Amos Owen (Wiyohpeyata Hoksina meaning Boy from the West) was born on the fourth of August in 1916 on the Sisseton Reservation in South Dakota. He died on the fourth of June 1990 at his home in the Prairie Island community. He was a highly respected Dakota spiritual leader and a highly regarded community leader. He worked for many years to build cultural bridges between the Indian and the nonIndian populations. He was both humble and charismatic, and it is to him and to his spirit that this garden is dedicated.

The garden started as part of a project a group of students and I did back in 1976 for a bicentennial celebration of American agriculture which was held in Lake Crystal, Minnesota in September of that year. It had occurred to us that the contributions of American Indians to agriculture were probably going to be overlooked. We visited the directors who fully confirmed our belief. They then asked us to draw up a proposal. This we did, and for the entire summer of 1976 we created an exhibit which consisted of a full scale Hidatsa earthlodge (45 feet in diameter and 14 feet tall), drying racks for the harvested corn and beans, 300 feet of palisade and three gardens. One garden was designed to show the diversity of plants which had been domesticated by Native Americans from both North and South America. This included potatoes and tomatoes, chilies, lima beans, sweet potatoes, beans, and less familiar crops like cannas, nasturtiums and dahlias all of which produce edible tubers. In all there were 36 different plants grown of the 200 or so which have been domesticated by Indians. A second garden was designed to show the variability of maize or corn. Maize is the principle cash crop in this part of the country and is grown in just about every country of the world. The third garden was a replication of a Native American garden from the upper Midwest. Here the three main crop plants were corn, beans, and squash. Many gardens would have included sunflowers and there would have been a small second plot for tobacco.

This was the first garden. This year's garden (2003) will be the twenty seventh. Although it has had several homes over the years it has been in its current location on the campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato for the past eighteen years.

CORN

Central to any understanding of Native American horticulture is corn. Originally a tropical plant, it was domesticated in central Mexico between 5000 to 7000 years ago. The actual domestication was a rather slow process, but well before two thousand years ago corn was productive enough to support large populations such as the Maya and the 125,000 plus inhabitants of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico. It was also being introduced into what is now the United States at about that time, and it was soon being grown from Arizona to the Dakotas and east to the Atlantic. By 1000 AD raising corn was a well established tradition and during the next hundred years a number of large communities were established along the Mississippi River and to the east. This was also the time of the establishment of some of the largest communities in the American Southwest - The Pueblo peoples of the Four Corners area (where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet). The Hohokam to the south and their predecessors had been there for more than a thousand years and had developed extensive and elaborate irrigation systems to support their crops.

The corn that was grown in at the northern limits of agriculture was known as Northern Flint and probably had its origins in highland Guatemala. It made its way into Pueblo country in the the American Southwest, and from there it made its way north to the to the Dakotas by way of several horticultural groups living in the Central Plains. Needless to say this is a story with many major gaps at this time. Northern Flint is a very diverse plant, resistant to climatic extremes, and quick to mature. It has three forms of which, as the name implies, the flint (a white flint is on the right in the picture) is the most durable. It is the most durable but not the most easily processed. The flint form has greater resistantance to insects and mold. It has a very hard endosperm (the material filling the kernel), has an almost pearly luster, and comes in a multitude of colors and patterns. Grinding it or pounding it are difficult tasks. More easily processed is the flour (a yellow flour is on the left and each is about ten inches long) which has a softer endosperm and is more easily ground with either mortar and pestle or on a grindstone with a mano (a flattened stone held in the hand). Finally there is a sweet variety. This was not used by Indians as a "sweet-corn" but was ground and turned into "corn-balls" which could be carried as food to be eaten while traveling or was saved as a flavoring for other foods. When Indians ate "sweet-corn" they generally ate flour corn in its unripe stage (called the "milky stage" by gardeners). Until fairly recently many of the commercially available "sweet-corns" were actually Northern Flint because of its rapid maturation. This is no longer true, and modern sweet corn is bred specifically for extremely high levels of sugar. In flints and flours the sugar is converted to starch, and as the kernels dry they shrink very little. When a true sweet corn dries its kernels collapse and they assume a wrinkled appearance.

Northern flint has a very distinctive appearance which is not very different from its ancient ancestor in Mexico - teosinte, a large native grass. Both Northern Flint and teosinte have multiple stalks. As the kernel sprouts a single shoot appears at the surface, but within a few weeks it is joined by several more (two to five) shoots arising at the base of the plant. What all these shoots do is create a lot of leaves. This in turn facilitates rapid growth and maturation of the plant. Thus it can mature rapidly and its growth corresponds to both the rainiest and sunniest part of the summer. In short it is "fine tuned" to its habitat, and this was achieved by generations of Indian gardeners selecting the seeds from the very best plants in their gardens. Northern Flint in this part of the country usually grows to about five and a half feet to six feet tall.

One weakness of a growth pattern in which the plant invests so much energy in growing an extensive leaf system as quickly as possible is that the plant tends of be top heavy and can easily be blown over by the wind, especially if the wind, as it often is, is accompanied by rain. To help keep the plants from tipping over Native American gardeners learned to "hill" earth up around the base of the plant.

Northern Flint produces ears quite close to the ground and under ideal conditions they may reach 12 or more inches in length. All ears have 8 or 10 rows of kernels. Simply by looking at the kernel one can easily tell whether it came from an 8 rowed ear or a ten rowed ear. Kernels from an 8 rowed ear form an angle of 45 degrees (8X45=360 degrees), and kernels from a 10 rowed ear form an angle of 36 degrees. Here you can see cross sections of a yellow flour on the left, a 14 rowed modern dent typical of modern corn-belt corn, and a white flint. The entire ears are here. The kernels illustrated are white flint and yellow flour from the garden in Mankato, Minnesota. The charred kernels date to about 1100 AD. Each ear, of course, is surrounded by leafy husks (they are modified leaves) which, on Northern Flint, flair out near the top of the ear to form a characteristic "flag." The ears are the female flowers of corn. The male flowers are at the top and are known as tassels. (Close up) On corn's ancestor the female flowers which form the seeds are at the base of the tassel on the top of the stalk, but on corn they are separated, and the ear grows on a shortened branch from which grow the leaves which surround the ear as husks.

When corn, essentially all corn, is planted, it will start its main mass of roots about an inch below the surface and these will be most dense immediately under the plant. Corn leaves have a shallow "V" shape, and when it rains most of the rain falling on the plant is funneled down the leaves to the stalk and then soaks into the ground right where the mass of roots is most dense. Corn sends roots out at least a couple feet on all sides and can also send roots several feet into the ground.

In the garden corn is planted in clusters of five to seven kernels (roughly a circle about ten inches in diameter). Each cluster is hilled and the hills are about four feet apart. In some areas the Indians made long rows of ridges about the same height and width of a corn hill and planted their corn in rows. At least among the Hidatsa of western North Dakota it was reported that it took about half an acre of corn to provide enough to support an adult (an acre is about the equivalent of a square 200 feet long on each side - a football field 30 by 100 yards is a little more than .6 acre). This figure is probably in error (follow the link on the home page to the Cahokia State Agricultural Test Plot where we have data derived from our test plot). The only tools were a digging stick about four feet long, a buffalo shoulder blade hoe (in the Plains and Midwest), and a rake made from a deer antler. It was hard work, especially to start a new garden where the soil had never been turned and trees had to be cut down. The garden needed plenty of attention, and it was all done by the women of the family. Hilling was an extremely arduous job and that football sized field could have 1650 hills and a full acre 2500.

Harvesting involved the young men as well, and they were rewarded with a good dinner. Harvest time was also a very social time as the young men moved from field to field to help out. But harvesting was only the beginning of another round of hard work because the corn had to either braided into a string of fifty or so ears for storage, trading or seed corn. Or it was shelled by beating the ears with a threshing stick and removing the stubborn kernels by hand. The resulting yield was stored in a grass lined pit which might hold as much as a thousand pounds of corn or more.