Kana’tarokhónwe: Cornbread

To Iroquois people, corn, beans and squash, are The Three Sisters, traditionally called “the life givers.” For thousands of years, our existence as nations and our whole being as people in this land were intertwined with these sacred plants. Our people grew and used 60 varieties of beans, Onenkwénhtara nikasahe’tò:ten. We had many different kinds of Onon'ónsera, squashes. And there were hundreds of varieties of corn, Ó:nenhste, grown and used by our people, including come that are widely know today like sweet corn, Tekontero:niaks, and popcorn, Watenenhstatákwas. Especially important for our people is Onenhakén:ra, white corn, the ancient seed of our culture carried by our ancient ancestors on their long journey up from the middle south to the continent’s great north eastern forests. As much as the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica, we Iroquois are people of the corn. The way our ancestors cultivated these plants was a sacred practice of their worldview. Corn and bean seeds were planted together in small mounds of dirt, corn first, in the middle, the beans a little later and around the edges of the mound – a metaphoric enactment of the life giving gifts’ emergence from the breasts of the first woman, our mother the earth, lain upon the back of the great turtle, A'nó:wara. The ground between them was shaded and its moisture protected by the fast growing vines of the squashes that had been planted between the mounds. This was the way of the Iroquois people for thousands of years in the valley of Kaniatarowanèn:ne, the great flowing majesty now called the St. Lawrence River, and in the other places throughout the northeast that our people lived before modern times. The basic food of ancestors was simple but complete nutritionally: hulled corn and beans, squashes, river fish and deer meat. We still have a connection to this way of life, in spite of changes to our foodways, some chosen and some imposed on us through forced acculturation and as a result of losses due to the degrading of the natural environment. For example, Kanen'stóhare, corn soup, is still a staple for many of our people and is always made and enjoyed on special occasions. Yet today’s corn soup shows just how much our food culture has changed since Europeans came to this land. In 1640 one of the first Europeans to live with our people, a Jesuit missionary, was disappointed to find that the only thing he was fed, and the only thing our people apparently ate, was a soup made of crushed corn seasoned with smoked fish. If you go to Kahnawake or any other Iroquois community today, you will not find smoked fish in your corn soup. Move your spoon around in the bowl though and you will see among the white hominy kernels and red beans some cabbage, and most likely a piece of salt pork or chunk of a ham hock in there. In Kahnawake French foodways have influenced our own – how could they not? And, pig has totally colonized fish and wild meat’s former place on the Mohawk palette. A typical Kahnawake Mohawk corn soup today is made using white hominy corn, sometimes locally grown but mostly canned hominy from the United States or Mexico, salt pork or ham hocks, cabbage or turnips, and salt and pepper. There are different ways of making it between families and different Iroquois communities, of course. Western New York Senecas don’t use anything but corn and people in the southern Ontario community of Six Nations add butter to the soup as well. …