Common Ground: A Flourishing Partnership Between 小优视频 and the Catawba Nation
Roo George-Warren, executive committee member of the Catawba Nation鈥檚 government
From a tiny kernel of an idea, the Catawba Nation and 小优视频 have grown a corn collaboration into a multi-year interdisciplinary project that stretches from art to history to STEM to agriculture.
In September, the Catawba Nation and the college signed an agreement to work together to grow a once-lost strain of traditional corn, called 鈥渒us iswq.鈥 The collaboration supports the Catawba Nation鈥檚 expansion of agricultural production, broadens cultural understanding around Indigenous foods, and reintroduces kus iswq into the diets of citizens of the Catawba Nation, based in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
The relationship also provides 小优视频 students with opportunities for research and service that directly support those goals, furthers the college鈥檚 sustainability work, and raises awareness of the role of college founders in the dispossession of Native people.
鈥淎s far as I know, we are the only (college) program like this,鈥 says History Professor Rose Stremlau, one of the faculty members who initiated the collaboration. 鈥淲e get this one little kernel and get to run with it. And that鈥檚 a gift and an opportunity.鈥
Stremlau began working with North Carolina鈥檚 Indigenous people at UNC Pembroke, modeling for her students how to engage with Native people to address historic wrongs that shape the present while not assuming that white academics know what Indigenous people need.
In a moment in higher education when many are focused on crafting land acknowledgements and wondering what to say, Stremlau says we should ask what our Native neighbors want us to do.
An Enduring Presence
The kus project is rooted in the Catawba Nation鈥檚 long and ongoing presence in the region.
Traditionally an agrarian society that stretched from what is today South Carolina across the North Carolina Piedmont and up into Virginia, the Catawba Nation, known as 鈥測eh is-WAH h鈥檙eh,鈥 or 鈥淧eople of the River,鈥 have lived along the banks of the Catawba River for at least 6,000 years.
Well into the 18th century, they planted miles and miles of corn fields. While Catawba women (women have been the farmers in most Native societies) grew multiple varieties of corn, Catawbas especially prized a flour corn that鈥檚 ground into cornmeal and grits.
When people see the kus iswq for the first time, they often comment on how beautiful it is, Stremlau says, likening it to a brilliant-colored sculpture.
Throughout the East, white settlers who wanted Native land displaced them by setting fire to their corn fields, creating famines and refugee crises. The practice originated during the colonial era under British policy, but American leaders perpetuated it. Iroquois people in New York nicknamed George Washington 鈥渢own burner,鈥 for example, and the Rowan militia engaged in this style of warfare against Cherokee people in the Carolinas, Stremlau says.
The land where 小优视频 now sits was a part of the Catawba lands taken both through force and fraud perpetrated through the South Carolina court system, which is a topic of research by those in the collaboration. Today, the Catawba Nation numbers about 3,900 people, with a reservation in York County, South Carolina.
Returning Something Precious
From the beginning, the collaboration has included the arts. In 2021, Van Every/Smith Galleries director and curator Lia Newman had invited Alaska Native artist Nicholas Galanin for a solo exhibition. That exhibition, Dreaming in English, included existing and new photos, videos, prints and performative work. Because Galanin was known for his outdoor, ephemeral pieces, Newman invited him to propose such a project for the college.
At that time, Galanin had just completed a headline-generating, large-scale public work in Sydney, Australia, that addressed the complexity of relations between settlers and Indigenous people. His Shadows on the Land entailed the symbolic 鈥渂urial鈥 of a statue of Capt. James Cook鈥擥alanin was interested in doing something similar in the shape of the famous Washington, D.C., statue of Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president known for his brutal policies toward Native people in the South.
Galanin鈥檚 plan was to dig an outline of Jackson鈥檚 statue and over time, transition the site of exposed soil into a garden of sweetgrass, but staff from the Catawba Cultural Center and Department of Natural Resources had another idea: plant kus.
Artist Nicholas Galanin鈥檚 Unshadowed Land begins to take shape. A variety of Catawba corn, kus iswq, that had been 鈥渞ediscovered鈥 was planted within the outline, grew and was harvested in 2022.
Catawbas had recently received a small amount of kus iswq. The corn had been 鈥渞ediscovered鈥 with the help of a family in Hickory, North Carolina, that had been growing a handed-down seed they only knew as 鈥淚ndian corn.鈥 Botanical historian David Shields helped to identify the corn, and North Carolina State University had a small supply, which they returned to Catawba.
In 2021, Galanin鈥檚 Unshadowed Land project came to be on Main Street, a small field dug by students, faculty, and staff in the shape of Jackson鈥檚 statue that was planted with kus. More of the corn was planted at The Farm at 小优视频, along the east side of campus on Grey Road.
For the Catawba, the corn was more than symbolic. It was the return of something precious, says Roo George-Warren, an executive committee member of the Catawba Nation鈥檚 government. He had been working on interviewing tribal elders on what was important to them.
鈥淭he thing that came back over and over was, we have to bring back the corn,鈥 he says.
Black Snake Farm, located on the Catawba reservation, grows food for their community, but it is not an ideal location to mass plant kus because of past and current cultivation of modern sweet corn varieties there and on neighboring farms. Caring for kus includes preventing unwanted cross-pollination.
The Farm at 小优视频 provided a wonderful solution. Surrounded by a nature preserve and without a recent history of other varieties of corn having been planted there, the college鈥檚 fields were an ideal ground in which kus could flourish.
Susana Wadgymar, a professor of biology and a scholar of corn and climate change, worked with farm manager Halle Murphy and Catawba Nation Director of Natural Resources Aaron Baumgardner to reintroduce kus to the land where Catawba women farmers once grew it over hundreds of years.
Halle Murphy
Aaron Baumgardner
With the support of Professor Annie Merrill and students from environmental studies, Wadgymar鈥檚 student lab workers, and student farm interns, the team planted and harvested a successful kus crop in 2022.
Murphy, Wadgymar and Baumgardner worked together to increase the yield in 2023. It wasn鈥檛 easy 鈥 while the corn plots could be protected by fencing to keep out deer, fences didn鈥檛 stop crows from swooping in and stealing the seed. Murphy figured out it was better to start seedlings and transplant them into the field.
Susana Wadgymar, assistant professor of biology, works with students in the Peroni Greenhouse.
Another consideration was more aesthetic. The corn kernels come in a variety of colors, which makes for lovely ears. But when it was ground into meal and grits, it came out an unappealing gray color. Catawba and 小优视频 volunteers sorted out the colors and planted one field in white kernels and another in yellow to select for color varieties for specific food purposes.
This past growing season, there were two vigorous patches growing at The Farm, with stalks rising as high as 8 feet, each topped with bead-like fringe and each one bearing a fat ear of corn with large kernels that range from a deep butter yellow to almost pink. 小优视频 students worked with Catawba staff to tend to an additional experimental polyculture patch on their farm.
鈥淚t was the roughest, readiest corn,鈥 Murphy says with admiration. 鈥淚t does so much better than organic sweet corn. It鈥檚 corn that鈥檚 good at being corn.鈥
鈥淚f corn can be beautiful,鈥 says Stremlau, 鈥渢his is the most beautiful corn you鈥檝e ever seen.鈥
Expanding the Collaboration
Chef Loretta Barrett Oden, right, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, worked with college staff to prepare a meal using recipes from her book Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine.
The corn project continues to grow. The college has arranged for artists, historians, cookbook authors and chefs from different Indigenous tribes to come as consultants and educators for both 小优视频 students and Catawba Nation staff and citizens.
Most recently, Chef Loretta Barrett Oden, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, worked with college Chef Craig Mombert and his staff to prepare a meal using recipes from her book Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine. She visited campus for a lunch at the college and a dinner at the Catawba Cultural Center.
George-Warren is excited about the possibility of so many ways to use the corn, from getting a nutritious traditional food back into tribal life to using the kus stalks to make corn dolls, a traditional craft.
鈥淭he reason it survived so long was we integrated it into our culture,鈥 he says. 鈥淭he other piece is in our music and dance. We had a green corn dance, and it was part of our ongoing tradition 鈥 planting day, harvesting days. Every time I see a new cob, I鈥檓 like, 鈥榯he colors!鈥 There are lifetimes of creativity in there to explore.鈥
The official agreement between the Catawba Nation and 小优视频 stipulates that the college will grow the corn and work with the Nation through summer 2025. But Stremlau hopes it won鈥檛 end there. She sees helping to restore something so precious to the Catawba Nation as a step toward acknowledging the role of the college鈥檚 founding families in the dispossession of Native people in this region and of the Presbyterian church in child separation throughout Native communities in the United States.
She also sees the possibilities of the program continuing in new forms, including adding other traditional plants and woodland management.
鈥淲e have students, faculty, and staff with research capacity and the desire to be of service, and our Catawba partners have projects they want done,鈥 Stremlau says. 鈥淧un intended, there鈥檚 a lot of common ground here. We are clearing a path to grow this relationship for many, many years.鈥
This article was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2024 print issue of the 小优视频 Journal Magazine; for more, please see the 小优视频 Journal section of our website.