On April 19th, the VAC hosted a panel discussion titled “The Growth of ‘Unshadowed Land’: Welcoming Kus Back to Campus” on our continuing project with Indigenous artist Nicholas Galanin, “Unshadowed Land,” and our collaboration with Catawba Nation, the native people indigenous to this area. The event was sponsored by the Davidson College Farm; the Environmental Studies, Art, History, and Biology Departments; and the Van Every/Smith Galleries.
To recap, “Unshadowed Land” began in Fall 2021, when students, faculty, and community members dug the outline of the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, Washington D.C. w into the ground, like he’s being buried. In February 2022, we amended the soil of that silhouette to prepare to plant “kus,” the Catawba word for corn. Catawba corn is a corn variant lost to time and colonization but recently rediscovered.
This Tuesday, April 26, we will plant the corn, supporting the aims of the Catawba’s food autonomy and continuing Galanin’s long-term and multiphase art installation. The panel discussion was a dialogue on the importance of seed reclamation and of corn to indigenous societies. The talk featured Dave Smoke McCluskey (Akwesasne Mohawk), Chef/Miller/Native Foodways Lecturer; DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren (Catawba), Consultant and Artist; Aaron Baumgardner (Catawba), Director of Natural Resources, Catawba Nation; and Davidson College professors Dr. Susana Wadgymar, Dr. Annie Merrill, and Dr. Rose Stremlau.
The talk began with a look back into corn’s history with native populations in the Americas. McCluskey said that “corn has always been a part of us.” Corn variations were grown here for thousands of years. It developed and grew with them; they would watch which seeds grew the hardiest corn or what techniques worked best and adapted their farming for the next season. Corn “helped build [their] societies” so there was a “near-religious thought process towards it,” McCluskey added. The panelists then reflected on how corn became “a site of colonization,” as George-Warren said, beginning in the 17th century. They talked about how their food was taken from them, both to be destroyed — as a part of “genocide and ethnic cleansing, [which are] are impossible to remove from our food” as McCluskey puts it — and to be stolen and bastardized.
Planting Catawba corn, which was rediscovered a few years ago, in “Unshadowed Land” is a reclamation of land, sustenance, and power that was taken from indigenous peoples by colonizing and anti-native forces like Jackson. Corn is resistance. “Corn is a teacher to us,” Baumgardner says. George-Warren said that they hope to reweave the ecology of foodways and farming into a native-oriented, sustainable future, both through growing Catawba corn and “[re]teaching a love of our histories and stories.” You “can’t learn the language without learning the land,” he said.
– Isabel Smith ’24