Lesson of the Corn

I remember.   

I am at a conference.  Cherokee author and activist Marilou Awiatka tells us to close our eyes. We comply as she starts beating the drum she holds in her hand. We move our feet to the sound, and I imagine we aren't at an academic conference but outside, in the dark night, under the stars. I drift into the beat. Suddenly the drum stops, and I open my eyes. I am way across the room from where I started. No one else has moved. Awkward and confused, I go back to my starting place. As a graduate student, I am uncomfortable anyway at one of my early professional conferences; now I feel even stranger.

Later, I go to ask Awiatka to sign a copy of her book of poetry. She signs the book, then looks at me closely.

"Do you have any Indian family?"

"No. I don't think so."

She smiles, and says, "Go look."

~

A few months later, I sit and look in the mirror. My fingers trace my cheekbones, the line of my face. I think about my low tolerance for alcohol and lactose in cow's milk -- European products Indian bodies are still learning to process. I feel my skin and think about that nice, dark tan I get in the summers at the beach. I run my finger around the slightly almond shape of my eyes.

Is that where Awiatka saw the Indian in me? Because she was right. I called my mother to ask. Mom said, "You mean I never told you about your great-grandmother?"

“No, Mom, you never told me.” 

My mom was working as a nurse among the Native people of Alaska and living two miles off the nearest road in a log cabin.  But she didn’t, couldn’t identify as Native.  To consider herself Indian would be to challenge all the silence her family had forced on her.  She never told me because she wished even she didn’t know.   


---

Years pass. 

In my first (and only) year of teaching women’s studies at UC-Berkeley, I become pregnant, and all I hear from the women I had been trained to follow is:  “You have ruined your career.”  I am denied maternity leave.  I am forced to resign my job.   So, I become a stay-at-home mother.  I meet new people who look away from me once I answer the question “What do you do?” with:  “I’m a mother.” I see my status in my own home decrease as I become a maid and child care provider .  Clearly, no one views the caretaking work I do for free at home as important as the paid work done elsewhere.  Having learned to despise traditional women’s work as well, I began to hate myself for doing it.  Wonder whether I could do anything else.  I have a hard time finding a new job with a baby in the background and a head filled with self-doubt.  I learn the hard lesson that the caretaking work that mothers do isn’t valued except in greeting card ways.  That we, as a society, don’t see an “ethics of care” as important, and those who privilege it, like mothers, are not important either.   

I feel betrayed.  Feminism as I learned it, and as I practiced it, approached motherhood as something negative – to be avoided or controlled or curtailed.  I had been taught that for women to advance, women needed to transcend their physical selves that birthed and bled, and move into realm of rarified intellect where the body didn’t matter at all. And I violated this dichotomy with my big belly and even bigger Ph. D.   

So, I begin to look elsewhere to find value in my new role of nurturer.

I find it in my Indian heritage. 

___

In many Indian traditions, such as the Zuni, Hopi and Cherokee, that keep women central in the religion, women and motherhood also remain powerful.  Looking back to the past, Paula Gunn Allen writes: 

Pre-Conquest American Indian women valued their role as vitalizers.  Through their own bodies they could bring vital beings into the world__a miraculous power whose potency does not diminish with industrial sophistication or time.  They were mothers, and that word did not imply slaves, drudges, drones who are required to live only for others rather than for themselves as it does so tragically for many modern women.  The ancient ones were empowered by their certain knowledge that the power to make life is the source of all power and that no other power can gainsay it.

Marilou Awiakta writes in her poem “Song of the Grandmothers”:

I am Cherokee.
My people believe in the Spirit that unites all things.

I am woman. I am life force. My word has great value.


The man reveres me as he reveres Mother Earth and his own spirit.

The Beloved Woman is one of our principal chiefs.
Through her the Spirit often speaks to the people. In the Great
Council at the capital, she is a powerful voice.
Concerning the fate of hostages, her word is absolute.

Women share in all of life. We lead sacred dances. In
the Council we debate freely with men until an
agreement is reached. When the nation considers war,
we have a say, for we bear the survivors.

Sometimes I go into battle. I also plant and harvest.

I carry my own name and the name of my clan. If I
accept a mate, he and our children take the name of my
clan. If there is deep trouble between us, I am as free to
tell him to go as he is to leave. Our children and our
dwelling stay with me. As long as I am Treated with
dignity, I am steadfast.

I love and work and sing.


I listen to the Spirit.


In all things I speak my mind.


I walk without fear.


I am Cherokee.

I also learned  from Susan Roesch Wagner (Sisters in Spirit, 2001) that the nineteenth century suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucrecita Mott took many of their ideas about gender balance from American Indian culture, particularly the Iroqouis.  Indian women chose the chiefs.  European American women could not vote.  Indian women owned land.  European American generally did not.  Indian women had legal right to their children.  European women did not.   Indian women produced the majority of the food for their communities through agriculture (the men hunted but were not daily suppliers of food).  Early 19^th century European women were supposed to be ornamental and thus not expected to contribute.  Indian women’s nurturing work was celebrated as equal in status to the work of the warriors and hunters.  European women’s work was demeaned as mere “women’s work.”  Indian women chose their marriage partners.  European women’s marriages were arranged for them.   In most ways,  Indian women had more status and power , and thus, better lives than their European counterparts in the settlements.  The women who signed the 1846 Declaration of Sentiments knew this, and so did Indian women.  Sally Roesch Wagner reports in her book “Sisters in Spirit” that in 1888:

Ethnographer Alice Fletcher talked about her conversations with Native women who were well aware of their superior rights: As I have tried to explain our statutes to Indian women, I have met with but one response. They have said, "As an Indian woman I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.

But Wagner is quick to point out that this is not just an historic piece of information.  The centrality of women is still important today.  Wagner writes of her own experience:

      I arrive, hurried, at the home of Ethel, a friend with whom I work. We have exactly an hour to meet, squeezed into a tight travel schedule. After pleasantries we get down to business, moving along at a smooth clip, and it looks as if we will finish on time when suddenly her son enters. A strapping 17-year-old, he fills the room with his presence. Ethel beams at him and hangs on his every word as he describes his teachers' deadlines, clean uniform needs, other mundane details of his day. Virginia Woolf got it right: his mother's admiring gaze reflects him twice life size. He never acknowledges my presence, she doesn't introduce us, and our work is forgotten. When finally he walked out, Ethel and I scramble to tie up loose ends, some of which still dangle as I dash out the door.

      Ethel is EuroAmerican: her son stands poised to inherit the world.

      A week later I sat in my friend Jeanne's living room, enjoyable chatting. I hear her 17-year-old son in the kitchen rattling pans, perhaps cooking or washing dishes. Minutes later he appears and places cups of tea in front of us without a word, his gift offered unobtrusively, his demeanor without display. I look up to thank him but he is gone, his back already turned as he repairs to the kitchen. Jeanne seems not even to notice, and our conversation continues.

      Jeanne is Onondaga, a Haudenosaunee woman descended from the traditional "pagan" Iroquois -- those who refused to be "Christianized" and "civilized." Her son recognizes his mother, and all women, as the center of the culture.

      Such sons of such mothers belonged to our feminist foresisters' vision too. They are sons who learned from their fathers and their father's fathers to respect the sovereignty of women. They are sons of a tradition in which rape and battering of women was virtually unknown until contact with white people, a tradition in which women's rights are a birthright.

Of all the new ideas I learned from studying, the most important was about corn.  Mother Spirit reports that 


Corn was a highly valued staple in the Americas and together with the other vital crops of beans and squash, the grouping was named the "Three Sisters, Our Supporters" in accordance with the belief that the plants also embodied female spirits. Mother Corn Herself, the nurturing Creatrix and Sustainer, was held in the highest esteem as shown in the following creation story. 

"Once all living things were in the womb of Mother Earth. Corn Mother caused all things to have life and start to move toward the surface of the Earth. With Corn Mother's help, the people were born onto the surface of the Earth, but because the people did not know how to care for themselves, they started to wander...Finally the Arikara came to a beautiful land where they found everything they needed to live. A woman of great beauty came to them and the Arikara recognized her as the Corn Mother. She stayed with them for many years and taught them how to live and work on the Earth and how to pray. When she died, Corn Mother left the people a corn plant as a reminder that her spirit would always guide and care for them. The Arikara say that the beautiful place where they learned to live was the valley of the Loup River in Kansas." This is an an Arikara story, but many nations believed female spirits were integral to daily and ceremonial life. The Hopi, Cherokee and Arikara, believed in a Corn Mother who gave birth to them and also created the land that sustained them. Cherokees say they came from the breast of Corn Mother (Selu) who died so that maize would spring from her body and give life to the people . . . . For the Sioux, White-Buffalo Calf Woman gave the people the 'Gift of the Pipe and Truth' and the first mothers of all the Tewa Pueblo people were called Blue Corn Woman, Summer Mother, White Corn Maiden, and the Winter Mother.

Imagining women as part of the divine made women powerful.  The Cherokee, when meeting the Americans for the first time for negotiations, asked the white leaders – “Where are your women?”  Nancy Ward, the Last Beloved Woman of the Cherokee, attended as part of their gender balanced diplomatic team.  The Cherokee were stunned that the people they were meeting did not bring any women, and commented that these white men were not “balanced.”  To the Cherokee (and other nations, t00), the corn plant, that has both male and female parts, is the ideal model for gender balance, and motherhood, a positive image for the relationship between the divine and humans. While their society was not a perfect gender utopia, what I see concerning the value of women’s work in general runs counter to all that I had learned from my white European heritage -- from both patriarchal and feminist sources. 

As I saw examples of a culture that valued mothers more than my own, I began to see mothers differently in my own life. As I looked back through my family tree, I saw the mothers clearly for the first time. They came out of the shadows of the fathers, and stood before me, strong, powerful, and proud. I looked back through photo albums to trace the lines of their faces. I fingered the possessions they left behind. I researched their lives. I learned about my grandmothers, and celebrated their lives not because they were "ahead of their times" but because they lived in them. Instead of viewing them as unenlightened women I had to react against and move beyond, I began to see the nurturing roles they embraced as powerful and important. As I learned to applaud the mothers of my past, I also learned to applaud the mothers around me. I began to rethink the term "nurturer" so it stood equal in status to the term "warrior." I began to see mothering as a heroic act.

I took my one-year-old daughter to Alaska, carrying Sarah through the forest on my back. I stood outside my mom's log cabin late one night, with the ground strong and sure beneath me, with the stars unfiltered by city lights or pollution shining above me, and the trees standing tall around me. And I felt it in my body and not merely in my mind: the power of my mother, of the mothers before her, of the earth itself in its continual acts of creation, growth, and nurturing. As when I gave birth, I knew in the deepest part of my body that this creation was good and holy and right. That I had found the answer to the question of "Why am I here?" That I could feel my place in the universe. I carried that moment back with me as I moved back into the cities and highways of my more urban life.

Reclaiming part of my Indian identity made me feel stronger, more powerful as a woman and a mother. Like my own mother, what was traditionally Native sustained me.  And I’d like you to consider today how it might sustain you. 

~

We as UUs often work through our social justice committee to create a better ethic of care in the society around us.  We march. We protest.  We sign.  We donate.   But, really, that is not where an ethics of care begins.  That is external. We have to start with the internal.

 

The difference, as I see it, between the European religion the Indians encountered and their own was an issue of practice.  Of wholeness.  Of not separating the spiritual from the physical.  If the kings and queens who sent their people to what they called the New World had practiced what they preached, they wouldn’t have conquered what they found.  The Cherokee and others, on the other hand, believed in equality and democracy for all members of their society, and their social structure showed it.  They practiced.  They didn’t preach.  They didn’t protest.  They didn’t sign petitions.  They did it.

Creating an ethics of care starts with each of us.  It starts within our hearts, In our homes. In our workplaces.  It is easier for some of us to tackle racial inequality than gender imbalance because, for many of us, we don’t live in the same home or sleep in the same bed with someone of a different race.  The closeness of gender makes facing our own gender imbalances difficult, thus, we haven’t really moved into an ethics of care.   And we won’t until all types of work are valued equally. 

Creating an ethics of care means moving toward gender balance within ourselves, learning to value those parts of us that are traditionally associated with the opposite gender.  Because I was trying to make it in man’s world, I devalued what was female about me.  Looking at the corn plant, I learned to I change that. 

Creating an ethics of care means valuing the work that is traditionally associated with both genders.  I looked  down on “stay-at-home” moms as women who just didn’t get it.  I looked down on the work they did as less important than the work I did at the university.  I needed to learn to value traditional women’s work as much as paid work no matter who was going it – men or women.  I needed to look at who was doing the nurturing work in my home.  Whom I was paying to do it.  Whom I wasn’t paying to do it.  Whom I was blaming for not doing it.  Whom I was cleaning up after.  Whom I was expecting to do it without asking.  Until my own home was balanced, how could I even think about changing the world?  Looking at the corn plant, I learned to do just that.    

Creating an ethics of care means valuing the other gender more.  I started listening to my men friends more.  I learned that their gender oppression – to be masculine, strong, and powerful – could be just as self - limiting as what was expected of women.  Looking at the corn plant, I worked to support the men in my life as whole people.

So, this is the kernel of corn I want you to take with you today.  Creating an ethics of care means believing the warrior and the nurturer are equally vital to our society.  And it means backing it with our actions.    Like the ancient people of this land we now call our homes, we need to restore balance within ourselves so we can balance the world. It's not some unattainable fantasy.  It's been attained already.  

I remember.   I hope you will, too.  




A sermon presented at the Unitarian Church in Charleston on July 18th, 2010.