Danielle Hill Greendeer harvests 200 to 300 ears of King Philip corn in the community garden of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Mrs. Greendeer likes to say that the corn came back to her.
She said that the Wampanoag people have historically grown corn in this area. It is cool that it is looping back around to the Wampanoag community, because we haven't grown corn on our lands in hundreds of years.
The lands used to stretch from the Atlantic beaches of Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard. The Pilgrims held a harvest celebration 400 years ago in Massachusetts, which became known as the first Thanksgiving.
No matter what generations of students have been taught, they did not call it that. The corn that was served at the celebration was from the Wampanoag tribe. If it wasn't the King Philip strain, it was another variety of sweet, deeply-flavoring Northern flint corn.
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Danielle Hill Greendeer, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe, grew her first crop of King Philip corn this year.
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The red-skinned King Philip variety is one of several flint corns that Native people bred for the New England climate.
Only a few farmers plant those heirloom lines today. One of the main ingredients found on Thanksgiving tables across the continental United States is cornmeal, which is ground from another hard maize called dent corn.
The story of the people who lived in the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived is written into the corn.
If you know how to read the corn, you can tell the civilization those people built. When the wheat crop from Europe failed, Wampanoag corn kept the Pilgrims from starving, and it wove itself into the diet of the European settlers.
maize wasn't just there for the taking, unlike deer or cranberries. According to archaeologists, it has a long history of cultivating. The Indigenous people of the Balsas River Valley, south of Mexico City, turned teosinte, a wild grass with little value as food, into a crop of large, closely packed kernels that were dense with nutrition.
The new strain was altered so much that it could not survive in the wild. Its descendants can't. Farmers have to plant maize faithfully, keep it far from any other variety and save some for next year to keep the maize from dying out.
The maize traveled from the Balsas Valley. It was being grown in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus. The Native peoples adapted the maize for their own climate through breeding.
In Arizona, Hopi farmers developed maize that could be planted a foot below the surface of high desert valleys, many inches deeper than other strains. Their maize has roots that can dig even deeper to find more water, and shoots that are strong enough to reach the desert top.
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Over thousands of years, Native people in Mexico developed many different strains of purple corn, called Maiz negro.
Gaspé, a fast-growing strain that has two-foot-long stalks, is ready to pick as soon as 45 days after planting in Quebec and northeastern Maine. Gaspé is the earliest maturing Northern flint corn because it takes half the time to mature.
Tony VanWinkle, an anthropologist who teaches sustainable food systems at a college in North Carolina, has helped grow Gaspé corn in Vermont in partnership with the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki nation. He has a deep respect for the agricultural skills of the Indigenous people, who used to own the corn crop.
He said that this prowess has not been recognized by outsiders because of their limited and narrow stereotypes. They were very sophisticated farmers.
The "three sisters" method of planting maize and beans in mounds with winter squash between them was one of their refinements. The beans have a pole to climb. The broad squash shade the ground from the elements.
Europeans learned to appreciate local maize after they acquired it by trade.
The people who shaped it to thrive in the local climate did not get the appreciation they deserved. Native people were killed or forced to leave their homes. They lost the corn at the center of their diet and culture along the way.
The corn was alive. The family at Davis Farm obtained white flint corn from a local tribe in 1654 and still grows it today. According to documents in the archives of the tribe, Uncas gave the farm to the founder. The trading post on the river was operated by the friend and military ally of the chief.
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White flint corn from a local Native tribe has been grown on Larry Davis's farm in Stonington, Conn., since about 1654.
Larry Davis said the white corn kept his grandparents and other families alive through the Depression. He said that there were a lot of farms that had it back then. It has disappeared as they have died off and gone out of business.
Across the hemisphere, heirloom lines of corn have dwindled or died out as more productive but less delicious corn strains came into favor.
The white flint line on Mr. Davis' farm has remained despite the loss of the King Philip corn. He is jealous of it. He will sell you ground corn, but not a whole cob.
If corn goes through my mill, it will leave here.
In 1996, his father gave seed corn back to the tribe after they won federal recognition.
Other tribes have been able to get their heirloom maize. The food sovereignty movement seeks to give Native people control over their own food supply by using corn and other seeds. The Indigenous Seed Keepers Network supports Native people who want to grow their traditional crops again through seed exchanges and other programs.
Rowen White, a member of the Mohawk Tribe who is one of the network's organizers, draws a parallel between the return of Native crops to Native hands and the repatriation to tribes of artifacts and human remains held in museums. She prefers to say that the seeds have been replanted because women were the farmers in Mohawk and other communities.
Mrs. Greendeer has several plans for her first crop. She wants to cook it with her squash and beans for the Wampanoag harvest festival. She will send some back to Truelove Seeds, the company that gave her the corn to plant, and swap some with other tribal members who want to grow corn.
She said that the tribe would like to grow it on a larger scale and make a Wampanoag cornmeal out of it. She thinks that it would be a nice addition to the Wampanoag Trading Post and Gallery, the shop she owns in Mashpee.
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Mrs. Greendeer has King Philip corn. The ultimate goal is for the tribe to grow it on a larger scale and make a Wampanoag cornmeal out of it.
The goal is to revive the relationship between corn and humans.
Mrs. Greendeer said that it wasn't just about growing out the corn and bringing it back home. It is about creating a spiritual connection with the corn. She is alive. The goal is to get it into the body and into the corn.
The stories we tell about the past define us. That is their purpose.
The United States is in the middle of a battle over what Americans should know about the nation's past and present. There have been violent conflicts over monuments to Confederate soldiers, institutions named after slave traders and plantation owners, and the history lessons children learn. Efforts to revise popular narratives about history to include Black, Indigenous and other points of view that have been ignored are now a central feature of political life.
Many Americans tell stories about Thanksgiving to build a nation. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln called for a national holiday to be held to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as possible.
The goal is to paper over the long and shameful history of killing Native Americans, driving them from their land and shattering their culture. Thanksgiving is a time for Native people to remember what they have lost since Europeans first arrived.
Mrs. Greendeer is working on a children's book called "Keepunumuk: Weechumun's Thanksgiving Story." A Wampanoag woman narrates the book, which is written by two other Native American authors.
The Pilgrims were dying off in the winter of 1620-21 after a plague killed many Wampanoags. Mrs. Greendeer said that the corn wants the Native people to show the newcomers how to take care of them.
She said that her book is about corn in our culture history and her taking a position of authority and guidance over people. All people are free from discrimination.
