Harvesting the Heirloom Corn That Nourishes the Oneida Nation

The first weekend in October is always the annual Harvest and Husking Bee at Tsyunhéhkw∧ Farm. Located just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin on part of the Oneida Nation, Tsyunhéhkw∧ (joon-HEY’-kwa) is a tribally owned, organic, regenerative farm that focuses on growing Oneida white corn. The farm plants about 10 acres annually, which produces around 8,000 pounds of finished corn.

Oneida white corn–also known as Iroquois or Tuscarora white corn–looks a little different than its modern counterparts. This heirloom variety has pearlescent, pale butter-colored kernels and ears can grow as long as a forearm. Stalks can grow 18 feet high and 4 inches in diameter. Modern hybrids have more uniform stalk and corn cob sizes. There is no modern machinery that can harvest an 18-foot-tall stalk of corn. So instead, farmers must rely on much older methods: The entire crop must be harvested and processed by hand.

“The best piece of equipment for what we do is people,” I was told by Lynn Utesch, a worker at Tsyunhéhkw∧. In order to harvest that quantity of corn, about 500 people show up to help.

“We invite the community in,” Lynn said. “Which is the whole community, not just the Nation—to come here and help us to pick corn and to husk the corn. It’s a major event.”

The farm also hosts a market with locally grown produce, and tribal historians offer free lectures to the crowd. Volunteers from the tribe serve traditional food, like white corn mush or corn soup. The white corn is the cornerstone of Oneida cuisine because it is extraordinarily nutritious: It’s both low in carbs and up to 24 percent protein, compared to commercial sweet corn which is about 4 percent protein, Lynn told me.

In addition to the work of the harvest, visitors learn how to braid the corn. The cob is husked until only three leaves are left; those are woven together with another cob, until 65 ears hang off a long central braid. Well, about 65 cobs; the weight of the corn in a good year can pull the braid apart. Experienced workers can make a braid in 10 minutes; a new learner will spend closer to 30.

Hundreds of volunteers show up for the annual husking bee. Garth Webster

There’s a reason for all that effort: The corn must be dried to preserve it. Over 30 years, the farm has experimented with different methods to get the corn to dry fast and evenly. To no one’s surprise, they decided that the traditional method worked best.

The thick, golden braids of husk look like a show pony’s tail. They are hung from the barn’s rafters in October and are dry and ready by January. Sometimes so much moisture is evaporating from the kernels that when Lynn opens the barn in the morning, the rafters and equipment are dripping with water. On those mornings, the barn also has a deep corn smell, reminding him of canning sweet corn as a kid with his family.

“Our primary duty is to grow and preserve the Oneida white corn so that it can be passed on for generations to come,” he explained. Lynn himself is not a tribal member. A local cattle rancher, he started volunteering at Tsyunhéhkw∧ when they needed someone with cattle expertise. About a decade ago, he came on full-time. The Oneida have always been his neighbors, and it felt like a natural fit.

“This corn is an open pollinated variety,” Lynn said. “So this is the original corn given to the Oneida people by the creator. It has not been hybridized, it has not been changed. It’s been grown from saved seed, from time immemorial.”

More than sustenance

I visited the farm on a cool day in early May, when the white corn plants were just seedlings in the field, an inch or two tall, two green leaves joining the world. Lynn met me at the end of a long dirt road before walking me out to greet the corn babies. He has shoulder-length white hair, a trimmed white beard and wore an electric-green shirt decorated in the farm’s hand-drawn name and logo.

“We believe that this corn has a spirit,” Lynn told me.“If you walk out into the fields when they’re growing, you can feel the energy from the corn. We want to make sure that whenever we’re handling this corn, that we always do it with a good mind and a good heart.”

“It also has a memory,” he added.

Lynn Utesch at Tsyunhéhkw∧ Farm. Sarah Lohman / Atlas Obscura

Workers at the farm save seed from every harvest, and add it to the mix to plant for the next year. “A few years ago, we had an extremely wet year,” Lynn said. “Basically everything drowned out, but we still had corn that grew, and we saved seed from that. We will use that in the next year’s crop to make sure that we have those genes and that corn that has that memory of what it’s like to grow in that wet weather.”

Last year, a drought year, the corn that did grow is corn that can handle a drought. Old varieties like the Oneida white corn tend to be incredibly adaptable. Which is exactly why it’s important to make sure it stays around.

“With climate changing the way it is, we need to have as many options as we can,” Lynn said. “Last year we had a major windstorm and actually knocked down the corn. A conventional corn, you get a windstorm that knocks it over, it’s done. It’s dead. Well, this corn, because it’s got actually a larger root mass to it, even though it got knocked down, after a few days that corn starts to come back up.”

In addition to growing corn, Tsyunhéhkw∧ helps tribal members start home gardens. Workers will come till the earth for a family garden at no charge, and this year they put together 200 boxes of baby plants to give away: tomatoes, green peppers, jalapenos, and ten different varieties of seeds. The farm also grows ceremonial tobacco on site. It’s not a variety that’s smoked; it’s burned to carry prayers to the creator. The tobacco isn’t sold—they only accept barter, to make sure it’s available to all.

Lynn showed me several trays of tobacco plants marked “1600 Tobacco.”

“There was an archeological dig out in New York,” he said, “and they found a clay pot that was sealed in that dig, and they dated it to 1600. There were tobacco seeds inside of it.”

Tsyunhéhkw∧ and a few other cultural sites across the country were allowed to germinate the seeds. The plants were doing well, and the farm would soon be able to offer it to the community.

Corn, cuisine, culture

Historically, the Oneida people were known for their agriculture. One of the six tribes of the Haudenosaunee Nation (sometimes known as the Iroquois, a name the French gave them), the Oneida were pushed west from upstate New York during colonial expansion after the Revolutionary War. Today, there are Oneida communities in New York, Ontario, and about 17,000 tribal members living on and off the reservation in Wisconsin. While their culture is now spread across hundreds of miles, one thing that unites them is the basis of their cuisine, the white corn, carried in pockets and packs during the migration.

“We still are trying to work our way back to having all that agriculture in our community,” I was told by Leah Stroobants, cultural event coordinator at the Amelia Cornelius Culture Park. “We didn’t want to leave our territory. We moved west here because the government said if we moved here, that we would be left alone forever.”

I met Leah in a field that would soon be the visitors center for the culture park, although it was currently occupied by some fat and happy groundhogs. The site is dedicated to teaching the history and culture of the Oneida people. Morning joggers ran the trails past mounded three-sisters gardens and an enormous replica longhouse. Leah shepherded my visit on the Oneida Nation, and was the expert to show me how the white corn connected to the history of the Oneida people.

Leah Stroobants inside the replica longhouse. Sarah Lohman / Atlas Obscura

She showed me some of the original log cabins Oneida lived in when they arrived in Wisconsin. Their most recent acquisition was discovered during a demolition: A family pulled apart an old house to discover it was actually one of these original cabins, expanded upon and built around. These structures were for one family; whereas in New York, the Oneida had lived communally with matrilineal extended families.

Leah wore black eyeliner, skinny jeans, and Converse kicks; she seemed tough and determined, a historian of her people who worked hard to make sure the true story was told. “The General Allotment Act of 1887 said that our people weren’t progressing because we didn’t hold land as individuals,” she told me. “We were holding it as a community. So they wanted to ‘help’ us progress.” The land was divided into parcels, and each family was in charge of farming 100 acres–not the communal farming system the Oneida had traditionally practiced. An agent from the Bureau of Indian affairs was assigned to monitor each family’s progress.

“While I was in undergrad, I interned at our land office here in Oneida,” Stroobants said. “My job was to take apart these really old documents—like the wax on ‘em still—and scan them. And I’m like a nerdy person, so I started reading everything.”

She realized she had been scanning reports from BIA agents reporting on Oneida families. One agent’s report stuck with her.

“He told the family that they needed to save money so they could buy a horse,” she said. “You know, ‘cause that’s what good farmers do. But then he went to visit them again the next year, and the wife was pregnant. So because she was pregnant, he said that they’re non-competent.”

The agent felt having another child went against his advice; with a new baby, they couldn’t save money for a horse.

“So he ruled that that family’s not gonna be able to take care of their land, and their land was taken,” Stroobants said.

Out of the original 65,400 acres of reservation land, 65,200 acres were seized and sold to white settlers. At one point, the Oneida only owned 200 acres of their own reservation.

Since the ‘90s, when tribal casinos opened, the tribe has been able to buy back some of the land. “Right now we’re at 44 percent,” Leah said.

I resolved to lose some money on the slots that night.

Restoring and reconnecting

The land is being reclaimed not only in the sense of tribal ownership. The Oneida have wetland, prairie, and forest restoration projects in action. There is a focus on bringing trout back to the rivers. And there’s agricultural restoration as well: healing the soil and using it to grow native foods.

The Oneida Nation Apple Orchard grows apples as well as vegetables and strawberries. They provide food directly to elders and families in the Nation, but also run a farm stand open to the public, stocked with fresh produce, local bison meat, and locally rendered bear grease, as well as bath bombs, salts, and medicinal products made by the Oneida Cannery.

The cannery, another tribal venture, processes produce for Feeding America distribution and local food boxes for elders. They’re a not-for-profit that loans space and equipment to locals who want to can their own home-grown or foraged foods. And they process thousands of pounds of local Oneida white corn from Tsyunhéhkw∧ into traditional hominy, toasted mush flour, and superfine baking flour.

Oneida white corn packs a nutritional punch, with far more protein the conventional varieties. Sarah Lohman / Atlas Obscura

First, the Oneida white corn is soaked and cooked with wood ash, which both helps to remove the hulls on the kernel, and unlocks vitamin B, making the corn even more nutritious. The result is hominy, which can be sold as is for stew, or made into Kanʌstóhale (guhn-ah-STOH’-hall) , a dense, boiled bread which elders will slice and fry in bacon grease or butter, then serve with jam or honey. Others make it into a sandwich, with bacon or ham in the middle.

Otherwise, the corn is dried again and ground into a rough, toasted meal for corn mush or a fine flour for baking. Toasting the mush flour caramelizes the sugars in the corn. As a result, cooking mush smells like breakfast cereal, green fields, and even notes of chocolate. It has the texture of oatmeal, but a bit more toothsome. It’s usually topped with local maple syrup and berries. The fine-milled flour can be used as a replacement for wheat flour. The cannery will often use it to make corn muffins, and during strawberry season–another important food to the Oneida–they’ll split the muffins and stuff them with sliced berries and whipped cream.

The corn products are sold to the public at the tribally owned Oneida One Stop, a chain of gas stations and convenience stores. One of the casino’s fine-dining establishments, Cedar & Sage Grill House, makes corn ice cream, deep-fried cheese curds rolled in corn flour, and a traditional corn soup with smoked meat, beans, and large kernels of hominy.

There’s an importance to these foods beyond sustenance; they’re also spiritual nutrition. At the end of my tour around the Oneida Nation, Leah dropped me off at the cultural heritage building. When she told the receptionist all the stops we had made, the young woman joked, “Next you’ll take her fishing, ah?”

The replica longhouse is now used for educational purposes. Sarah Lohman / Atlas Obscura

I sat down with Randy Cornelius, an Oneida language and culture archivist and educator. In addition to documenting and teaching the language, he also leads foraging tours, which are open to the public, to teach about seasonal plants that are important sources of food and medicine.

“It enhances people’s self-esteem and pride that they’re doing things that our ancestors did,” he told me as we sat in his cool, quiet office.

“It’s about reconnecting with our ancestors,” Randy said. “And these are the foods that they ate, since the beginning of time.”

He pointed out that in 1969, the Oneida Nation started its own tribal schools. Formerly, teaching Native kids about their identity was banned from local schools, traditional ceremonies were condemned by the Christian church, and practicing traditional religion was an arrestable offense until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

Now Oneida culture, history, and language are included in children’s daily studies. And more people are practicing traditional ceremonies and eating traditional foods. Randy told me it’s often the most difficult to get elders to engage in traditional practices.

“But now you go to our longhouse, and the place is packed,” he said. No longer used for communal dwelling, today the longhouses are used to hold traditional ceremonies.

“It’s the next couple generations down that are really grabbing hold of those teachings. Learning the language and the songs and the stories and everything. And that’s really exciting.”

The next morning, before I left the Oneida Nation, I stopped at Off the Trail, a breakfast and lunch spot connected to an outpost of the Oneida Casino. The restaurant focused on healthy, local, native foods. The dining room was packed with tribal members, including the chairman and neighbors from the Hochunk and Menominee nations. I greeted the owner, Apache Danforth, and her daughter at the counter, and even though it was not even noon, they were almost sold out of food.

I had swung by the day before for a jug of fresh strawberry drink and a container of wild rice porridge, but today I was hoping for a cup of their White Corn soup. Danforth had saved some for me on the sly.

I cradled the takeout container of thick soup, piled high with great big beans, which I could tell had been cooked from dried because of the snap in their texture. It was laced with smoked turkey and just enough salt to bring out the flavors. But the star, of course, was the Oneida white corn, processed into hominy—dense white kernels that popped pleasantly between my molars. The white corn was both a connection to the past and an invitation to connect, a tradition as old as planting the seeds and reaping the harvest.

Corn mush is often served with maple syrup and berries. Sarah Lohman / Atlas Obscura

An earlier version of this article and a photo caption misidentified the worker who led a tour of Tsyunhéhkw∧. He is Lynn Utesch, not Kyle Wisneski. It also misspelled the surname of the owner of Off the Trail. She is Apache Danforth, not Dansforth.

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