Indian Corn

In Bea Tioux’s house, as in every house in the pueblo, a bunch of dried corn of many colors hangs in the kitchen to bless and protect the house. Corn is to the Indian what bread and wine are to the Christian: an incarnation of body and blood, flesh and spirit. But unlike the industrialized Western world, the Indian world is still centered on the cycles of nature, on the annual sprouting, ripening, harvesting, and burial of the seed. Corn in its many transformations from raw kernel to cooked porridge to fermented mast never loses its sacred-ness because it is man’s kin. “Europeans can’t understand that,” Tony Garcia says, laughing. “They think corn is for animals.”