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Corn Women
Perhaps it was the study in university of Native Americans, perhaps it was the study of the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas. It is difficult to know exactly when the idea of writing about the history of corn as the grain of the Americas came to me. I am a poet, and although I presented the required class papers, I felt there must be another way, a poet’s way, to write about what I was learning. I credit my inspiration to the discovery of the large clay figure of a peasant women of Mexico, kneeling to offer two ears of corn in her upraised palms. Corn . . .maíz! That brave grain of the New World that was as important to the great indigenous civilizations pre-Conquest and to the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest as rice and wheat were to the Old World.
I wrote my epic poem Corn Woman, Mujer Maíz in two languages -- English and Spanish, this latter the language of the majority of those descendants of the original inhabitants of the Americas pre-Conquest. As I investigated my heroine, Corn Woman, Mujer Maíz, even as I described her poetically, setting forth the history of the civilizations built on the security of her harvests, I realized that corn itself was being constantly changed to meet economic and human demands, especially through the new artificial genetic alterations (alterations much disputed because of the negative results to other plants and beneficial insects, and which include the disappearance of certain butterflies dependant on plants the new corn eliminates). Consequently, I found myself turning to those scientists who had achieved so much in improving and changing corn using the techniques the original planters of corn had used for millenniums -- the result of natural plant breeding.
Corn can be traced back over 12,000 years to a wild ancestor, teosinte, that grew in Central Mexico, and is perhaps the most docile grain in existence, since cross pollination is such an extremely simple process.
I would like to note here, to give you an idea of just how deeply integrated I am with corn, that while giving an undergraduate lecture at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, reading from the poem, during questions and answers, one of the students asked me, “What does Corn Woman think of artificial genetic mutation?” Not what did I think of it, but what did Corn Woman, that is, the Corn, think of it. My response was totally spontaneous. “She hates it,” I replied. Today Corn Woman and I have slowly adapted to the acceptance of certain aspects of this process of artificial genetic improvement. One of my Corn Women, Evangelina Villegas, states that genetic mutation can be useful. Villegas won the first World Food Prize, shared with Surinder Vasal of India, who worked with her, and used nothing but straight cross-pollination to achieve tremendous improvements in yield and strength of a new corn known as QPM – “quality protein maize.”
I quote these lines in praise of Villegas from the last chapter (“Corn Woman Speaks”) from my book Corn Woman in poetic and historical reference to the work of Villegas and Surinder Vasal:
...In the 20th century were born a true daughter
of my First People,
Evangelina Villegas,
and a son of my New People, Surinder Vasal of India.
These two, no longer young,
saw the promise in my potency, my vigor,
dedicating their short spans of human life
to altruistically changing my essence.
For thirty years, in my ancient city of Texcoco
they labored side by side,
blending with gentle fingers and unselfish wisdom
tassel and pollen, as have done my People
for thousands of years.
The Others have rewarded these two, my children,
with honors and material recognition –
but my reward is far greater.
I exalt in an unprecedented yield of protein,
and, strengthened, immune to diseases of old, …
with rain and sun I celebrate each glorious harvest,
content in the knowledge that I may promise food
for two hundred fifty millions …
As time passed I discovered that many scientists had used or studied corn in their investigations, but to my surprise the most outstanding and dedicated of these scientists were women -- three women in particular. These three women were and are involved with corn in an individual and intuitively personal way that male scientists are not. They seem to relate to corn as I do, finding in this humble and ancient plant a special personality -- a friend, if you will. Therefore I have chosen to discuss the Corn Women: Barbara McClintock, Evangelina Villegas, and Jane Mt. Pleasant.
I will begin with Barbara McClintock.
Dr. Renate Fernandez, a medical anthropologist whom I met in San Francisco at a meeting of American anthropologists and who gave me the basis for my chapter The Vengeance of Corn Woman, had mentioned McClintock in correspondence with me. Renate said that when Barbara, who had never married and who, in the face of years of social and academic adversity, as well as tremendous intellectual challenges, established herself among the great geneticists of this century, received notification that she had won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983, her response was, “I will go into the cornfield and tell my corn kernels about it.” That day, at age 81, she went to talk to her corn of the honor finally received after many professional struggles, and then to pick walnuts all morning. She returned in her usual dungarees, carrying the tongs to bring down the walnuts, and told the waiting reporters who had arrived to interview her, “It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.”
In early July of the year 2000, eight years after Barbara’s death, her original research cornfield at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, set aside as a memorial to her work, was vandalized. These few acres of corn were part of Barbara’s research project, and represented a distinguished scientific heritage. Apparently militant environmentalists protesting artificial genetic mutation of corn were not aware that the corn they trampled was not genetically modified, bur rather was the result of natural plant breeding.
Barbara McClintock, the first woman scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in this field without sharing it with another scientist, died at the age of 90. She is among the world's most respected cytogeneticists, and her work led to greater understanding of human diseases. Corn has always talked to the human race; Barbara was one of those special people who could listen and understand what the corn had to tell her.
My second of the Corn Women is Evangelina Villegas.
Mexican scientist Evangelina Villegas spent over 30 years studying and improving corn, or maize, the most widely cultivated grain in the world, a source of nutrition for millions. Villegas, born in Mexico City in 1924, worked with Surinder K. Vasal, a scientist from India, in the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, located in Texcoco, outside Mexico City, to develop a maize variety with double the protein content and 10 percent higher yield. This new corn, known as ''quality protein maize (QPM), was created as an important tool in the endless struggle against hunger in the world. Because of their work with corn, Villegas and Surinder were honored on September 7 with the World Food Prize 2000, and thus Evangelina Villegas became the first woman to receive this $250,000 honor, inaugurated in 1986 by Nobel Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug.
The following quotes are taken from an interview with Dr. Villegas herself. When asked about her methods, Dr. Villegas stated that “everything was done by crossing, all through conventional improvement methods. Sometimes they were crosses between sibling varieties, sometimes between other strains, with varieties that had better texture, that were not so soft, that would have greater resistance to disease and insects.”
Asked the difference between her method of work and those that produce the controversial genetically modified organisms, Villegas responded “(Our) maize is developed through traditional methods, and we work only with maize genes, of different types, but only from maize. Genetic modification, however, is when genes from other species are utilized, and genetic engineering is employed.” She goes on to defend genetic modification, “ But that is not to say that genetically modified products are bad - they have been made to seem so terrifying - but we have to work in many areas, with all the technology we have in our hands.”
In other words, using the same methods used for hundreds, if not thousands of years, Villegas and Surinder achieved incredible results without the side-effects genetic modification has been shown to cause in certain instances.
As to whether or not Evangelina Villegas communicated literally with her corn plants, I do not know. I do know, however, that I read about her first in a newspaper article with a photograph of her standing in front of a magnificent cornfield with the corn plants behind her reaching high above her head. I would like to believe that her feelings for corn are as intensely personal as those of McClintock and Mt. Pleasant, to say nothing of mine, but if they are not, it is unimportant. Corn spoke to her of what it could do and Evangelina Villegas heard and acted.
The third of my Corn Women is Jane Mt. Pleasant.
Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant, whose father is an Iroquois, looks to the indigenous past for answers to today's farming needs, contrary to the majority of agricultural and food scientists who have shifted their focus to biotechnology. Dr. Mt. Pleasant is an agricultural scientist and professor of horticulture and director of the American Indian Program at Cornell University in New York.
By focusing on the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition of polyculture, which is a method of sustainable agriculture that allows individual plants to prosper by being planted together, she has shown the importance of the "Three Sisters" planting technique, i.e., corn, beans, and squash. The Iroquois nations believed that the 'Three Sisters'” were a gift from the Creator, three nutritive crops that thrive when grown together despite distinctly different personalities. The Three Sisters are not only a part of the Iroquois creation story, but are also an important aspect of Iroquois culture. All those indigenous cultures of the Americas that depend on the maize plant as their grain staple include a creation story dedicated to corn, but it is the Iroquois who have given recognition to these three plants in combination.
Through the Iroquois method, corn, beans and squash are planted on the same plot, allowing the plants to use their natural defenses. (Other indigenous methods included placing a small fish in the mound where the corn was planted, the use of bat guano, etc.) The corn and squash help prevent the growth of weeds, the corn also supports the upwardly climbing bean plants as bean poles, and in return, the beans produce nitrogen, which aids soil quality.
Dr. Mt. Pleasant has also directed her attention to revitalizing Native American culture and agriculture in the northern U.S. She has helped preserve nearly-extinct heirloom corn varieties by documenting the details of the traditional planting dates and needs. As a result, many Native American farmers have since taken up the task of revitalizing these corn varieties, which for centuries sustained Native communities in the Northeast and Canada.
As director of the American Indian Agriculture Project "that emphasizes conservation and distribution of traditional Iroquois open-pollinated corn varieties and the enhancement of indigenous agriculture," Dr. Mt. Pleasant promotes the potential benefits of the Iroquois method of sustainable agriculture, and in 1998 was awarded the Ely S. Parker Award from the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, which "recognizes a Native American scientist who has made outstanding contributions to Native peoples through research." Jane Mt. Pleasant has provided Native Americans an important role in the burgeoning field of sustainable agriculture through her knowledge of Western science and Native American traditions and agriculture. She comments, "It’s part of the miracle and wonder of corn. It has an enormous array of genetic variability that people can bring out by selection to develop corn types best suited for their environment (temperature, precipitation) and their uses."
Barbara McClintock, Evangelina Villegas, Jane Mt. Pleasant. Three women who related to corn in different ways to achieve outstanding results -- from Barbara, who discovered “jumping genes” by observing and experimenting with variations in the coloration of kernels of corn and found that genetic information is not stationary, that the controlling elements could move along the chromosome to a different site, and that these changes affected the behaviour of neighbouring genes, to Evangelina, who dedicated over thirty years of intense investigation to the development of a “super” corn plant that is an amazing source of food for the hungry poor of the world, to Jane and her support of modern indigenous methods of sustainable agriculture, all three of whom seem to have felt the same mystic connection to this marvelous grain that I have been fortunate enough to share in my own humble way.
I would like to quote a few lines from Corn Woman that emphasize this mystical relationship to corn:
In Iowa, or perhaps it is Nebraska or Illinois,
Pennsylvania or Kansas,
a farmer goes into his cornfield at dawn
to watch the first rays of light illuminate the sky
and, musing on the glorious panorama before him,
returns to tell his wife,
“I heard the corn growing this morning,
heard it hiss and seethe with secrets I could not understand
as it pushed its way toward the sky.”
He has thought himself a man without imagination,
a pragmatic cultivator of the soil;
yet, at some level, he too perceives Corn Mother’s mysteries,
feels within himself
the same indefinable relation to the corn that the Quechua,
high in the valleys of the Andes,
feel as they plod behind their oxen, the”little bulls,”
sowing the spotted, many-colored kernels;
the awareness shared in the drowsy, dusty villages of Mesoamerica
where the cadenced slap of busy palms echoes from house to house
as the women shape corn tortillas
to ease their families’ hungry bellies,
as tortillas have been shaped by the People of the Mexica
from time beyond memory . . .
Sue Littleton
Born September 25, 1932, in Abilene, Texas, poet Sue Littleton lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has published in various anthologies and literary magazines. She is one of the four founders in 1992 of the Austin (Texas) International Poetry Festival. Sue writes in both Spanish and English, and her last five books are bilingual: Images, Melange, A Love Affair, The Last Stone and Sueku/Suku, dedicated to the Japanese haiku. Sue is an investigative and historical poet; her bilingual epic poem, “Corn Woman, Mujer Maíz, the history of corn , which in turn is the history of the great civilizations of the Americas at the time of the Conquest and before, is available in Kindle and soft-cover on Amazon, as well as her autobiographical book The Ranch on the Pecos River.
Sue recently worked with David Roberts, British editor of www.warpoetry.co.uk on an anthology of poems (Falklands War Poetry) by English veterans, Argentines and Sue herself) concerning the Malvinas/Falklands War, which included translating Argentine poets to English and writing a series of 25 annotated poems. She is currently presenting the Spanish version of the book as La guerra de las Malvinas (The Malvinas War).
Her latest bilingual book is The Little Snake Goddess of Crete, published by Botella al Mar, Uruguay, Her book The Poems of Istanbul was published in poetryrepairs, the on-line literary magazine.
Email: Sue Littleton
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