"Hahneev--American Indian Corn"
"American Indian Corn and Natural Science"
"Hahneev (Comanche)--Tanchi (Choctaw)
Maize: Gift from America's First Peoples
Columbus did not realize that the gift of
maize was far more valuable than the spices or
gold he hoped to find. He had no way of knowing
that the history of maize traced back some 8,000
years or that it represented the most remarkable
plant breeding accomplishment of all time. He
might have been embarrassed if he had understood
that then, as now, this plant developed by peoples
he judged poor and uncivilized far outstripped in
productivity any of the cereals bred by Old World
farmers --wheat, rice, sorghum, barley, and rye.
Were he alive today, he would certainly be
astonished to see the extent to which the advent of
maize has affected land use, food production,
cuisine, and population growth around the
world.
Walton Galinat, 1992, "Chillies to Chocolate"
"when you eat corn-on-the-cob, it is very soft and sweet. But after corn dries, its outer shell becomes very hard. In scientific term, it becomes lignified when the cells around the center of the corn kernal become lightly latticed, like a tightly woven basket."
"In this lesson, you will learn about how corn may be edible even after it has become hardened."
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"American Indians use readily available alkalinematerials to take off the hard exterior of corn."
American Indian people also cooked certain kinds of hard corn (flint corn) to make one of our favorite movie foods---popcorn."
Lesson One:Acids andAlkalines
Lesson two: Exploring Corn
Other links to see:
