by Jan Thompson
Overton, Neb.
March 27, 2008

KEARNEY, Neb. — Each spring, seed corn prized for its purity is planted in a woman’s garden. Five kernels go in each hill, with one in the middle and four surrounding it. She plants the hills sporadically, one long pace apart from each other, and fills the space between with melons and beans. Eventually their vines and leaves will twine into a thick patch that will preserve moisture in the ground, shade the plants, and make it tough going for animals trying to reach the young produce.

Getting these seeds to germinate and start growing is a heavy responsibility for the woman. Many people — an entire tribe, in fact — count on her to renew the sacred crops. In a way, it’s up to her to feed the Pawnee Nation.

It’s a responsibility that Ronnie O’Brien, educational director at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument in Kearney, Neb., has taken on since 2004. That’s when she began raising Pawnee heritage crops, in an effort to revive the pure and ancient varieties of corn, beans, and watermelon that the Pawnee Nation raised when they lived in central Nebraska. It’s also a job O’Brien knows she’s inherited from the generations of Pawnee women who raised gardens big enough to feed their communities, and she’s taking her cues from them.

“We are learning exactly the way (the Pawnee) did. One year at a time. There is no manual, there is no book,” she said. Just the land, the weather, and the plants she tries to learn from as she watches them grow. One variety, called eagle corn for the distinctive black marks on each kernel that resemble spread wings, has been a particularly big challenge — and perhaps the project’s biggest success. At one point, only 25 kernels of eagle corn were still known to exist. This fall, O’Brien shipped another five ears of kernels to Deb Echo-Hawk, who supplied that first seed corn and who runs the Pawnee Nation’s seed bank in Oklahoma.

“For me to tell you how much I have learned in (four) years of growing this corn, it’s unbelievable. And I’m really glad that I found them, and that (Echo-Hawk) trusted me with her seeds,” O’Brien said.

A Partnership
When she first contacted Echo-Hawk, O’Brien wasn’t thinking about a project that would affect the entire Pawnee Nation. She was only looking for a way to educate archway visitors about the American Indians who used to live on the prairie where her museum now sits.

Stretching across Interstate 80 about two miles from the Kearney interchange, the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument features exhibits about the route that bridged East and West. O’Brien has been the museum’s educational director since it opened in 2000. She has also done historic re-enactments telling the story of her husband’s great-grandparents, who befriended a Pawnee chief and so learned how to survive while on the trail. O’Brien studied Pawnee life for her re-enactment, and found out just how important gardening was to their way of life.

“Their life depended on crops,” she said, and the growing of crops was attended by great ceremony. They also took pains to keep their seed stock pure. “They planted their corn, all their different varieties at least a half a mile apart from each other, and they would put fields of other crops in between, so they were avoiding cross-pollination.”
O’Brien said some of the books she read listed pure Pawnee varieties of corn, beans, and squash. She had also found beans listed as “Pawnee Heritage” seeds in a catalog, which matched drawings from her reference books. From this, she got the idea to create an educational program about the Pawnee’s gardens.

“In coming up with the programming, being the education director, I wanted to do something with the Native American programming, and I wanted to come up with a Pawnee of the Plains program. I already knew what name I wanted to give it, because this was real, this was their area ... so I thought of any tribe the Pawnee would be the one I would want to do a program about,” she said.

What O’Brien didn’t count on was how rare those crops had become. Getting seed stock, she thought, would only take a simple phone call to the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma. When O’Brien made that call in 2003, she found that the ancient crops were no longer being grown, and there was no official program for their renewal.

“(The tribe) didn’t know what to do with me. They didn’t know who to direct me to,” O’Brien said, but someone finally thought to connect her with Echo-Hawk. The Pawnee National education and training director and director of admissions at Pawnee Nation College, Echo-Hawk had been leading an effort to revive the traditional crops.

What Echo-Hawk told O’Brien was that when the U.S. government relocated the Pawnee from Nebraska to Oklahoma in the 1870s, they took their seeds with them in sacred bundles. But less than 700 of the 10,000 Pawnee survived the forced march and many bundles were lost when there was no one left from a family to care for them. Those who did survive found that Oklahoma’s climate and soil weren’t suitable for growing their crops.

Still, the Pawnee people were interested in keeping and renewing their pure seed stock. After moving to Oklahoma from Colorado in 1997, Echo-Hawk got involved with the Nation’s Culture Committee in the Pawnee Seeds Preservation Project. Today this program runs a seed bank, with pure heritage seeds available for people to check out and plant. But in 2003, Echo-Hawk said, it was smaller and less organized. She was simply displaying seeds in the library where she worked.

When O’Brien called, Echo-Hawk had only a handful of eagle corn kernels. Some of them dated from the 1980s, when Echo-Hawk and her brother had lived in Colorado and tried growing the corn there. Some of it was much older. Saying she barely had enough eagle corn left to show Pawnee children what it looked like, Echo-Hawk at first told O’Brien that she couldn’t send her any seed. “I had a hard time with that,” O’Brien said, “but I could tell she was willing to listen to me and she was willing to talk about what they were experiencing.” After a long conversation, O’Brien convinced Echo-Hawk to send about half her stock. Echo-Hawk also sent out a call for seeds through the Nation’s newsletter, and people came forward with seeds for other crops.

“It was pretty much a leap of faith” sending the seeds to Nebraska, Echo-Hawk said, but she and others in the tribe were convinced by O’Brien’s network of skilled gardeners and by the hope that Nebraska soil would give the seeds what they needed.

“We just felt like Nebraska’s where it all began,” so the crops would likely do better there, Echo-Hawk said.

In 2004, O’Brien planted the eagle corn and watermelon in her garden near Shelton. She sent other watermelon seeds to her sister at St. Libory, and yellow corn supplied by Henry StoneRoad in Oklahoma was raised by retired Kearney farmer Jack Irlmeier. They had mixed success.

The yellow corn responded well, with almost 100 percent germination. The watermelons at St. Libory did all right, but O’Brien’s did better. She had raised them the way she thought the Pawnee would have, by getting them started and then leaving them alone the rest of the summer. O’Brien said that’s what the tribe would have done once they left for their annual buffalo hunt.

But while O’Brien was able to send Echo-Hawk plenty of yellow corn and watermelon seeds, the eagle corn kernels had rotted in the ground.

“Some of (the eagle corn kernels) were 20 years old, some of them were older. She kind of had them mixed together. Some of them were 80 to 100 years old that we were working with,” O’Brien said, which made the chances of germination very slim. One expert told her it was very unlikely kernels would germinate after five years.

“If I would have listened to everything everyone was telling me, I don’t know that we would have (tried it),” she said. “We kept saying ‘well, we’re going to try anyway.’”
Echo-Hawk agreed to try again after the first crop’s failure, sending the last of her eagle corn kernels in 2005. While she knew some of her relatives had small collections of the seed, her decision was a major vote of trust in O’Brien and the project.

O’Brien got help that year from Myron Fougeron, a retired biologist from University of Nebraska in Kearney, who started the corn with “rag dolls.” He wrapped them in paper towels and put them in jars to promote germination, and that year it worked. O’Brien grew 23 stalks and harvested 17 ears.

From 2005-2007, the project has grown to include several varieties of corn and Pawnee beans that are white with red spots. Seeds have come from people in Oklahoma and from a couple at the Pawnee reservation near Genoa, who save heritage seeds.
Different gardeners have gotten involved, but O’Brien said she wants to tightly control the crop placement to ensure no cross-pollination. This year’s crops were grown by her, Fougeron and Roger Woolsey. Woolsey, director of facilities at the Archway Monument, lives in Mason City.

The project’s biggest success so far is the watermelon crop, which has become plentiful enough now that the Pawnee people are growing and eating their own produce. Other successes include the yellow corn, white corn, blue corn, popcorn, and red-and-white striped corn. While the beans were an initial success, seeds planted this year turned out more red than white. That shows an impurity, O’Brien said, and she can’t send any of it to Oklahoma. She went from having a large jar of bean seeds to only a handful that she’s used in educational programs.

Another future challenge is blue-speckled corn, which O’Brien and Fougeron tried to grow this year. The 151 kernels were too old and wouldn’t germinate. O’Brien said that the variety’s future may depend on a plant DNA specialist, who’s offered to help. Echo-Hawk said the tribe is still considering whether to explore that option.

Next year, O’Brien would like to grow squash alongside the eagle corn, beans, red-and-white corn, and white corn.

Discovering the Past
When most gardeners or farmers put seed into the ground, they have a pretty good idea of what will come up, and when. If they don’t, they can simply look at the instructions or call a specialist.

But when O’Brien began planting the ancient Pawnee crops, she had no instructions. No specialists had ever seen the plants grow. Luckily, O’Brien had the same kind of training the Pawnee women would have received when they lived in Nebraska — on-the-job training with her mother.

“My mom was the most amazing gardener. And my mom had us out there every day in the garden and she talked to me and my sister constantly, (saying) ‘Look at this plant. Look at what this plant is telling you.’ She said ‘Listen to these plants. Just go out there in the garden and listen to what that plant is telling you,” O’Brien said, adding that she put her mom’s advice to good use in her own garden.

“I have two girls that I have taught to garden in the same way,” she said. Every day O’Brien and her girls check their plants “to see what they’re telling us, look at it, see what bugs are in the garden. Just go out there and look at it. That’s what I’ve done, and that’s what (the Pawnee) did. You know, I don’t have a schedule that says ‘this time of year put this on, this time put that on, this time of year apply that chemical.’ Every day it’s just go out there and look at it, see what it says.”

O’Brien’s approach to gardening is part of what convinced Echo-Hawk to take a chance and send her precious seed stock to Nebraska. “Ronnie comes from a family of growers,” she said, and takes a personal interest in what she grows. “She gets really attached to all her plants,” Echo-Hawk said, and that’s undoubtedly helped in figuring out how to make the Pawnee crops successful.

O’Brien said she learned very early that the crops were drought resistant, and didn’t do well if she watered them regularly. She found out that each eagle corn kernel sends up three suckers, and each one develops an ear. But the stalks only grow three to four-foot high. She learned that the corn goes from sprout to tassel in 30 days, which will help her time the crop better next year to avoid cross-pollination from surrounding corn fields. That was a problem this year, because early rains forced her to plant the eagle corn later.

“It’s just really neat to put a kernel in the ground that you’ve never grown before, to see what the plant looks like, to see how fast it grows, to see how tall it might grow, to see how many stalks you’re going to get, how many ears you’re going to get, how big the ears are, what color it is, what color the stalk is, what color the husk is around the ear ...”
Another important lesson O’Brien has learned from her work with the Pawnee crops is about their importance to the tribe. While she always knew crops were key to their survival, the project has made her truly aware of the crops’ spiritual significance to the Pawnee.

“They were a very religious tribe, they had a lot of ceremonies, but nothing compared to their ceremonies over their crops and over the seeds. Which tells you just how important it was to them, and that’s still there in the native people who are working on their crops ... I mean look how hard they have tried to grow crops. It means so much to them that even though they have no place to plant them, they have been preserving those seeds so that someday, hopefully that seed can be planted and grow.”

O’Brien said the strength of the Pawnees’ determination to keep their crops alive became evident when Echo-Hawk told her about the people coming forward with seeds for their project.

“Not only have they kept the kernels, they tried to keep the kernels alive,” O’Brien said, relating a story Echo-Hawk had told her about that mayonnaise jar of eagle corn. “Three years before I called her, it had gotten worms of some kind in it, so she put it in the freezer for three months, trying to save it so that something could be done with it.”

Gardens for the Future
Near the end of September, O’Brien put this year’s harvest into an educational display at the monument before sending the seeds to Oklahoma. She said it was much bigger than the display she put up last year, but it’s still far from her ultimate goal. Just as she originally intended, O’Brien would like to start a garden of Pawnee heritage crops at the Archway Monument. It would be planted the way the Pawnee did, covering one-half to one-and-a-half acres in the “three sisters”: corn, beans and squash. Sunflowers would be planted around the edge as a kind of natural fence.

“What I’m really hoping we can do is start a garden here at the archway that we can take care of like the Pawnee women did. It was the women who were responsible to have the garden. Each earth lodge had 35 to 50 people living in it, and the woman who ran it, who had the garden, were responsible for feeding those 35 to 50 people every day. So she had to plant enough crops to last the whole year, for 35-50 people every day, and they ate twice a day. That was an enormous responsibility,” she said.

O’Brien said the archway is in the second year of a five-year National Park Service Trails project, which helped the museum bring in top soil and plant native grasses. While she hopes that will make the garden possible, O’Brien said the timeline really depends on the Pawnee Nation and how quickly the seed builds up.

“Until they’re able to eat their corn, I don’t think we should be doing anything else with it,” she said.

In Oklahoma, Echo-Hawk and other Pawnee leaders have plans of their own. The tribe set aside land as a garden, not only to help renew the ancient crops but to encourage gardening as a traditional and healthy activity.

Crops, and especially corn, do have a special place in the life of the Pawnee. “Everyone has corn stories,” Echo-Hawk said, but they might also hold part of the answer to physical challenges the Pawnee face. “We have a high diabetic population, and it’s not just for middle-aged people,” she said. Many young people are diabetics, too. Echo-Hawk and other tribal leaders hope that teaching people how to grow and eat their own crops will improve nutrition and therefore the tribe’s overall health.

So far, Echo-Hawk said, the effort has faced many challenges. Dirt brought onto the garden site was full of debris. They had to find equipment to get the garden ready. While several families helped with the garden this year, more hands are needed. Heavy rains weren’t good for the crops, but encouraged the weeds. But Echo-Hawk said they’ll keep developing the garden, and even want to make gardening part of the curriculum at Pawnee Nation College.

“We’re eventually wanting to make (gardening) part of the health education class,” Echo-Hawk said, and even develop a separate class to teach gardening skills. Echo-Hawk said she’s excited about everything that’s developing because of the work done in Nebraska. Perhaps the biggest gain, she said, may be finding out the true value of pure Pawnee corn.

“When you get to talking about corn and its uses, it seems you could talk all day about it,” she said, and she looks forward to a time when the Pawnee can not only discover the benefits of heritage crops, but share them.