HASTINGS – Electa Hare-RedCorn removed the husk from the cob and studied the multicolored kernels, seeing more than just corn.
Long thought to be extinct, a native corn resurfaces in the heart of the country | Agriculture
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Shelton’s Ronnie O’Brien records data of yellow flint corn in her garden at Central Community College in Hastings, where she is a hotel management instructor. In 18 years of planting, this strain has only produced enough good ears to keep planting. Of the record 64 ears harvested this year, only four have been set aside for seed.
This year, Pawnee corn was grown in 20 gardens by 14 different farmers in central Nebraska.
The annual work of growing better Pawnee corn can be laborious. It requires the recording of details on each ear harvested. Write handwritten notes listing the garden row, hill, and number of ears of each corn stalk, then tie them to the grouped ears with rubber bands. Careful monitoring of the weight, length and kernel of each ear per row defines the best growing conditions for each variety.
Electa Hare-RedCorn (left), who drove from Oklahoma to Hastings to harvest 2021 Pawnee corn grown in Nebraska, and Kahheetah Barnoski, an agronomy student at UNL, represent the next generation of Pawnee Seed leaders Preservation Society. The corn was transported to Pawnee, Oklahoma in this trailer on October 13.
Pawnee Nation member Kahheetah Barnoskie, who is studying for a master’s degree in agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, counts rows of kernels on a cob of white sweet corn. She oversees data collection and evaluation for the Pawnee Seed Preservation Society.
Pawnee Keeper of the Seeds Deb Echo-Hawk only had 75 kernels of eagle corn, with its distinctive purple eagle-wing-like spots, to share when Ronnie O’Brien started planting it in 2004. Now , the seed bank also has eagle meal and candy corn.
Marlan Ideus of Amherst, one of Nebraska’s veteran Pawnee corn growers, and Pawnee agriculture specialist Electa Hare-RedCorn, check out the 2021 Ideus blue flour corn crop.
LORI POTTER still water press
For the Pawnee woman, this corn represents history and heritage, food and family, culture and community.
On a recent Wednesday, varieties of corn that two decades ago had vanished from the Great Plains were laid out on the floor of a gymnasium at a community college in Hastings.
Hare-RedCorn paced the ranks, inspecting the crop.
The fact that Pawnee corn exists even in 2021 is a story of tribal perseverance, cutting-edge horticulture, and good old-fashioned cooperation. It is the story of this new culture that connects the Pawnee to their ancestors, and each Nebraska to a story that began long before the settlers arrived in the Great Plains.
“Corn has defined us,” said Deb Echo-Hawk, the Pawnee seed keeper. “It was something that was part of our daily life …
“Growing it again is a way to get back to who we really are and put corn back in the center of our lives. “
The Pawnee may have been in Nebraska as early as the 13th century.
By the early 1800s, over 10,000 Pawnee in four separate bands lived and hunted across Nebraska and northern Kansas. By 1872, there were only 2,447 left – the tribe decimated by famine, locust infestations and attacks from other tribes.
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