Cherokee White Eagle Corn
“For more than a decade, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – also known as the 'doomsday' vault – has collected and maintained the world's largest collection of diverse crops. This week, the Cherokee Nation became the first tribe in the United States to be invited to deposit samples in the vault.”
-- Sophie Lewis, CBS News
A Cherokee Nation press release confirmed that nine samples of heirloom crops are being sent to a long-term seed storage facility located deep inside a mountain on a remote island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The seeds will be deposited on February 25 with the 2020 collection.
The vault, built in 2008 to withstand man-made and natural disasters, is part of an international effort to ensure the preservation of a wide variety of plant seeds. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops and currently holds nearly 1 million samples from nearly every country in the world.
In recent decades, Native Americans across the United States have rallied to bring back the traditional crops that fed their ancestors, and the seeds they need to grow them. While many traditional seeds have been lost, many of those that are still cultivated face environmental and human threats, including poor storage facilities.
This movement represents important indigenous history when seed savers were charged with protecting the plants that provided food and medicine to their tribes. The seeds symbolize a future that could reconnect Native Americans to their culture and renew interest in healthy foods that might help offset high rates of obesity and diabetes.
(Sophie Lewis, "This is history in the making: Cherokee Nation becomes first U.S. tribe to preserve culturally important seeds in Arctic 'doomsday' vault.” CBS News. February 8, 2020.)
Such so-called “heirloom plants” are old cultivars of plants used for food that are grown and maintained by gardeners and farmers, particularly in isolated or ethnic minority communities of the Western world.
To Native Americans, seed protection isn't just about maintaining diverse genetics and food sustainability, said Lea Zeise, Eastern Region representative for the Intertribal Agriculture Council and a farmer who runs a corn growing cooperative on her reservation. "We need to know about protecting our seeds and foods... to protect the sacredness of our culture," she added.
“The tribe’s heirlooms were selected over the centuries for improved storage characteristics. Corn and beans were picked after they dried on stalk and vine and were ground into flours or cooked in soups. And that squash lasts practically forever. The takeaway is to realize how brilliant the agricultural science of the Cherokees was.”
– Pat Gwin, administrative liaison in Cherokee tribal government.
Native Americans attached religious significance to their cultivated crops. As evidence, there are a great number of sacred ceremonies during the growing season – ceremonies to honor, among others, maple trees, strawberries, bean planting, corn planting and the time of green corn.
Staff of Life
It is commonly believed that approximately 12,000–15,000 years ago people from northeast Asia crossed the Bering Land Bridge to enter and inhabit North America beginning in Alaska but rapidly spreading throughout North and South American and the Caribbean islands. These people rapidly adapted to the available food sources and soon developed new foods.
The "Three Sisters"
By the time Christopher Columbus first entered the New World, Native Americans were relying on foods that were indigenous to the region, although many had been improved by hybridization or selection. When Europeans arrived, the Native Americans had already developed new varieties of corn, beans, and squashes – known as “the three sisters” – and had an abundant supply of nutritious food.
Historical Note – The Mayan believe that corn is primordial and a part of their creation stories. They tell how the gods successfully created humans out of corn in the “Popul Vuh,” a written version of their timeless oral narratives – one reason corn is deeply revered.
Long before European settlement, there were numerous regional tribes with distinct diets, customs, and languages throughout the Americas, but many of the foods spread among the regions due to well-organized trade routes that were facilitated in part by a common hand sign language used by many tribes. The squash was of North American origin. Corn and beans probably originated in South America, but their use spread throughout North and South America.
(S. Wurtzburg and L. Campbell. “North American Indian sign language: evidence for its existence before European contact.” Int J Am Linguist, 61. 1995.)
Historical Note – Some historians call early foods “four sisters” as opposed to “three.” These were corn, beans, squash and the sunflower. These crops actually work together. The beans fertilize the corn as they climb the stalks. Sunflowers hold them up against the wind. Squash keep the raccoons at bay. There are also tomatoes, okra, gourds, sage and sweet grass.
Estimates claim about 60% of the current world food supply originated in North America. Those foods became important to the entire world, as Samuel Beck, author of Cherokee Cooklore said:
“The American Indian's greatest contribution to our civilization is, in the eyes of many experts, the patient cultivation from their original wild state of the food plants which are now more than half of our agricultural wealth.”
The Seed Care and Storage
Care is needed to prevent these special plants from cross-pollinating with others. Their seeds, passed like treasure through generations of native tribes, are pure heirloom strains, unaltered by modern agricultural techniques.
Several communities have created Native seed exchanges, seed banks, and sanctuaries, but their scale is local and relatively small. Moreover, federal law, which protects tribal lands, human tissue, and cultural artifacts, is unclear when it comes to protecting Native traditional seeds – while it does shield hybrid and genetically engineered seeds.
Vaults such as Doomsday could provide food for humans in case of a catastrophic disaster and serve to protect crops that are becoming endangered due to climate change. Every variety sent to the Doomsday vault predates European settlement in the U.S., officials said.
The Cherokee Nation samples include Cherokee White Eagle Corn – the tribe's most sacred corn – Cherokee Long Greasy Beans, Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans, Cherokee Turkey Gizzard black and brown beans, Cherokee Candy Roaster Squash, and three other varieties of corn.
Historical Note – Cherokee White Eagle Corn is known as “the treasure of the Cherokee Nation. It is a beautiful mixed blue and white dent corn “with nuanced flavors of ancient blue corn and a base level of sweetness.” Th corn is favored for its abundant ears that grow 8-10 in. long and excellent quality kernels for corn meal. Blue and white coloring with markings that resemble eagles. Excellent germination. (110 days)
Some of the Cherokee White Eagle Corn seed that was originally carried on the Trail of Tears has survived and produced a small amount of crops for the last 163 years.The USDA-NRCS Jimmy Carter Plant Materials Center is developing the Trail of Tears Corn seed stock. This is an attempt to help reintroduce this very rare and special crop to the descendants of the Cherokee People that once covered the North Georgia Mountains. The corn is being grown in a protected and irrigated area in order to produce viable seed stock for future use. This will provide tribal members and others the opportunity to feed their families with this very special corn.
Seed saving is a priority for many tribes. The White Earth Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota grows saved seeds. Native Seeds/SEARCH, a nonprofit group in Tucson, Ariz., has a seed bank with almost 2,000 varieties. The Traditional Native American Farmers’ Association, based in New Mexico, distributes indigenous seeds in its community.
Laboratory testing of heirloom corn, bean and squash seeds has found greater concentrations of copper, calcium, magnesium and amino acids than in store-bought seeds. The most pronounced difference was in bean seeds; the indigenous seeds contained increased levels of antioxidants.
The majority of heirloom seeds are open pollinated, meaning that they reproduce themselves from seed. The plants from these seeds grow true to that variety. When they are grown, they will be the same as the parent plant. A very old heirloom is the 1500 Year Old Cave Bean found in a sealed clay pot in a cave in New Mexico. Thought to be left by the Anasazi Indians, this bean seed still germinated after all that time.
Time Travel – A Look at Subsistence
This view of prehistoric agriculture describes how people on the Great Plains of the United State and southern Canada farmed before extensive contact with European explorers, which in most areas occurred by 1750.
Prehistoric native farmers on the Great Plains, who lacked iron tools and draft animals, primarily cleared and cultivated wooded land along rivers, especially the lighter soils on elevated river terraces which periodically flooded, renewing their fertility. They avoided cultivating the heavy soils of the open prairie with their deep mats of fibrous roots.
(Michael Scullin. "Indian Gardening and Cooking.”
Minnesota State University. 2008.)
High productivity of maize compared to European grains such as wheat enabled Indian farmers to produce large crops with a relatively low expenditure of effort, simple tools, and a small amount of cultivated land although farming on the drought-prone Great Plains was always a risky endeavor. Whereas wheat and other grains in medieval Europe had average grain yields of two to ten seeds harvested for every one planted, maize yielded as high as "one hundred grains to one."
Sissel Schroeder. "Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America" American Antiquity, Vol. 64, No. 3. July 1999.)
The average size of family plots of Native American farmers may have been about .6 acres (0.24 ha) with yields of 10-20 bushels (627 – 1,254 kg) of shelled maize per acre. This would have been sufficient, after accounting for post-harvest losses to pests and rotting and the retention of seed corn, to provide about 20 percent of the caloric needs of an Indian family of five persons. Some families may have cultivated up to 3.4 acres (1.4 ha) which would have produced sufficient maize for family consumption plus a tradeable surplus. Higher yields of up to 40 bushels (2,508 kg.) per acre have been reported on newly cleared land. Land declined in fertility in subsequent crop years.
(Sissel Schroeder. "Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America" American Antiquity, Vol. 64, No. 3. July 1999)
The Future
The Native American Seeds Protection Act of 2019 would direct the Government Accountability Office to study the long-term viability of Native seeds and the programs and laws that could safeguard them. The study would assess the cultivation, harvesting, storage, and commercialization of these ancient seeds, as well as investigate the fraudulent marketing of seeds as "traditional" or "produced by Native Americans."
The six senators who introduced the bipartisan, bicameral bill all hope the effort will "support healthcare, food security, and economic development in tribal communities."
The Concept
“The history of humanity is the history of domestication.”
-- Logan Kistler, Curator of Archaeobotany and Archaeogenomics at the Smithsonian
Understanding the development of agriculture is better understanding humanity. There’s already speculation that advances in genetic engineering could allow scientists to engineer favorable characteristics from ancient plant DNA into modern cultivars.
Goosefoot
Paul Patton, Professor of Anthropology and Food Studies at Ohio University, shares a local tie to the history of ancient food in Ohio. He’s been growing wild goosefoot in test plots in Southeastern Ohio, with the eventual goal of providing the indigenous quinoa alternative as an economic boost to a region devastated by the environmental effects of boom-and-bust industries such as mining. Goosefoot is healthier than wheat, corn, and other staples, says Patton. Its tangy greens taste like a cross between spinach and arugula.
Yet goosefoot is more than a tasty vegetable: it’s Native American heritage. Paul Patton says ...
“Each one of these seeds is a cultural history that really captures the lives of the people who were growing them and who passed them from generation to generation.”
Many questions remain concerning the recent studies. Who should have the right to extract genetic material from archeological seeds that are the heritage of tribes across Eastern North America – especially since the very act of extracting DNA from ancient seeds destroys them? If ancient crops are redomesticated and even commercialized, who should profit?
Some safeguards are already in place. Under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, scientists have a legal and moral commitment not to take any material, including seeds, from burial or other sacred sites. Most ancient North American seeds that archaeologists have recovered are currently held in public museum collections, which have stringent guidelines about DNA testing.
“When they go and take the dignity of that food from you and turn it into something else, it is offensive, it hurts our people. It hurts us economically and it hurts us spiritually.
– Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabe activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer
Consider the history of plants to better understand the dilemma. In the last century, 94 percent of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared. The last study to count U.S. seed diversity was in 1983. There were 544 cabbage varieties; 28 varieties remained. There were 158 varieties of cauliflower; nine remained. There were 55 varieties of kohlrabi, three remained; 34 varieties of artichoke, two remained; 288 varieties of beets, 17 remained; 46 varieties of asparagus, one variety remained.
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