indigenous knowledge, knowledge systems, maize, coexistence
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Non-Native farmers and gardeners in the US who are involved in adapting culinary corn to particular places through selecting and saving seeds, alongside Tribal Nations are participating in an ongoing Indigenous agricultural practice with a millennia long history and deep ancestral and spiritual roots. Adapting corn to particular places, and developing shared relationships and responsibilities to place through seeds, holds the potential to decolonize environmental and agricultural knowledge systems in Indigenous-settler collaborations. Indigenous relationships with place through corn continue to the present despite centuries of colonial displacement, land theft, and allotment and assimilation policies which have brought about loss of ancestral homelands, seeds, and agricultural knowledge. Indigenous food sovereignty movements in the US aspire to revitalize corn agriculture as a strategy of cultural survivance as peoples, despite, in some cases, having to reroot their corn far from their ancestral homelands. This paper will explore several individual Tribal Nations’ relationships to corn and place through their migratory movements in North America, both colonially forced and via treaties, to show how the Indigenous science of corn agriculture has allowed for adaptation, resilience, and cultural survivance. It will then turn toward recent and nascent collaborations between Native and non-Native farmers around place-based seed rematriation and place-adapted corn. Though potential areas of commonality in philosophy and place-based techniques and knowledges are present, protocols must be in place to address the settler-colonial history of the land and differing ontologies of place and seeds with the goal of fruitful collaboration and coexistence.