"This corn...has been grown by the Tuscarora since they lived in what was not yet the Carolinas, and for who knows how long before that. During the four-year Tuscarora war ~ which killed more than a thousand American Indians and settlers before its end in 1715 ~ the corn traveled with the Tuscarora in their episodic exodus from the South, through Pennsylvania, and into New York, where the tribe was adopted as one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois [the oldest living participatory democracy on earth] in 1722.
Tuscarora corn flourished until the boom in highly mechanized industrial agriculture that began in the 1950s and then, like so many breeds and crop varieties across the country, it dwindled until only a few families were still growing it in the traditional way."
Natural selection Strings of Tuscarora corn,
40 and 50 ears to a braid, hung from rafters,
"The way to assess Tuscarora corn is not to gauge its difference from the genetically engineered corn being grown in fields a few miles from the Tuscarora Nation. Gauge its difference instead from the species — or species plural — from which maize originated as long ago as the oldest bristlecone pine. It is a long way, geographically and temporally, from the tiny ancestral ears of Mesoamerican corn to Tuscarora corn. Embedded in the ear I was holding was not only the tremendous adaptability of Zea mays but also the will and the needs of a people, expressed family by family."
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