Curing with Our Mother Corn

Abstract: In this article, the author discusses the myriad of ways agricultural practices are interconnected with healing modalities. Using environmental justice and healing justice frameworks, the author examines how Our Mother Corn (“Native Corn”), as a Wixárika relative, prescribes and assures the health of Wixárika families. Drawing from ethnographic research, the author examines Wixárika communities’ views on health. To be healthy, Wixárika families maintain a harmonious relationship with their ancestors—including Our Mother Corn—to receive wellness from them. In the article, the author questions current healing frameworks and problematizes the current traditional practices.

Citation: Garcia-Weyandt, Cyndy Margarita. “Curing with Our Mother Corn” The Jugaad Project, 27 October 2021, www.thejugaadproject.pub/mother-corn [date of access]

Poema VI

I saw my mother again
And I felt her body
I felt her body, not like feeling her physicality, but like embodying
I embodied her for a second
From the tip of her toes to the top of her head
I felt her growth, her pain, her anguish, her happiness, and her content She didn’t have to speak to me
I felt her body and I knew how she felt
I felt her grow, I remembered how it felt to be in her womb
I felt her feet like her roots crawling up with pain from the ground
I felt her anguish, like growing from the inside to her extremities
I felt her happiness, dancing with acoustics of the wind
I felt her content, seeing me back, feeling me there
I felt her body
This time I felt her physicality and the pain was there
I felt her body and I held her for a second
We embraced and with the wind we danced together Embracing!
We did not feel any more anger
We did not feel any more regret
We felt each other and our memory came back
We remembered we were once one!
I saw my mother and I felt her body
I knew it was all to her and all of for her to me
I felt her body and it was during the strawberry moon after that
I decided to change
Reconfigure my growth and spark the change
Grow a tassel, spike!
I saw her as me and she saw me as hers!

 -June 2020[i] 

Fig. 1. Our Mother Corn. Photo by author.

Introduction

In the oral tradition of Wixárika families, Yuawima (“Blue Corn”) was the first Corn maid to be part of the first farmer’s family.[ii] She was a Corn-person and lived with Watakame (“First farmer”) to provide seeds. Watakame cultivated the land as part of the many rituals to maintain kinship with not only Yuawima but with all “other-than-human” beings including Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”).[iii] Therefore, cultivating the land offers a framework beyond farming and growing food—cultivating Our Mother Corn offers a framework to relate with the land and all beings. The land relies on human’s ability to formulate, maintain, and sustain a reciprocal relationship with the other beings beyond western notions of being and existing. Through sustainable agriculture, Native communities across the globe have found ways to establish connections with the land, decolonize their diet, and maintain cultivation practices for cultural survival, and conceive the land as an extension of their body (Simpson 2014).[iv] Sustainable agriculture offers a framework to re-establish relations with food, deconstruct binaries between food as a commodity, deconstruct gender divisions in the kitchen, and find a path to attain food sovereignty and food justice around the world (Tedlock & Tedlock 1992; Salmon 2012; Menzies 2006).[v]

For the past ten years, I have been learning from community members—especially women—on the role of motherhood, kinship relations, and “other-than-human” being interactions. I wish to dedicate this article to my Wixárika collaborators and family who made this research possible by allowing me to be part of their spaces, especially my Godmother Rosalía Lemus de La Rosa and comadre (co-mother) Felipa Rivera Lemus from the Y+rata community in Tepic. Additionally, I have been learning from plants and Native seeds in a more intimate way, learning how to restore traditional healing practices within my family. Thank you to all my emerging families—human and beyond—for making my connections stronger. In my research, I collaborate with urban Wixárika speakers in El Gran Nayar—Wixárika (Huichol), Náayari (Cora), Mexicanero (Nahua), and O’dam (Southeastern Tepehúan) territory.

Specifically, I conduct community-based research and active participatory research to examine the crucial role of Our Mother Corn (“Native Corn”) in healing practices. I use autoethnographic and poetry as methods to position myself in the field and speak about human and beyond-human interactions. I also coordinate the Proyecto Taniuki (“Our Language Project”), a Wixárika language revitalization project based in Tepic. As part of the Taniuki, the collective offers language courses and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) workshops to mainly third-generation Wixárika children and youth. Annually, we—the students, teachers, and collaborators—cultivate Our Mother Corn inside our school garden, as well as in a community plot to maintain kinship and learn language, culture, and traditions from Our Mother Corn.

Over the years and through embodied practices, I have learned countless practices inside the Cornfield concerning Indigenous science and technology. We engage with Our Mother Corn as a relative, following principles and protocols of coexistence taught by Wixárika elders. The Cornfield is our lab, but the seeds are not specimens, they are our relatives—more specifically, “Our Mother.” In 2018, I was invited to the Indigenous Science and Technology Symposium at Edmonton Alberta, Canada alongside many other Indigenous women and scientists. It was there that I began more clearly seeing the correlation between my work among Wixárika families in cultivation practices and science and technology. I have spent many summers in the field with other families cultivating and learning with them the meaning of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), Indigenous frameworks to conceptualize the land as an extension of kin, and Indigenous ecologies, but more precisely, the ecologies of womanhood that allow to all principles of coexistence to flourish. I learned with my comadres, or co-mothers, how our labor brings together a multitude of species. Through the years, my research practices have expanded to collaborate with community, learn from them, and understand how Our Mother Corn is responsible for our health. I learned from multiple plant teachers how to initiate relations with them, and I have taken several classes about Mexican herbalism to learn about Native plants as relatives, their properties, and how to best interact in order to coexist. In the field, I document how Yuri’ikú (“True Corn” or “Heritage Corn”) is an actor in the life of many families in Tepic and how, from cultivation to harvesting, Our Mother Corn prescribes the health and the wellbeing of families. By offering examples from Indigenous communities in Mexico, I explore how their efforts to bring back Heritage Corn as main crop provide alternatives ways to relate with the land. These communities’ efforts provide a model to conceptualize land as an extension of our bodies. Here, I also will demonstrate the essential role of sustainable agriculture and seeds within Indigenous communities. I will then discuss the impact of the agrobusiness on the environment and show how environmental justice is deeply interconnected with ancestral agricultural practices examining how non-traditional, monoculture, and large-scale agriculture interfere with the health of people. Secondly, my research will demonstrate how Indigenous agricultural systems and ceremonial practices surrounding Heritage Corn continue being the epicenter of healing practices in contemporary Indigenous groups, specifically in Tepic, Mexico.

Fig. 2. “Co-parents: kinship outside colonial boundaries” October 2015. Photo by author.

Theoretical Framework

In many Indigenous communities in Mexico, geographies and ecologies encompass more than the physical features of the land and the living organisms in the environment. Geographies and ecologies constitute many branches of spaces and places where knowledge is collected, reproduced, and transmitted by multiple actors including “other-than-human” beings or ancestors (Weyandt-Garcia 2020).[vi] Inter-species and non-human interactions in within Indigenous families occurs very often. Families’ proximity between “the rural” and “the city” allows to the daily interaction of not only animals and not only plants, but also the topographic formations, lands, and natural forces. So, following these concepts of relatedness and being, Wixárika families in Y+rata share a field of connections with their environment and everyone who inhabits it—human and non-human—including Corn, deer, bodies of water, and topological formations. These relationships are the basis of Wixárika’s social networks and relatives. All beings are in constant interaction and in reciprocity with families in different times and spaces. Through this constant interaction with relatives in everyday life and in ceremonial spaces, families in Y+rata give attributes of personhood to “other-than-human” beings.

Hegemonic western relationships between people and their land contradicts Indigenous epistemologies, therefore disrupting traditional ways of relating with “other-than-human” beings. As such, I aim to interconnect ideas from environmental justices and healing justices to analyze the close relationship between land and body. The ongoing pollution and degradation of the environment directly impacts the health of minority communities, especially Indigenous groups of people (Bullard 1993; Gilmore 1998; Pulido 2000).[vii] The environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s after demonstrations and protests against polluting areas populated by minority communities in the United States (Bullard 1993).[viii] The pollution of the land targets minority communities by polluting industries resulting in “high rates of environmentally related illnesses” (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019: 16).[ix] This movement’s main objective is to stop the exposure, dumping, or/polluting of the land with hazardous environmental conditions inside underrepresented communities. Some examples are exposure to toxic insecticides, polluting bodies of water, and land (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; Ascencio, The Environmental Justice in Mexico, A UC Berkeley project).[x] As previously explained, from the perspective of Wixárika families, the relationship between Wixárika and their ecosystem extends beyond a singular physical experience. The environment offers traditional ecological knowledge, a framework to maintain a balanced relationship in which people are stewards of the land and in turn, the land offers TEK for community survival. These interactions ensure the survival of all parts of the ecosystem. This is the case of Our Mother Corn. To grow Our Mother Corn, Wixárika families gather and cultivate for her survival. As a result, Our Mother Corn offers the seeds to maintain a constant communication through the embodiment of cultural practices.

Fig. 3. “Yuimakwaxa Ceremony” October 2016. Photo by author.

In Mexico, the cultivation of single crops in the land (monocrops) impact the environment. Single crops deplete the soil of nutrients, makes it less productive, and reduces the organic matter in the soil, causing erosion over time. Agrobusiness, or enterprises in agriculture, make profit from annually cultivating single crops because it maximizes the production of a single commodity (e.g., sugarcane, coffee, flours, etc.). In contrast to monocrops, in polyculture, multiple crops grow together to increase biodiversity, enhance soil health, eliminate fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, and control erosion. In the case of growing multiple crops while growing Our Mother Corn, many families cultivate beans, squash, chilies, tomatoes, and herbs. Our Mother Corn, for example, grows vertically to maximize the consumption of light during the day. Other plants such as squash and beans grow together to maximize the production of oxygen and nitrogen in the soil, avoid predators, and grow healthier. Wild medicinal plants grow around Corn such as Dandelion (Taraxacum Officinale W.), Epazote (Teloxys Ambrosioides L.), Malva (Malva Parviflora), and Chiclacayote (Argemone Mexicana L.). Additionally, the coamil (“Cornfield”) serves as an ecosystem for many other species such as Corn worms, fungus (huitlacoche), ants, and pollinators (Garcia-Weyandt, 2020: 65).[xi] An environmental justice framework sheds light to the multiple ways in which corporations—specifically the agribusinesses and mining industries—negatively impact the environment. On Indigenous land, these corporations harm the environment and cause a negative impact on the health of communities by polluting and making it close to impossible to access and cultivate the land.

Fig. 4. “Offerings during Yuimakwaxa Ceremony” October 2016. Photo by author.

A healing justice framework responds to the multiple ways of curing the body from generational trauma, violence, and oppression of body and mind (Valenti et al., 2010; Page 2007; Wong 2020).[xii] In my research, I build on Indigenous agricultural practices, traditional healing practices, and ontological frameworks to understand how Our Mother Corn (Heritage Corn) is an epicenter of healing currently taking place in contemporary Indigenous groups. Furthermore, introducing a healing justice lens to the research of traditional agriculture demonstrates how traditional ways of healing encompass more than just the body of humans. In this way, a healing justice approach contributes to the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) can access a holistic way to treat/heal from generational trauma, violence, and the oppression of body and mind, using decolonial methods, alternative epistemologies, and community-based ontologies.

In the western world, Indigenous practices regarding the body have often been conceptualized as ineffective “folk medicine.” Healing and Corn centers Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies to unsettle the western frameworks around healing the body. Over the course of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have been forced to find alternative ways of healing due to the lack of adequate health care and accessibility to allopathic medicine. Among Native communities, using traditional practices and herbal remedies has aided in the health of elders and vulnerable members of the community. As a result, there is a large gap in our current understanding of healing. A new framework is in need to tackle the injustices of accessing healthcare in the United States and across the globe. Furthermore, a healing approach that centers our relationship with “other-than-human” beings aims to restore the health of BIOPC. In this, understanding how Wixárika’s healing modalities and allopathic medicine complement and contribute to our understanding of the body can be transformative. Healing justice is fundamental in uncovering how diverse sets of communities understand health, seek for alternative medicine, and maintain connections to “other-than-human” beings, specifically the land and all beings, human and beyond.

However, as with other settler colonial structures, the Mexican nation-state fails to understand Indigenous relatedness, notions of being, existing, and methods of curing the body. In Mexico, many Indigenous communities demands their rights to their ancestral land, self-determination, and sovereignty. Since Spanish colonization in 1521, Wixárika families and communities have struggled to maintain their original lands, battling against a plethora of invasive actors ranging from mining corporations, agribusiness, the touristic industry, spiritual tourism, Indigenous erasure, and pollution of bodies of water and the land. More recently, the state has failed to understand traditional ways of healing and how interconnected is the land and “other-than-human” beings in the health of people.

Decolonial Practices in the Field/Methodology and Methods

Fig. 5. “Land and Body” August 2019. Photo by author.

I engage in decolonial practices in the field by conducting community-based research and active participatory research. In this work, I often offer workshops to youth and children to understand how they conceptualize plant-human interactions in the urban context, using their own epistemologies and ontologies. I used multi-species ethnography or the study of “contact zones, where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 546).[xiii] Using multispecies ethnography, I understood how plants, and their livelihoods, shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. For example, when Our Mother Corn and people meet, their livelihood shaped by the political (agrarian laws, land tenure and land fights, cultivation of GMOs, etc.). The economic (the local and global trade of corn and corn-based products) and finally in the cultural forces (centrality of Corn in the life of Indigenous peoples of Mexico). Plants and people co-exist and depend on each other for their survival. Specifically, Our Mother Corn and many Indigenous peoples in Mexico depend on each other for nutrition, cultural identity, and maintaining connections with the land and ancestors. The role of women in the livelihood of Our Mother Corn is essential in enabling inter-species relations between Our Mother Corn and people.

I engage ethically and with responsibility with other beings in the field by being in with relationship with members of the community and ancestors. As previously explained, this research could have not been possible without Wixárika collaborators, friends, and emerging families. My goal as a researcher is to continue ethical practices of consent not only with human collaborators but with “non-human” such as Our Mother Corn. Currently, I am in relation with Our Mother Corn by cultivating my own Corn field in Tepic, Mexico, with the permission of my elders and then with the consent of Our Mother Corn. I have engaged with this practice since 2018 and I hope to continue maintaining this relationship with Our Mother Corn and extend it to other ancestors.

Fig. 6. “Consent in the Coamil” October 2019. Photo by author.

When I think about the methods and strategies that have helped engage in ethical research with my community of study, I often come back to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou iwi). The work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith challenges researchers to examine the role of research in knowledge production. The 25 Indigenous projects in chapter eight of Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People (Claiming, Testimonies, Storytelling, Celebrating Survival, Remembering, Indigenizing, Intervening, Revitalizing, Restoring, etc.) prioritize an Indigenous agenda.[xiv] In many ways, my research prioritizes Wixárika ways of knowing, being, existing, thinking, and theorizing.

I also think about alternative methodologies that help me develop a field of relations inside my field of study, and outside colonial practices. Such tools allow us to expand our thinking about how we formulate relationships, maintain reciprocal relationships, and sustain those relationships. For instance, I use art as a methodology to reimagine the realities my body can inhabit in multiple spaces. These realities help me perceive and make sense of other worlds. In this other world, Our Mother Corn has always been a relative and not a specimen for research studies.

Indeed, autoethnographic writing help me make sense of the relationship between my body and the community of study (Behar 1996).[xv] My narrative, as a non-Wixárika woman, part Indigenous person from Oaxaca (San Juan Sayultepec, Oaxaca), part mestiza, a transnational scholar, and a mother of my child and co-mothers of many children in Y+rata, informs my methodologies and how I navigate my field of study. I also use methods from multispecies ethnography to see how and under which circumstances Our Mother Corn and people meet and form kinship ties. I use those methodologies to reconfigure how Our Mother Corn is an actor in the life of people, how the livelihood of Our Mother Corn depends on social, political, and economic factors, and how my scholarship offers alternative methodologies to expand our current understanding of human and non-human interactions. My research centers Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies outside western frameworks to engage with relatives in an ethical and responsible way. Using multiple methods to cultivate land and theories that enlighten my understanding of the importance of the environment in my life have provided platforms to conceptualize my relationship between Our Mother Corn and my human relatives. One platform has been writing poetry.

Fig. 7. “Cultivating in La Labor with Taniuki students” July 2018. Photo by author.

In my poetry, I use the power of language to convey the relationships with “other-than-human” beings, experiences, coexistence among species, but most important my emotions that carry the power to enact a different world. Poetry then becomes more than just figurative language to evoke emotions or a type of literature to imagine worlds but a method to create worlds. In Poema VI from my doctoral dissertation, I write about my relationship between the body of Our Mother Corn and my own body.[xvi] I recreate a world where I perform our relationality, where we both exist and dance together. In the stanzas of the poem, I embody her, and I feel how she feels. Through the multiple verses, we perform together, and I describe her movements and my emotions. This poem creates the process of healing and helps me attain wellness.

Fig. 8. “Our Mother Corn” October 2019. Photo by author.

Role of Women in Maintaining Practices

Women have often been active within conflicts and demands to their communities’ rights and sovereignty. Here, however, I focus on how women pass down the relationships between humans and “other-than-human” beings as an act of resistance within colonial states. Learning about inter-species relations begins at home, with community-based methods, where caregivers are the primary educators of the family. With the migration of Indigenous families to the city, women have been very active in maintaining Indigenous ways of being and existing by enabling interspecies relations. In her most recent work, Stacy Schaefer, Huichol Women, Weavers, and Shamans, addresses the movement of Wixárika women to cities as they leave traditional lands to find access to education, services, and a more profitable market for selling arts and crafts (2015, p. 152).[xvii] Indigenous women from Mexico find niches across and beyond the nation as a resource to gain economic sustainability. For instance, Y+rata with strong women leadership built a tuki (“ceremonial center”), kitchens, and fire pits for the performance of Wixárika ceremonies and cultural practices, mirroring Sierra living.

Fig. 9. “Felipa Rivera in Y+rata during the Yuimakwaxa Ceremony” October 2015. Photo by author.

In my active participatory research among women in Y+rata, I have learned how women as primary care givers and centers of all family knowledge transmit the power of healing to other women through 1) the handling seeds, 2) preparing meals, and 3) making offerings to “other-than-human” beings. For instance, every summer women, young girls, and children gathered to separate the seeds for the cultivation. As families gathered, they carefully select the healthiest seeds for the cultivation at the same time they learn about their responsibilities inside the community. In each ritual, members of the family received their duties and responsibilities to fulfill before, during or after the ritual. Additionally, they prepared the meals and teach each other about the importance of food preparation and offerings. During pilgrimages across Wixárika land, families delivered meals as offerings to maintain relationships with all ancestors. The labor of Wixárika mothers before ceremonies harness the relationship with Our Mother Corn by implementing a diet and connection with Yuri ‘Ikú (“True Corn”). This connection assures Our Mother Corn’s livelihood and the growth and health of families.

Fig. 10. “Harvesting of Our Mother Corn” October 2019. Photo by author.

In urban contexts, women use storytelling and narrate Wixárika ethnohistory to trace the genealogy of Our Mother Corn in their embodied practices, such as cultivation and cooking. Women transmit narratives to keep community members aware of their responsibilities towards “other-than-human” beings by repeating behaviors found in ethnohistory narratives. Often, in the Y+rata community family members gather to listen to the grandmother Rosalía Lemus de La Rosa or Mamachali retell over and over the narratives of how Our Mother Corn came to the family. In 2020, we had the great honor to record, transcribe, and translate the narrative of how Yuawima came to the first farmer. In her detailed account, Mamachali narrates how her ancestors interacted with “other-than-human” beings and gained from them properties and attributes of personhood. In the narrative, Our Mother Corn offers a philosophy to live a proper Wixárika life coexisting in reciprocity with multiple beings. The following excerpt from Mamachali’s narrative of how Blue Corn came to the first Wixárika family exemplifies the bond between people and Our Mother. In this bond, assigned by Mrs. Dove or Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”), demonstrates people how to treat Blue Corn with respect (letting her rest), dignity (using words of encouragement), and honorability (bringing offerings):

Tixaɨ pemukareiˀaitɨ́aka, pemukaheéteˀani, muwa xeikɨ́a niwetaritsie makakaní, yɨrari pemeimawirieka, ha pemeimawirieka, paapa pemeimawirieka, tunuarikɨ katira pemeikutairiwaani”, paɨ waníu tiˀɨkitɨ́a wateí./To the Corn woman you will not assign any work, you will not scold her, she will only stay in her altar and you will offer water, tortilla, and the candle will always stay lit[xviii]

When a family makes the decision to cultivate and harvest Our Mother Corn for ceremonial purposes, they make the decision to make kinship with Corn and accept all the responsibilities towards Corn. And when families make the decision to ingest their ancestral seeds, the families resist to disconnect from their relative Corn. This conscious decision grounds urban Wixárika people to their ancestral, place-based practices. More than a food staple, Our Mother Corn offers the family well-being by providing nutrients and connections to Tatéi Takutsi Nakawé (“Our Mother Growth”). Corn as relative, and as an actor in Wixárika’s health, implies a reciprocal relationship and reaffirms interspecies relations. Our Mother Corn, in the life of Wixárika, acts a major agent in the life of people by granting them physical and metaphysical wellness. The cultivation assured a constant exchange of health when Corn grows healthy to feed people and people grow healthy to cultivate Corn. In this reciprocal relationship, both Corn and Wixárika depended on each other for survival. Wixárika paid gratitude to Tatéi Takutsi Nakawé (“Our Grandmother Growth”) and Tatéi Niwestsika (“Our Mother Corn”) when they harvested the land and honored all daughter of Tatéi Niwestsika, Five Color Corn Maids, in sustainable agriculture.

Fig. 11. “Altar at Y+rata” October 2018. Photo by author.

Healing and Corn—Practices in the Cornfield

Fig. 12. “Preparing Corn-based meals” January 2019. Photo by author.

Within Wixárika families, consuming Heritage Corn equals medicine, especially if the seeds come from the first harvest—community members often consume these first corn cobs during ceremony. The seeds come from a long genealogy of Yuri'iku  (“True Corn”), and the first corn cobs contain all the healthy ingredients in its purest form. Later, the seeds in other foods such as tortillas, tamales, or drinks sustain the body of many Wixárika with Yuri’ikú, and provide all the healthy benefits to perform daily routines. For some Wixárika families, tortillas are the main food staple for Wixárika meals. Tamales and Corn-based drinks are only consumed occasionally and during ceremonies. Some of the culinary representations of Corn include tortillas, tamales (only Corn-dough and beans), Corn in the cob, and Nawá or tejüino (Corn-based drink). When the seeds go through the nixtamalization process (Corn infused with limestone), the outer layer of corn gets separated so we can digest Corn better and maximize the absorption of all nutrients. This process helps in the absorption of all the niacin, six amino acids, and calcium from the corn dough or masa. Now, depending on the color of Heritage Corn, the properties change. For example, purple or blue corn have antioxidant properties. According to studies in Peru and in Mexico eating or drinking blue/purple corn can increase antioxidants in the body due to the high levels of blue pigments or anthocyanins (Guillén-Sánchez et. Al 2014).[xix] Also, the drinks made from blue corn have many health benefits such as Chicha in Peru and Nawá within Wixárika in Mexico. The nawá is a fermented drink like kombucha. The drink cleanses the body during consumption for the ingestion of other foods. People only drink nawá in ceremonies, but it is a process to cleanse your body before the ingestion of other corn-based foods. Drinking this detox elixir before ingesting your daily doses of niacin, amino acids, and calcium assures the ingestion of all the nutrients of corn. When people eat Heritage Corn and Corn-based drinks such as nawá they are maximizing their consumption of nutrients. Eating tortillas every day and drinking nawá most of the time during ceremonies (April-October) are necessary doses of medicine to maintain bodies healthy throughout the year. Thus, Heritage Corn is medicine to keep the body healthy.

Fig. 13. “Preparing Corn-based meals” October 2018. Photo by author.

Fig. 14. “Preparing Corn-based meals” January 2019. Photo by author.

All the meals with corn are prepared first by infusing the seeds with limestone to separate the outer layer in nixtamalization. Later, the seeds are pulverized and then turned into the corn dough or masa by pulverizing the seeds. From the masa, women prepare all the meals, and some families have their own ways and recipes. For example, for fiestas or ceremonies the tortillas are made with Heritage Corn and not maseca (premade corn powder for masa). Only the grandmother and one other girl can help in making the tortillas because they have been properly trained in the culinary arts of the family.

Fig. 15. “Making tortillas in the metate” March 2016. Photo by author.

Conclusion

The rematriation of seeds by reconnecting them with their local environment—and with people—is in the epicenter of health within Indigenous communities in Mexico. Within my own practices, learning how to care for my human and beyond human relatives has been a transformative opportunity to revitalize the traditional cultivation practices and restore traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) within my family, teaching me cultivate the land with a lesser impact on the environment. Additionally, I have learned how to care for “other-than-human” beings in a reciprocal way, bringing balance not only to my body but to the body of Our Mother Corn.

Tatéi Niwetsika (“Our Mother Corn”) and her body contribute to the well-being of Wixárika families. In the consumption for medicinal purposes, the properties of Our Mother Corn provide myriad of culinary representations, especially Nawá (“Corn-based fermented drink”) for offerings. Many plants can transmit their healing properties through the ingestion of their bodies. For this reason, Tatéi Niwetsika is at the center of Wixárika healing practices, sustainable agriculture, and ceremonial life for many families within the community. Indeed, environmental justice is deeply interconnected with restoring ancestral agricultural practices. Healing justice movements advocate for BIPOC communities as a way to heal from inter-generational trauma. Both frameworks advocate for the ethical ways to relate with “other-than-human” beings for the wellbeing of all.

Fig. 17. “K+puli holding Yuawima” May 2019. Photo by author.

Note

I would like to acknowledge that I wrote this article while teaching at Kalamazoo College, which sits on unceded territory of the Council of the Three Fires – the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Additionally, my research was completed on El Gran Nayar—Wixárika, Náayari, Mexicanero, and O’dam territory. Further, I am grateful for the constant advice and guidance of my advisor Dr. David Delgado Shorter, my comadre Felipa Rivera Lemus, and godmother Rosalía Lemus de la Rosa. ¡Pampariyutsi! Thank you!

Endnotes

[i] From my doctoral dissertation entitled: Te ‘uayemat+ ta Kiekari Tatéi Niwetsikak+: Urban Wixárika Healing Practices and Ontology.

[ii] Throughout the article, I capitalize Corn and Maize to denote attributes of personhood, agency, intention and will to act upon the life of other beings.

[iii] This narrative was first recorded in 2015 Felipa Rivera Lemus in 2015 and then by Rosalía Lemus de la Rosa in 2020. Both women are Wixárika from Santa Catarina in Jalisco and reside in Y+rata a Wixárika community outside Tepic, Mexico.

[iv] Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014).

[v] Tedlock & Tedlock 1992; Salmon 2012; Menzies 2006.

[vi] Garcia-Weyandt, Cyndy Margarita. “Living Geographies: Urban Wixárika Places and Spaces of Knowledge.” Theory & Event 23, no. 4 (2020): 1066-1085.

[vii] Bullard 1993; Gilmore 1998; Pulido 2000.

[viii] Bullard 1993.

[ix] Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As long as Grass grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock.

[x] Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; Ascencio, The Environmental Justice in Mexico, A UC Berkeley project (Ascencio, TheEnvironmental Justice in Mexico, A UC Berkeley project) https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~robertoascencio/).

[xi] Garcia-Weyandt, 2020: 65.

[xii] Valenti et al., 2010; Page 2007; Wong 2020.

[xiii] Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 546.

[xiv] Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd., 2021.

[xv] Behar 1996.

[xvi] Garcia-Weyandt, Cyndy Margarita. “Poema VI.” Te ‘uayemat+ ta Kiekari Tatéi Niwetsikak+: Urban Wixárika Healing Practices and Ontology. University of California, Los Angeles, 2020.

[xvii] Schaefer, Stacy B. Huichol women, weavers, and shamans. UNM Press, 2015.

[xviii] Rosalía Lemus de la Rosa storytelling June 2020 virtual conference. Transcribed and translated by Felix Bonilla.

[xix] Guillén-Sánchez, Jhoseline, Sigry Mori-Arismendi, and Luz María Paucar-Menacho. “Características y propiedades funcionales del maíz morado (Zea mays L.) var. subnigroviolaceo.” Scientia Agropecuaria 5, no. 4 (2014): 211-217.