For this month, we are devoting this space to an exploration of the role certain indigenous plants play in Native art forms. In our world, such plants are often multi-use materials: food, medicine, shelter, tools, ceremony, art, and a host of other uses that range from the entirely mundane to that which is visionary and sacred. Two weeks ago, we looked at wildflowers, including the cactus blossoms that thrive so well in this high desert landscape. Last week, it was a specific form of cactus, one that is significant to many peoples in this part of Indian Country particularly, and one used as what the dominant culture would understand as a sacrament.
This week, we turn our attention to a plant seemingly less elevated, despite its height, one whose principal use is widely regarded as sustenance: Corn.
According to conventional wisdom, corn as been grown and harvested in something much like its current form by the indigenous peoples of this land for some 7,000 years. Modern science currently traces its roots to what is now called “Central America,” where the locals engaged in sophisticated agricultural practices that over time transformed a wild grass they called teosinte into the more or less contemporary plant known as maize.
Today in what is now North America, the word “maize” is pronounced as one syllable, mayz, but both its original pronunciation and its etymology are disputed. The word unquestionably traces to one of the indigenous languages of the broader region, but some credit the ancestors of the Native peoples of Guatemala and Honduras with the word, and with a pronunciation much like the modern one, a single syllable that, rather than being a long English “a,” is more like the short Spanish “e.” Dictionaries, on the other hand, tend to trace it to the Taino peoples of the [now-]American Caribbean, to a word that contemporary sources spell mahís, and which eventually filtered through the lexicon of Spanish colonialism to become maíz (pronounced in two rapid syllables as mah-EES), thence to end up as the one-syllable “maize.”
Today, our peoples generally know this plant as corn, and refer to it accordingly, at least in English. The very word “corn” is said to be European in origin, a word that served, essentially, as an analogue from “grain.” Its use reportedly began in a variant form in Russia long ago, then spreading westward through medieval Europe, from Germanic cultures to Dutch and Norse peoples and eventually to what is now the United Kingdom, where the spelling and pronunciation were altered slightly and simply to “corn.” Our peoples, of course, have their own words for this plant, words that long precede “corn” in any spelling or pronunciation, and that reflect their own understandings of the plant. In my own language, the word varies, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, by geographic and cultural contexts, but in at least one of the words for it, the etymology of its syllables is directly traceable and clearly identifiable as meaning, roughly, “fruit of the soil,” or, perhaps more poetically, “fruit of the earth.”
It fits.
At any, 7,000 years or no, its use spread: rapidly in some regions, more slowly in others, but eventually, it became a near-universal food source for the peoples indigenous to this land. Throughout this period, many disparate nations and peoples put their scientific skill and agricultural knowledge to use, isolating the hardiest genes, the best-tasting, the most colorful, and then cross-breeding to produce strong, sustaining sources of nutrition for body and spirit alike. They learned which varieties were sweetest, which would withstand the weather most effectively, which would produce the most beautiful jewel-toned ears, and planted and cultivated accordingly. By the time the first European set foot on Native soil, corn production had long since spread across the entire continent, and it was a staple of not merely indigenous food, but indigenous life.
Here in this part of the world, corn plays a central role in Native foodways, roasted on its own, or used in the form of masa (cornmeal) to make a variety of foods. I wrote briefly about them here a year ago, specifically in the context of yellow corn:
Yellow corn is, of course, the food’s essential form, the one that most often finds its way to our tables. We eat it in the form of whole ears, roasted; as kernels, in sweet corn; dried and treated with lime to form hominy, used in posole; and ground into masa of varying levels of fineness, for use as meal or flour in making tortillas and tamales, corn cakes and atole, cornbread and pa’wen. Where I am from, the coarse meal is used to make breakfast cakes smothered in maple syrup; here, it is more likely to be ground into very fine flour, which finds its way into all sorts of dishes. Yellow corn meal is also used in spiritual contexts.
The dominant culture really only regards certain varieties of yellow (and now occasionally white) corn as edible: the sort known colloquially as “sweet corn.” We grow, harvest, and eat sweet corn, too, but here, our options are not limited only to those varieties. In addition to yellow and white corn (both sweet and non-sweet varieties), blue corn remains a popular food source, used frequently in corn tortillas and atole, as well as in some forms of frybread and in foods such as pancakes. Blue corn is decidedly not sweet; it has an earthy, almost nutty flavor, one that, in its ground form, can leave a slightly sour aftertaste if not seasoned appropriately. And then there is Indian corn: the bright bejeweled kaleidoscope of corn, manifesting in white, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, even pearlescent gray-blue and periwinkle and other shades. It’s edible, too, although it also is not sweet. But its beauty makes it difficult to part with it, and so most of us use it for decoration rather than sustenance.
But corn plays a role in spiritual sustenance, too. Here, many peoples use corn pollen are an offering at prayers, especially at dawn. For some, the various color varieties of corn have special significance. And in places like Navajoland, cornmeal in different colors is used for specific purposes in their sacred iconography.
Something so elemental to existence will naturally find its way into a culture’s art forms.
Sometimes, the corn finds its way into the work of art in figurative form: engraved, embossed, or otherwise summoned into existence. Here at Taos Pueblo, most traditional potters work in the indigenous mica clay, a warm golden-red earth shot through with metallic flecks of mica that give the fired pottery a warm glow and a coppery finish. Such traditional artisans tend to follow the path of their forebears, adding virtually nothing in the way of painted artwork. But while many leave their works completely unadorned beyond the finish of the fired micaceous clay, some potters do add artwork in the form of etching or relief work.
The small mug, otherwise known as a spirit bowl or cup, shown above is by Jessie Marcus, for whom the style is her hallmark. She creates clayware in other forms, too, but these tiny bowls are her specialty: little mugs of clay sized to the palm of one’s hand,, with one wall extended upward into a figurative image: an elder; a singer; a Buffalo Dancer; a pair of lovers; a mother and child; occasionally an animal being, such as the head of a horse. She sculpts the front of the mug slightly, giving it the appearance of a blanket wrapped around the figure(s) emerging from one side. And she etches the outer edge — sometimes in the pattern of the old village walls with the mountain behind them; sometimes in a symbolic pattern; and sometimes, as with the one shown here, in the image of a corn plant, standing tall and dancing in the wind. It’s fitting that the woman whose head and shoulders extend from the far side of the bowl should appear to be speaking, as a storyteller would, or singing: In many of our cultures, traditional planting practices include speaking and singing to the plants to encourage them to grow. I do the same with ours.
Then there is the work of Wings’s aunt, Juanita Suazo DuBray. She is one of the Pueblo’s masters, a traditional potter whose identity and work are internationally renowned. Her medium is the Pueblo’s own micaceous clay, but she long ago found the signature element that sets her work apart from all others and makes it readily identifiable: Corn pottery.
And when I say “corn pottery,” I mean that literally. Her hallmark is mica pottery wrought, as is traditional, in very simple, rounded, flowing forms . . . but virtually every contains at least one ear of corn, sculpted out of the clay wall of the bowl, vase, or plate to appear in stark relief on the outside. At the moment, we only have one of her works in inventory, the one shown above, which combines several elements: the twin ears of corn; the kiva steps pattern carved out of the front; and the small polished turquoise nugget at one side, at the base of the ears.
Many of her po
ts are simple in style, small (or even large) bowls
and pots in classic shapes, some with only one ear of corn on the front, some ringed all the way with ears. The miniature pot at left is an example of the former: simple in the extreme, with only the lone ear for decoration. It’s a work that has resided for some years now with a very dear friend.
At right is an example of the latter, a medium-sized pot in an iconic high-walled shape, ringed all the way around the center with ears of corn. This one was also spare in style, but it was also one of her most beautiful, fired to
a deep pumpkin shade with a coppery sheen. It sold, if memory serves, eight years ago.
Even Juanita’s wedding vases bear the ear-of-corn imagery. These forms of Pueblo pottery are an old traditional design, an olla, or water jar, in the form of a single large bowl extending upward into twinned spouts connected by a clay handle. The design has symbolic significance: At a wedding, both bride and groom drink from the vase, which represents their union, the coming together of two people, two spirits, into one whole. As you can see in the one at left, Juanita reinforced the symbolism with the twin layered hearts on one spout and two ears of corn with husks entwined together on the other.
Juanita has never confined herself to pottery per se, however, at least if that word is defined solely as the creation of pots (and their cousins, plates and jars and vases). She has also long created figurative works of the same micaceous clay, both in storyteller form and in other imagery. In addition to the wedding vases that have long been part of her repertoire, she has, at least once in recent years, created a figurative work of a wedding couple, shown at right. In this work, she portrayed another indigenous wedding tradition, the wrapping of the bride and groom in a ingle new blanket to symbolize their union and their going forward together into a new life. On each side of the blanket, she sculpted a pair of ears of corn — two for the bride, two for the groom — in what is, perhaps, one of the most fitting symbols of nascent fertility and abundance in an indigenous context.
Of course, is not only a symbol of fertility, but of sustenance, and Juanita incorporated that imagery into her work, too. A few years ago, she did a series of storytellers for us, grandmothers with children in their arms and on their laps . . . and she managed to fit the corn motif into them seamlessly, here, with two roasted ears on a plate, food for the children.
And then, of course, there are the spirits of the corn.
One of the most obvious is the Corn Kachina, a being found at places like Hopi. We have one such figure in our current inventory, the one shown above by Josh Aragon (Hopi/Laguna). This is no ordinary Corn Kachina. Rather, it’s one wrought in the dual-spirited form that is one of Josh’s specialties.
I should emphasize here that “dual-spirited” is not the same thing as “two-spirit.” The latter is a term that comes from my own language, and refers to people (and spirits) of nonbinary gender status or sexual orientation, identities that are known in the dominant culture by the acronym LGBTQNBIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, nonbinary, intersex, and/or asexual). In many of our cultures, my own included, gender was never regarded as a hard binary, but rather as a spectrum, and among those traits, qualities, and identities that were more ordinarily cast as either male or female, people possessed or embodied both were given the honorific identifier of two-spirit. In societies where such identities were given this name, it was indeed considered an honor, with such persons held in high esteem, even, in some societies, as sacred.
But when I use the term dual-spirited, I’m referring not to gender identity or sexual orientation, but rather, and explicitly so, to the presence of two separate spirits in one representational being or figurative work. Josh has long made them a part of his repertoire: dual-sided Maidens; katsinam with twin heads emerging from the same body, heads placed back to back; a single larger katsina with a smaller spirit being emerging from some part of its head, body, or base; or, as with the Corn Kachina shown above, one being embodying two separate katsina natures — in this case, the Yellow Corn Kachina (on the front) and the Blue Corn Kachina (on the back).
I’ve written about these spirits, and the role in various cosmologies, at this time of year over the last two years. As I said a year ago:
Last year, I placed this piece squarely within the context of the sacredness of the katsinam to Pueblo peoples. These beings had been much in the news in recent years. and within the context of their opposite: their theft and attendant defilement at the hands of outsiders, these beings who are wholly a part of the very peoples to whom they are connected, stolen and then offered up for auction to the highest bidder in an extraordinary display of racism and sacrilege. As I said then of the relationship between the katsinam and their people:
[S]ome refer to them, in their traditional Hopi language, as “Friends.” This makes perfect sense. Many of these spirit beings are responsible for bringing blessings to The People — the kind of blessings that ensure a healthy, harmonious existence: rain, fertility, abundance, the dawn itself.
Some, like the one featured here today, represent the very food that keeps The People alive.
. . .
The Corn Katsina may be Pueblo in origin, but it’s a spirit that likely resonates with nearly all of our peoples. There’s a reason that Corn is first among what we call the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash): She has fed our people since time immemorial, ensured our very existence, our survival in the lean years when little else was available, and she does so by way of her own art, in a rainbow palette of jewel-toned kernels. She lends us her pollen for ceremonial purposes, and we use it to give thanks. We honor her in myriad ways, in the course of going about our daily activities, and in the special ceremonial contexts that focus on her and her alone.
She is Sister, yes, and a Mother of sorts to The People, and most definitely a Friend.
At Hopi, the dancers who personify the katsinam are male, but the beings themselves may be male or female, depending on the identity of the individual spirit. Gender is not necessarily readily identifiable to outsiders, since Longhairs are male and some female spirits wear a beard. Some appear to be androgynous, or simply without gender as the outside world usually conceives it. But the Corn Maidens, those tasked with caring for the corn itself, are female beings, and they play fundamental roles in the people’s cosmology. After all, they are charged with an obligation that amounts to nothing less than ensuring the people’s survival.
And the corn — made up of tiny individual kernels that spring to life modestly, humbly, from the very earth itself, tiny kernels that grow into harvest enough to feed an entire people — the corn and the beings who evoke it are sustaining spirits.
There are other spirits of the corn, as well. I mentioned earlier that both corn pollen and cornmeal are used as part of ceremony and the sacred in this part of the world, offered at prayer and in other contexts.
The painting shown above, by Kiowa artist Phyllis Belindo, encapsulates this dynamic in several ways. Most obvious, of course, is the basket of cornmeal in the foreground, at the figure’s feet. The figure also stands between two tall cornstalks, both leafed out in bright green, with luxurious tassels at the top — much like the corn, in fact, in our own fields that is shown in the photo at the top of this post.
But the figure herself is significant: She is a Corn Maiden, one of a number of spirit beings whose role and task is to protect and nurture the corn for the people. I wrote briefly about them here a few weeks ago:
One [dance] universal to the Pueblo peoples is the Corn Dance, which honors the corn itself, and also the Corn Maidens, female spirit beings who are credited variously with bringing the corn to the people, with nurturing it and ensuring an abundant harvest, and with representing it, in a manner of speaking, among the beings of the spirit world.
That one short paragraph is an indicator of how complex such cosmologies are. You will read elsewhere, variously, of the Corn Maidens as being “the spirits of the corn,” or that their “job” is to “ensure a good crop” or other attempts to define them in singular ways, but there’s much more to it than that. How could it be otherwise in a tradition in which the very concept of the katsina refers to actual spirit beings, to the personifying of them at dances and ceremonies, and to the smaller, tangible figurative works that are designed to reflect their essential image and identity? And, of course, not all Maidens are Corn Maidens, and not all Corn Kachinas are Maidens, either.
The Corn Maidens (and other Maidens), however, have become a popular subject for traditional Pueblo carvers, whether of small fetishes or of dull-sized sculptural works.
Shown above are a quartet of such carvings, these created in a more contemporary style that is, nonetheless, a throw back to a vintage carving of a much older time. [Yes, there are four; on the right, the small shock of bright blue and green feathers between the large and small carvings actually sits atop the head of a wholly independent figure. We featured these works here last Friday, and you can see all four figures depicted individually in that post.] In this instance, each figure is carved out of a material that feels like soapstone, traditional headdress scaled back to a simple cluster of brilliant macaw feathers . . . but they hew to the traditional features of such spirits, with geometric eyes, nose, and mouth, hair blunt-cut with bangs.
In that, they are very like Wings’s own representations of the Corn Maidens, wrought in sterling silver instead of stone.
The one shown here was perhaps his most iconic, and most traditional: round face, geometric features, luxurious bangs; a tablita headdress in the iconic stepped pattern, accented with thunderhead symbols; her traditional dress comprising gorget, shawl, and a dress adorned with the symbols of flowing water; and a body cut into neither teardrop nor triangle but something of the two combined — roughly the shape of an ear of corn.
Wings created a small series of such pendants years ago, but more recently, he updated it for a different sort of work — a pair of earrings:
This pair in many ways embodies a very old traditional Native design, one in which the earrings were large and long, but rather than dangle loosely, were set higher up on the earlobes. With this pair, he reconceived both the old style and the imagery of the Corn Maidens, to create a work he called The First Sister, a reference to corn’s status as first among the Three Sisters who have fed our peoples since the dawn of time, corn, beans, and squash.
They remain in our current inventory, but they were created as a companion work to another piece.
Before we get to that, though, I want to give a nod to one of Wings’s signature series of long standing, The Mona Lisa On the Rio Grande. It’s a collection of necklaces whose creation spans more than two (perhaps more than three) decades, with multiple entries in it. It’s also, as I’ve noted here before, one that predates the Tish Hinojosa song of similar-but-not-identical name — a song which, to this day, I’m still not sure he’s heard of, much less actually heard. The one shown above dates back about a decade, and was one of the most archetypal of the entire series, with the stair-stepped tablita headdress, high at the center and at either edge, like the parapets of the old village walls; centered by a truly spectacular cabochon of bright sky blue turquoise, and strung on a chunky strand of turquoise barrel beads with a hand-made clasp.
I’ve written about his Mona Lisa series at length. As I said then:
The Corn Maidens are female katsinam (kachinas), spirit beings that are a part of the tradition of the various Pueblo peoples. Stories of how the Corn Maidens came to be vary among Pueblo nations, and the ancient versions of those stories very often are not something that is repeated to the wider public. Today, though, there seems to be general agreement on the basic role they play.
In his recent one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces, Wings described both that role, in part, and how he interprets and manifests that role within his chosen medium:
The Corn Maidens, of course, are female kachinas, and as enigmatic and mysterious as any archetypal Woman. Some 20 years ago, to honor their nurturing power and essential mystery, I launched a series I entitled The Mona Lisa on the Rio Grande. Each necklace is a unique personification of our Spirits of the Sacred Feminine, embodied in a single gemstone set into the traditional kachina headdress made of sterling silver.”
In the dominant culture, virtually everyone knows of the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda), by Leonardo da Vinci. Among European cultures and their descendants, she embodies all the mystery and femininity of essential womanhood. Rendering the Corn Maiden as an intrinsically Pueblo version of the Mona Lisa was a way for him to translate their centrality, their importance, their iconic identification with cultural concepts of Womanhood into an artistic language easily accessible to outsiders.
As with all of Wings’s art, each iteration of the Corn Maiden is unique; no two are ever identical. However, each also shares common features and traits: a large round gemstone cabochon to form her head; a hand-stamped setting for the stone, cut to evoke the Maiden’s traditional headdress, known as a tablita (Spanish for “little tablet”). When Pueblo women chosen to personify the Corn Maidens perform in traditional dances, part of their regalia includes the tablita, a heavy headdress usually carved of lightweight wood and hand-painted with traditional symbols. It takes dedication and skill to be able to wear the headdress, balance it properly, and dance, all simultaneously.
Some versions of the Mona Lisa differ in material ways, yet adhere to the same iconic imagery and symbolism. In the one shown directly above, the tablita headdress has a single high point rather than two or three, one at the center that coincides with the bail. It’s simply a variant form of the actual headdresses, which assume a variety of similar geometric shapes.
Last year, however, Wings reconceived the spirits of the corn in a whole new, yet utterly traditional way — reimagining both the Corn Maidens the Mona Lisa series embodies, and the Corn Kachina itself, all in one stunning new masterwork
This was the piece I mentioned above, the one to which The First Sisters, the Corn Maiden earrings, served as a companion work. They were not intended to be matching, but merely complementary, each able to stand on its own, and, in fact, this one has already found its home; it sold recently to a friend who lives in the heart of the country. Its name is Indian Corn Spirit, a nod to its own dual-spirited identity (or even treble- or quadruple-): It was the physical embodiment of the spirit of the corn itself, manifest as a single ear, and not merely “corn,” but also “Indian corn,” that colorfully-jeweled variant that is unquestionably ours, with a host of tiny bright gems serving as kernels. At the same time, it was a new version of the Corn Maiden, a distinctly feminine being, wrought in the same general shape as his older Corn Maiden series of pendants, but with the gemstone face reminiscent of the Mona Lisa series. And in lieu of the tablita headdress, this iteration of the spirit wears a wholly natural headdress, the husks swirling around her head like long, luxurious locks of hair. This was one of the most outstanding works he’s ever created, and being into my second decade’s worth of witnessing his work, that’s saying something.
Sometimes, of course, the situation calls for something much simpler: just the corn itself, no extraneous detail, no spangled accents to distract the eye.
About seven years ago or so, Wings created a small collection of slab earrings, rectangles of sterling silver ingot an inch and a half to two inches long, upon which he stamped various traditional patterns.
Save one.
On one pair, he work with his jeweler’s saw to create an ajouré design: a pair of cutwork cornstalks dancing on the front of each slab. They were Corn at the stage of early flowering, pure, simple, archetypal, emerging, upright, from a mound of earth.
At that stage, they represented the still-growing plant, fruit and harvest both yet some time off.
But for all the beauty of the many forms of indigenous arts that pay tribute to the First Sister, there is stil nothing that quite substitutes for its own inherent beauty and spirit.
This was a selection of the Indian corn harvested from our garden last year. They were Nature’s own works of art, sculpture, painting, gem- and beadwork, all in the fruit of one living plant.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that my own people had it right: For our indigenous peoples and our cultures, corn is, above all others, the fruit of the earth . . . and its art, too.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
