On a rainy March day in 2021, seven ears of corn with kernels ranging from purple to pale yellow sat on a picnic table in Pembroke, North Carolina. Each bore a handwritten label—Lovette, Brittain flint, Carolina gourdseed, Lail, Sea Island flint, Bloody Butcher, Cherokee white flour—and represented seeds that were, after some two centuries, beginning to return to Southeastern Native American tribes that had engineered them over millennia.
Three years later, in the heat of summer, the fruits of those cobs thrive in high green stalks of Sea Island flint waving in the wind on Waccamaw Siouan lands west of Wilmington. Meanwhile, near the Lumber River in Pembroke, silk unspools from the husks of Carolina gourdseed corn. “This is living archaeology,” says Nancy Strickland Chavis, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the director and curator of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and the driving force behind the ongoing Ancestral Corn Reclamation Project.
Corn began as a wild grass called teosinte. Over some nine thousand years, Native Americans domesticated it, selecting for plants that produced more ears and fewer branches. Different tribes then diversified the crop into many colorful varieties to suit their needs. In the complex mound-building cultures that thrived in the Mississippi River Valley, it drove society’s evolution. “We know that corn was used for food, for ceremonies, to pay taxes,” Chavis says. “Corn had such power—when people have a consistent food source, you see a proliferation of stratified societies, of government and art.”
The crop’s significance was on full display during the weeklong Green Corn Ceremony at harvest, historically one of the tribes’ most important traditions. “Green Corn was a time to settle any debts, to forgive grievances, to punish people for crimes, to drink Black Drink for internal cleansing,” Chavis explains. “They cleaned, celebrated, danced, and sang.” But with colonization and the ensuing suppression of Native American culture, over time, the ceremony blinked out. Many of the ancestral corns disappeared, too, as old varieties hybridized, some tribes lost their land, and other Native Americans pivoted to cultivate more in-demand commercial varieties.
“Today we are trying to reclaim our identity,” Chavis says. Early in the pandemic, she had a long conversation with a friend about restoring the Green Corn Ceremony. But first, they would need to bring back the corn itself. Four days later, Chavis says, she woke up with a sudden urge to try Carolina Gold rice. As she scrolled the website of the heirloom grains producer Anson Mills, something else caught her eye: Carolina gourd-seed corn. After reading its history—Native people had traded it just fifteen miles from Lumbee lands—she contacted Glenn Roberts, the mill’s owner. “He told me, ‘Nancy, I’ve been waiting for someone like you to call.’”
Roberts directed her to University of South Carolina food historian David Shields and corn expert and geneticist James Holland of North Carolina State University. “In the twentieth century, the USDA had agents locating old corn varieties; they thought the genetics could be used to create supercorns,” Shields says. “But what the effort actually did was preserve in its pure form a lot of really old corn.” Holland had already been growing out seed from some of that USDA corn, and Shields was following paper trails to determine the corn’s origins. One, named after the Lail family, turned out to be the lost calico flour corn of the Catawba people, which Holland and Shields returned to the tribe. Chavis worked to connect other tribes to the researchers, and soon, “the project just took off,” she says.
On that rainy March day, Chavis invited Holland, Shields, other partners, and members of eight North Carolina tribes to come reclaim their corn. “I can’t explain how I felt when we received those seeds,” recalls Darlene Graham of the Waccamaw Siouan, the tribe associated with Sea Island flint, a variety that features hard kernels resistant to corn weevils and stalks resilient in high winds. “It connects us to who we were, yes, but also to who we are—because we are still here, even if the history books talk about us as if we are in the past.”
Now, with corn growing again, the tribes are acting as seed savers, gifting it to friends, and exploring its possibilities. The Lumbee are experimenting with grinding Carolina gourdseed and Bloody Butcher into the cornmeal used in their renowned corn cake and collard sandwiches. The Coharie are growing Brittain flint. Graham, meanwhile, nurtures Sea Island flint in an educational garden called the Three Sisters, where it flourishes alongside its ancestral partners, squash and beans. Community members mill its kernels into grits, and Graham hopes to plant more in an empty community plot. And Chavis’s dream to restore the Green Corn Ceremony may finally be within reach—next year, the Lumbee plan to bring back stomp dancing, an important element of the celebration.
Still, Chavis knows the work is just beginning; even now, Holland is still plumbing the USDA archives for more varieties. Exact knowledge of how to grow the corn faded along with the seeds, and with help from Holland and tribal elders, new growers are figuring out the best planting methods. The sudden return of something gone for so long has raised existential questions, too. “How do we honor and make space for the corn in today’s context?” Chavis says. “When so much has been lost, how do we restore this in a meaningful way?” But those are questions future generations will now have a chance to answer. “Above all, I want it to give us hope,” she says, “and to remind us of our endurance and resilience—that we are honoring our ways as we continue to evolve as Native peoples.”
Graham recalls a day as she sat alone among stalks of Sea Island flint in the Three Sisters garden: “The wind was blowing, and it was as if I could hear the corn speaking to me, saying, ‘I am home. Write my story.’”