myaamia miincipi: Growing Native Corn for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

 What can two corn cobs do for a neighborhood reclaiming their language and tradition?

Four months earlier than the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, curator Mary Linn and manufacturing workers started making ready the instructing backyard for the Native Language Reclamation within the U.S. program. The first week of my internship, we took a visit to the Smithsonian Gardens greenhouses in Suitland, Maryland, to witness the planting of myaamia miincipi, a novel number of corn cultivated by myaamiaki, the Myaamia or Miami folks. The journey of miincipi displays the journey of the Myaamia folks, who’ve been working tirelessly to reclaim their language and tradition.

The ancestral land of the Myaamia is in what is understood as we speak as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Through two compelled removals, the Myaamia have been pushed to northeast Oklahoma, the present location of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.

As a results of displacement and compelled assimilation, the Myaamia language ceased to have fluent first-language audio system within the Sixties. Since the early Nineteen Nineties, the nation has labored to reawaken their language by means of archival supplies, linguistic reconstruction, and the exhausting work of studying the language and rebuilding neighborhood. 

One effort of the reawakening is the Myaamia Center, established as a part of the long-term collaboration between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University of Ohio (MUO) in Oxford, Ohio. Here, Myaamia college students can study their language, tradition, and historical past by means of courses and occasions.

At the 2025 Festival, college students from the Myaamia Center mentioned and demonstrated their journey of language and cultural reclamation. They confirmed us how they join studying their language with conventional artwork, data, and video games. They demonstrated peepankišaapiikahkia (ribbon work), taught language classes, performed a number of conventional video games within the Language Lodge, and taught guests find out how to play peekitahaminki, or Myaamia lacrosse.

Another a part of their heritage classes are about conventional crops and foraged vegetation. MUO has an energetic instructing backyard, and college students take seasonal area journeys to see completely different levels of vegetation in forests and fields. Among all of the vegetation, miincipi is essential to Myaamia tradition and conventional weight-reduction plan. Its cultivation and harvest is marked in myaamia kiilhswaakani, the Myaamia Lunar Calendar, equivalent to throughout kiišiinkwia kiilhswa (Green Corn Moon) when the kernels are candy and able to eat on the cob. The miincipi they use as we speak descends from solely two dried cobs, which survived the numerous challenges confronted by Myaamia over time.

Linn labored with mahkoonsihkwa Kara Strass, director of Miami Tribe relations at MUO and a mentor to the Myaamia contributors, to verify the Smithsonian may develop miincipi for the Festival. To do that respectfully and correctly, we enlisted the assistance of Dr. Tim McCoy, a Miami citizen and curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Together we visited the Smithsonian Gardens greenhouses in March to plant the miincipi.

McCoy soaked every kernel of miincipi in his mouth to interrupt down its hull. As he planted them within the soil, he sang a standard tune to the miincipi within the Myaamia language.

In addition to planting the corn kernels, McCoy provided a present within the type of tobacco, which he sprinkled over every potted plant. Many North American tribes, together with the Myaamia, provide tobacco as a type of respect when asking for help. Planting beliefs and practices are variable amongst Myaamia as we speak, and McCoy’s practices signify only one strategy.

Less than a month after planting, the miincipi had sprouted up below the care of workers at Smithsonian Gardens. Meanwhile, we on the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage have been busy making ready all the opposite elements of the Festival.

The day earlier than the Festival, our Gardens colleagues delivered mature stalks of miincipi to the National Mall. They have been set to be replanted in Gifts from the Land, the backyard containing vegetation of cultural significance to the Native teams collaborating within the Native Language Reclamation program.

We unloaded the cornstalks together with different vegetation for the backyard, getting our arms soiled with gardens coordinator Kyra Uphoff and volunteers to maneuver them fastidiously into planters. In 4 months, the stalks had grown to round ten toes tall.

In the backyard, Myaamia Center college students and their workers mentors shared with Festival guests the which means of miincipi in Myaamia tradition, in addition to the importance of miincipi’s restoration for future generations of Myaamia folks.

After the Festival ended, the miincipi continued its journey by returning to Tim McCoy. Using a hand cart by means of the National Museum of Natural History, the corn made its option to his workplace. There it missed the National Mall, the place it had lived for over every week and welcomed many guests.

McCoy has since harvested the miincipi, its ears having absolutely matured within the few months after planting. Although many of the corn had begun to mould as a result of excessive humidity on the National Mall, he was in a position to harvest one good ear. This will probably be dried and used to seed the subsequent technology.

The Myaamia makes use of for miincipi don’t cease at cooking or gardening. Education and neighborhood actions surrounding miincipi assist to revitalize the Myaamia language and transmit cultural data from one technology to the subsequent. From simply two dried cobs to some kernels in a Smithsonian greenhouse to tall stalks on America’s Front Lawn, miincipihas taken us on a journey that helps to additional the Myaamia folks’s broader language and cultural reclamation.

Sofia Wallace is a Native Language Reclamation program intern for the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and a rising senior at Dartmouth College, majoring in linguistics and minoring in Russian.