A Story of Glass Gem Corn Indigenous Heritage

Everything that we meet has a story. From what we put in our mouths to eat to the thousands of parts inside the device you're reading this on! 

For the most part, our dominant culture doesn’t value recording where things come from and where they go when we’re done with them. We want to do our small part in changing that.

We honor and give our most sincere gratitude to all of the people and places who, over the last 9,000+ years, have tended corn seeds for nourishment, prayer, and of course--adornment.

We give thanks to the original peoples of what is now called Mexico and North America as well as their indigenous ancestors whose language, identity, bloodline and belonging is inseparable from corn.

Through this jewelry, we are raising awareness and funds that uplift indigenous communities to heal, restore, and deepen their relationship to their culture and cosmologies through heirloom seeds.

This image above is of a Mayan Maize deity clay sculpture from the 7th to 9th centuries wearing necklace, earring, and crown jewelry. We are certainly not the first to revere seeds as the most sacred and beautiful of adornments. 

Thank you especially to beloved ancestor Carl ‘White Eagle’ Barnes (June 18, 1928-April 16, 2016), a half Cherokee and half Scot-Irish Oklahoma farmer, for his decades of meticulous devotion to seed stewardship—isolating reoccurring ancestral varieties of corn—and for his invaluable gift of reviving a both ancient and never-before-seen beauty of Glass Gem Corn. Catch more of the story of his devoted and deeply-respected life here on Mother Earth News.

 We honor him by his oft-spoken words of: ‘The Seed Remembers’ as well as this poem below his image.

 

Thank you to his apprentice, Greg Schoen, for carrying forth these seeds, crossing them with other indigenous varieties from the Santa Clara Pueblo, and bringing them to Native Seeds/ SEARCH former Executive Director, Bill McDorman.