Corn Mother

At a Glance

• Central figures: Corn Mother (sometimes called First Mother), a woman who feeds her people from her own body; her husband, born from the sea foam; and their many children and grandchildren.
• Setting: Wabanaki tradition (Penobscot and Abenaki peoples of the northeastern woodlands, present-day Maine and the Maritime provinces); the story belongs to the cycle of Kloskurbeh, the All-Maker.
• The turn: When the people grow too numerous for the hunt to feed them, Corn Mother instructs her husband to kill her and drag her body across the cleared earth.
• The outcome: From the ground where her flesh was dragged, corn grows for the first time, and the people have food enough to survive.
• The legacy: Corn itself - every planting and harvest carries her sacrifice forward, and among the Penobscot, seven ears of corn are saved from each harvest to seed the next, keeping Corn Mother’s body alive in the fields.

Kloskurbeh, the All-Maker, had finished shaping the world. He had made the rivers run and set the animals loose in the forests. Then he went to live on a hill in the north, and the world went on without him for a while.

A young man was born from the sea foam where it struck a rock on the coast. He stood up on the shore, wet, with no memory of anything before the wave. He walked inland and found Kloskurbeh and lived with him, and after a time a girl grew from a plant on the dew-wet earth where the sun first touched the ground in morning. She was beautiful. The young man married her. Kloskurbeh blessed them and went further north, leaving them to fill the world.

The Young Man and the Woman from the Dew

They had children. Their children had children. The family spread along the rivers and into the forests, and for a long time there was enough. The animals were plentiful. The fish filled the streams. Nobody went hungry.

But the people kept coming. More grandchildren, then great-grandchildren, camps growing into villages, villages pressing against each other along the water. The deer thinned out. The moose moved deeper into the woods. Fishing grounds that once fed a family now had three families pulling from them. The children began to look thin.

Corn Mother watched this happen. She loved her children - all of them, every generation outward from her body. She did not say anything for a long time. She cooked what there was. She divided the portions smaller and smaller.

Her husband saw her crying. He had never seen her cry before, not once since she had risen from the plant on the ground.

What is wrong?

Feed me, she said.

He did not understand. He brought her dried fish. She did not eat it.

That is not what I mean, she said. You must do what I tell you.

What She Asked

She told him to kill her.

He refused. He went to Kloskurbeh on his hill in the north and told him what she had said. Kloskurbeh sat quietly for a long time. Then he said: if she asks again, you must do it. She would not ask without reason.

The young man walked back. It took him many days. When he arrived, the children were thinner than before. Corn Mother was standing in front of the lodge waiting for him. She had not eaten while he was gone.

You must do it, she said. And then you must do exactly as I say. When I am dead, have two of our sons drag my body across the earth. Have them drag me back and forth by my hair over the bare ground until my flesh is scraped from my bones. Then leave that ground alone. Do not walk on it. Do not touch it. Wait seven moons. Then go back.

She told him one more thing: her bones were to be gathered and buried at the edge of the cleared ground. Not scattered. Buried together in a single place.

Her husband held her face in his hands. She did not look away from him.

The Cleared Ground

He killed her. The story does not say how, and among the Penobscot the manner is not dwelt on. He did it because she asked, and because Kloskurbeh had said he must.

Two of their sons took her body by the hair. They dragged her across the bare ground that had been cleared of brush and stone. Back and forth, as she had instructed, until her flesh was gone from her bones and the soil was dark with her. They were weeping the whole time. The other children stood at the edge and watched.

They gathered her bones and buried them at the border of the field, in a single place, as she had said. Then they left. They did not go back to that ground. They ate what little the forest still gave them. They waited.

Seven moons passed.

When they returned, the cleared earth was covered in tall green plants they had never seen. The stalks were as high as a person’s chest. At the top of each stalk, long silk threads blew in the wind - the color and texture of Corn Mother’s hair. Inside the husks, rows of seeds, yellow and dense, pressed tight together like the bodies of her many children.

This was corn.

They knew what it was. Not because anyone told them, but because they recognized her in it.

The Bones at the Border

At the edge of the field, where they had buried her bones, another plant had grown. This one was different - broad-leafed and low, with a sharp sweet smell when they rubbed the leaves between their fingers. This was tobacco. It had never existed before either.

The people harvested the corn. They learned to dry it, to grind it, to cook it into bread and porridge. They learned to save seed for the next planting. Seven ears from each harvest were set aside, never eaten - this was the rule, and it held. Those seven ears carried her forward into the next season and the next.

The tobacco they burned as an offering, the smoke carrying their words upward. When they wanted to speak to the ones who had gone, they used what had grown from her bones.

The Hair in the Silk

Every year after that, when the corn grew tall enough, the silk appeared at the top of each ear - fine, pale, shining in the light. The people saw it and knew whose hair it was. The wind moved through the fields and the silk moved with it, and the children who were too young to remember Corn Mother alive still understood, looking at the silk, that the corn was not just food. It was her body, given freely, still giving.

The Penobscot kept the seven ears. They planted in the spring. They harvested in the fall. They burned tobacco and watched the smoke rise. The fields fed the villages, and the villages grew, and no one forgot where the corn had come from - not the soil, but the woman who had walked into her own death so that her children’s children would eat.