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“As far as I know, we are the only (college) program like this,” says History Professor Rose Stremlau, one of the faculty members who initiated the collaboration. “We get this one little kernel and get to run with it. And that’s a gift and an opportunity.” 

Stremlau began working with North Carolina’s Indigenous people at UNC Pembroke, modeling for her students how to engage with Native people to address historic wrongs that shape the present while not assuming that white academics know what Indigenous people need. 

In a moment in higher education when many are focused on crafting land acknowledgements and wondering what to say, Stremlau says we should ask what our Native neighbors want us to do.

Returning Something Precious

From the beginning, the collaboration has included the arts. In 2021, Van Every/Smith Galleries director and curator Lia Newman had invited Alaska Native artist Nicholas Galanin for a solo exhibition. That exhibition, Dreaming in English, included existing and new photos, videos, prints and performative work. Because Galanin was known for his outdoor, ephemeral pieces, Newman invited him to propose such a project for the college. 

At that time, Galanin had just completed a headline-generating, large-scale public work in Sydney, Australia, that addressed the complexity of relations between settlers and Indigenous people. His Shadows on the Land entailed the symbolic “burial” of a statue of Capt. James Cook—Galanin was interested in doing something similar in the shape of the famous Washington, D.C., statue of Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president known for his brutal policies toward Native people in the South. 

Galanin’s plan was to dig an outline of Jackson’s statue and over time, transition the site of exposed soil into a garden of sweetgrass, but staff from the Catawba Cultural Center and Department of Natural Resources had another idea: plant kus.

For the Catawba, the corn was more than symbolic. It was the return of something precious, says Roo George-Warren, an executive committee member of the Catawba Nation’s government. He had been working on interviewing tribal elders on what was important to them. 

“The thing that came back over and over was, we have to bring back the corn,” he says. 

Black Snake Farm, located on the Catawba reservation, grows food for their community, but it is not an ideal location to mass plant kus because of past and current cultivation of modern sweet corn varieties there and on neighboring farms. Caring for kus includes preventing unwanted cross-pollination.

The Farm at �ʼһ��� provided a wonderful solution. Surrounded by a nature preserve and without a recent history of other varieties of corn having been planted there, the college’s fields were an ideal ground in which kus could flourish.

Susana Wadgymar, a professor of biology and a scholar of corn and climate change, worked with farm manager Halle Murphy and Catawba Nation Director of Natural Resources Aaron Baumgardner to reintroduce kus to the land where Catawba women farmers once grew it over hundreds of years. 

The corn project continues to grow. The college has arranged for artists, historians, cookbook authors and chefs from different Indigenous tribes to come as consultants and educators for both �ʼһ��� students and Catawba Nation staff and citizens.

Most recently, Chef Loretta Barrett Oden, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, worked with college Chef Craig Mombert and his staff to prepare a meal using recipes from her book Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine. She visited campus for a lunch at the college and a dinner at the Catawba Cultural Center.

George-Warren is excited about the possibility of so many ways to use the corn, from getting a nutritious traditional food back into tribal life to using the kus stalks to make corn dolls, a traditional craft. 

“The reason it survived so long was we integrated it into our culture,” he says. “The other piece is in our music and dance. We had a green corn dance, and it was part of our ongoing tradition — planting day, harvesting days. Every time I see a new cob, I’m like, ‘the colors!’ There are lifetimes of creativity in there to explore.”

The official agreement between the Catawba Nation and �ʼһ��� stipulates that the college will grow the corn and work with the Nation through summer 2025. But Stremlau hopes it won’t end there. She sees helping to restore something so precious to the Catawba Nation as a step toward acknowledging the role of the college’s founding families in the dispossession of Native people in this region and of the Presbyterian church in child separation throughout Native communities in the United States. 

She also sees the possibilities of the program continuing in new forms, including adding other traditional plants and woodland management.

“We have students, faculty, and staff with research capacity and the desire to be of service, and our Catawba partners have projects they want done,” Stremlau says. “Pun intended, there’s a lot of common ground here. We are clearing a path to grow this relationship for many, many years.”

This article was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2024 print issue of the �ʼһ��� Journal Magazine; for more, please see the �ʼһ��� Journal section of our website.