Who grew maize?

by Sandra Busatta

At the time of the Spanish Conquest many chroniclers, attentive to the economic chances offered by the new lands, described the Mesoamerican Indian farming techniques. They illustrated accurately the different stages of the slash and burn crop growing, from the fires in the forest to the lavish harvest, as well as the religious ceremonies accompanying them. Poma de Ayala left us a precise set of drawings showing men and women planting maize, the presence of the Inca and his wife at the breaking of the soil and, after that, women and children performing most of the menial tasks . The same can be said of all the so called masculine agriculture of Meso and South America as well as of the ancient agricultural Southwest. The writers describe all the process of cutting and burning, men breaking soil with their special digging stick, and then women helping with their hoes and putting the kernels in the holes, all the weeding, bird scaring, watering, harvesting and putting into the silos, and after all that they state that the old Andean, Mesoamerican and Pueblo farmer was a man! This is a very special case of sexual blindness, since even today poor Indian families sell their work as an economical unit in the poorly mechanized estates, as a waged husband and non waged wife and children.

The crop return of the Aztecs was slightly inferior to the Mayas', but the poor tropical forest soil forced the Mayan farmer in the jungle to use his maize field for one or two years and lie farrow for at least ten , while an Iroquois or Creek woman had to lie fallow and move her village only every 12-20 years.

Andean agriculture was more advanced than that of Mesoamerica, using terraces, irrigation canals and an organization strictly controlled by the State. The Pueblos are the conjunction ring between Mexican and North American agriculture; they also used irrigation, but they had to fight the salinization of the soil provoked by evaporation in the Sonora Desert area. Even if men cultivate the fields, (today exclusively), the property of the land is firmly held by women.

The agricultural techniques in the Western Woodlands and the Prairies of the USA are almost the same, but the great difference is that the digging stick and the hoe are still in the women's hands as well as the property of the land and the crops. The digging stick is even a symbol of womanhood in sacred bundles and other ceremonial paraphernalia in the Plains until reservation times. Women's work was organized in collective bees, very different from the individual toil of the modern Pueblo farmer and witnesses say it was not a very heavy lot. Feminine power on the crops and the control of maize trade has its counterpart in feminine political power in the North American Woodlands, superior to that of Pueblo women. While female horticulturalist power may come from the economic importance of gathering that accounted for about 70- 90% of the balance between meat and vegetable production, it is possible that the major role of the Pueblo man in the fields was favoured not only by the hard Southwest soil and the influence of the more authoritarian cultures that exported southern maize culture, but also by the Spanish mission rule that considered agriculture a man's task. In the East, English and French farming influenced Indian horticulture much later; in late 18th century agriculture became masculine: Indian prophets and reformers favoured the adoption of the European plow and the type of farming and family organization it brought in.

The Scalp and the Ear of Corn

by S. Busatta

Custer is Dead for your Sins, affirmed Vine Deloria jr. in his 1969 "manifesto", where he supports the idea that scalping was introduced by the whites. He is wrong, as his many polemicist followers, and the Iroquois editor of Scalping and Torture clearly demonstrates it. In fact scalping is part of a very old, pre-columbian religious complex found in various parts of the Americas, from Northern Argentina to the St. Lawrence River. Georg Friederici thinks it had its North American origin in the Southeast of the United States and followed maize northward to the Hudson Valley, where the Mohicans and other Delaware speaking tribes practised it against their Iroquois enemies, who adopted it, but seemed preferring the head cult, also of southern origin. The Pueblos, Pimans, Yumans and later the Navajos scalped ceremonially and among them the Scalp Dance and connected rites are still an important part of their religion.

The Dutch learned the use of scalping from the Mohicans and transformed it from a religious symbol of agrarian fertility into the token for a money reward and then transmitted this desacralized bounty to the English.

The link between the scalp and the ear of corn is showed by the rites of corn husking; it was the only operation to which the Indian man participated, opening the husk and braiding it during a very lively night feast. The process of husking with the husking pin was very similar to that of scalping with a scalping knife and, of course, it did not go unnoticed by the Indians.

Women and scalps are related everywhere. Since 1540 the first conquistadors were shown the rites performed by the Southeastern women in front of the great earthen pyramids, and outraged Franciscan fathers saw Pueblo women having sexual intercourse with scalps in order to adopt and transform them into rain fetishes.

In North America the scalp is always connected to the menstruation and the woman as a farmer well as as the owner of the land. Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that this is the lesson of the myths when they put the origin of the menstruation and that of the scalp (or the first trophy head) in the same story, and concludes that this relationship shows a symbolic connection between marriage and war.

by Flavia Busatta

Indian cultivated fields, where the plants seem to grow heedlessly, are very different from the European idea of a field. Yet the combination of the three sisters, maize, beans and pumpkins offered great advantages. The hard and large leaves of the maize give shadow to the delicate leaves of the beans and its stalk supports the vines. The pumpkins cover almost all the soil between the stalks , efficaciously withhold wet, prevent soil erosion from rain or wind and do not let weeds to grow, reducing hoeing and giving a better crop.

Usually the seeds were planted in concentrical rows in holes made by a digging stick on little dirt mounds ; the seeds therefore were not spread with a large movement of the arm, but put one by one in the holes. Even if this method gives a less abundant crop, it permits the choice of the kernels, helping hybridisation and better crop selection, and explains the unbelievable variety of Indian maizes. Moreover, policulture diminishes parasite insect aggression because a mixed crop attracts predator insects; this was also the function of "pen" plants such as sunflowers in North America. Impollination was made on every single plant because the female hair of the ear was protected by the husk, that protected the kernels from parasites, wind and pollen alike.

Maize typology and cultivation that integrated human beings and plants influenced the co-operative and equalitarian structure of Indian societies, in a way different from the individualist typologies inherent to monocultural crops such as wheat.

Precolumbian America ignored the plow and a most favoured hypothesis about this technological conservatism indicates the cause of it in the lack of burden animals. Men and women used the digging stick and the hoe to open their fields and practised the slash and burn method of horticulture. In some regions of the Mesoamerican jungle the soil was so poor that could allow only one or two crops a year instead of the seven of the Mexican Highland. In the Eastern Prairies of the USA a plot could be exploited continually for twelve years at most, but the Iroquois fields were so fertile that could lie fallow about twice in a generation. Since the Indian tools were so simple, the prairies of Iowa were virgin in precolumbian times and had to wait for northern plow and McCormick machines to give their crops to the farmers and become today's heart of the American Corn Belt .

by F. Busatta

Most scholars agree that maize was domesticated in southern Mexico, in about 5000 b.C, producing a popcorn in which every kernel is closed in an individual pod; this pod-popcorn from the Tehuacan valley is more primitive than the Chapalote and Nal-Tel Mexican types and can interbreed with teosinte, a wild graminaceous plant. Modern maize shows affinities with teosinte as well as tripsacum , another graminaceous spread from Indiana (USA) to Colombia. Since maize has to be fecundated intervening on the "flowers", prehistoric Indian women could experiment every kind of breed. Mexican breeds can be divided into four groups: Ancient Indigenous, Pre-Columbian Exotic, Prehistoric Mestizos and Modern Incipient.

The Ancient Indigenous variety includes the primitive types deriving from Puebla pod-popcorn and spreading northward and southward. Pre-Columbian Exotic is thought to have been created in South America and diffuse north, Prehistoric Mestizos are related to the dent corn of southeastern United States and Modern Incipient developed in post- columbian times and has not reached yet fully stabilized hybrids.

A very old type called Hohokam-Basket Maker developed in 200-100 AD. from Pre-Columbian Exotic and is still planted by the Pimas, Papagos and Yumas, while other Indians bred the flint and dent types in Eastern USA and the Prairies, which gave origin to the modern corn grown in the Corn Belt.

Follows a card on Zea mais: a description of the plant and its active principles not only as food but also as a drug. Another card on pellagra and regional Italian names of corn.

From the Introduction of G. F.Will and G. E. Hyde's Corn among the Indians of the Upper Missouri a good example of the (white) farmer's conservatism. With the first knowledge of corn and its culture received from the tribes near the coast from New England to Virginia and Carolina the American farmer has felt, generally, that there was nothing further to be learned from the Indians about corn. The first settlers in the Upper Missouri failed to understand that each region presented different conditions of soil and climate, that could be won more easily copying the methods of the resident tribes. Only some Indian agent experimented with corn at an early date, but for the most part the corn they tried was from the east and, as the frontier moved up the Missouri valley into South Dakota, the triumphal progress of the dent corns began to slacken. In this region the flint and flour corns of the Rees and Mandans were reputed for their extreme hardiness. The common cry of the opponents of the native flints was that corn of this type grew so low that the ears were very hard to gather, but this problem was overcome by progress in mechanization. When interest in this flint corns was revived, at first it was supposed that many of these varieties had been lost and that others had been permitted to degenerate into the condition of mere squaw corn. As work progressed it was learned that a surprising number of the old varieties still existed in pure or almost pure strains. Altogether some fifty varieties have been found among the tribes that formerly practised agriculture in the Missouri valley, not including any of the Sioux.

Arthur C. Parker in Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants begins a short story of the names of maize, with the Latin zea, from the Greek word zao, meaning "to live", a most appropriate name for the plant the Iroquois called "our life" or "it sustains us". The names applied to maize during the 16th century in Europe have confused some writers. In fact it was variously called Roman corn, Turkish wheat, Sicilian corn and so on. Turkish wheat was the name generally used by the English. Maize was imported in China in mid 17th century and in India in the 18th, but in the latter country flourished for long only as an ornamental grass.

Don C. Talayesva, Sun Chief of the Hopi, had his autobiography written in 1938-42 collaborating with L. W. Simmons. In it he remembers that farming was the hardest task for him. He had to fence his fields to keep donkeys off the corn and to participate to all the kachina dances to help the rain to come. He first planted sweet corn and protected it from wind, mice and worms with some grass, small wood sticks and old cans. When the Sun Chief stated it was the right time, he planted melons, pumpkins and beans, then white and blue corn, hoping it was not too late to escape sand drifts. Many men helped him to dig, because he had helped them before: the holes were very deep, the soil hard and the farmers tormented by a hot and strong wind sweeping the fields. It was a good thing avoiding sexual intercourse among the corn plants, in order not to offend the Corn Maidens, and running along the borders to invite corn to grow fast. Nobody threw things to others to escape hail and nobody touched corpses. Many old people ordered the clouds to help the Hopi and rain, but he was not able to do so.

Quotations on maize and the Indians from:

W.H. Prescott," The great staple of the country, as indeed of the American continent, was maize, or Indian corn, which grew freely along the valleys and up the steep sides of the Cordilleras to the high level of the tableland. The Aztecs were as curious in its preparation, and as well instructed in its manifold uses, as the most expert New England housewife. Its gigantic stalks, in these equinoctial regions, afford a saccharine matter not found to the same extent in northern latitudes, and supplied the natives with sugar little inferior to that of cane itself".(Conquest of Mexico, 1866)

John Fiske, "Maize or Indian corn  could be planted without clearing or plowing the soil. It was only necessary to girdle the trees with a stone hatchet, so as to destroy their leaves and let in the sunshine. A few scratches and digs were made in the ground with a stone digger, and the seed once dropped in took care of itself. The ears could hang for weeks after ripening and could be picked off without meddling with the stalk; there was no need of threshing or winnowing. None of the Old World cereals can be cultivated without much more industry and intelligence. At the same time when Indian corn is sown on tilled land it yields with little labor more than twice as much per acre than any other grain". (Discovery of America)

John Lawson, "The Indian corn or Maize proves the most useful grain in the world; and had it not been for the fruitfulness of this species, it would have proved very difficult to have settled some of the plantations in America. It is very nourishing whether in bread, sodden or otherwise; and those poor Christian servants in Virginia, Maryland and the other northerly plantations, that have been forced to live wholly upon it do manifestly prove that it is the most nourishing grain for a man to subsist on, without any other victuals."(History of Carolina, 1714). This emphatic description is either false or interested. In fact nobody can survive only eating maize, without getting pellagra for want of salt or other serious diseases for want of meat. Authors have thought that Aztec cannibalism was partly provoked by scarce game.

G.F. Will-G.E. Hyde describe corn in Upper Missouri, from Pawnee corn going south the size of the plant and the ears decrease as well as the length of the ripening season. This speaks of the extreme hardiness of the Indian species, while a crop failure occurs very rarely. Another characteristic of the northern corn is its bushy foliage that is preserved in its hybrids as a typical trait.

Father Gabriel Sagard, a French Recollect, described the work of the Huron women in his Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, 1623-24. The women chose the kernels, damped them in water and put nine or ten of them in the holes made with a digging stick. Their weeding was so good that the paths between the rows looked so much as roads that the priest sometimes got lost more easily there than in the forest. He described the plant, which is much better than in Canada or in France. This corn ripened in four months and in some places in three. They collect the ears and put them upside down in great bunches hanging from poles forming racks in the longhouse. Once dried the crop was put into great birchbark containers.

by Howard L. Meredith, Ph.D. Cookson Institute, Oklahoma City 1994

Traditional Native American cultures incorporate butterflies into their tribal mythologies and imagery in recognition of their significance and beauty. The symbolism of the butterfly remains a fascinating one that links all of creation to the center in a variety of ways. Certain myths and symbols have circulated throughout the Americas. These are spread orally, in painting and pictographs, and within the weaving in cloth and basketry. Each is the image of a well defined cultural complex. The butterfly image discloses centering images for various Native American peoples. Some of the most dramatic images of the butterfly exist in the region of the arid Southwest. The Jemez butterflies are shared with the other Eastern Pueblos and the color symbolism represents plants and weather from the directions. The Jemez songs concerning butterflies tell of wooing the Rain Spirits to come and play with the Corn Maidens, the Vine Maidens, the Cloud Spirit Maidens. Among the nearby Hopi people, the butterfly serves as a messenger of good times and in many legends the insect is present to lure young people away from danger. Highly conventionalized butterflies appear in ancient Hopi pottery as well as modern Hopi and Zuni one, in the Hopi Butterfly Dance and the tablets dances of the Rio Grande Tewa Pueblos as the symbol of the beneficence of summer. Among the Nahuatl speaking peoples butterflies serve as sacred symbols of rebirth and carriers of the souls of dead warriors, the eternal sundancers, when they return to earth. The American Southwestern Papago tell a wonderful story of the first butterflies and butterflies appear in various Navajo sandpaintings. Ojibwa tales from north among the Great Lakes include this colored being and in the Central Andes of Peru it serves as the primary design motif in Quechua weaving related to birth, growth and fertility. Stylized with centers and boundaries, the images of the butterflies are still comparable upon the plane of imagery and symbolism, although the cultures are not interchangeable. The image provide openings into a trans-historical world. The butterfly and its symbolic meanings in the Americas constitute another opening on the true reality of the world.