Watermelon Rites

Weather: For the past few weeks, the tropical depressions and storms off México that feed our monsoons have been heading west rather than north; some rain Friday night.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, morning glories, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, David and purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, African marigolds, coreopsis, blanket flower, zinnias.

Red and yellow apples visible on trees, pyracantha berries orange, grapes turning purple.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow mullein, goat’s head, bindweed, scarlet creeper, green-leaf five-eyes, yellow and white prairie evening primroses, leather leaf globe mallow, green amaranth, pigweed, Hopi tea, native sunflower, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters, side oats and seven week grama grasses.

In my yard: Yellow potentilla, garlic chives, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, lead wort plant, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, scarlet flax, Maximilian sunflowers, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, purple and cut-leaf coneflowers, Mönch aster, yellow and reseeded Sensation cosmos.

Sandcherries have all disappeared. Privet berries are bright green and highly visible. Rugosa rose hips are brilliant scarlet; small ones on Woodsi are cranberry red.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds, geckos, cabbage butterflies, bees, grasshoppers, ants.

Weekly update: Watermelons were so integrated into pueblo life by the time of the 1680 revolt that Popé assured his followers, if they abandoned the mission crops, they would "harvest a great deal of maize, many beans, a great abundance of cotton, calabashes and very large watermelons and cantaloupes."

Santa Clara included the melons in their "ritual formulas as one of the principal crops." Hopi at Shipau’lovi chanted

Corn in blossom
Beans in blossom
Your face on gardens looks.
Watermelon plant, muskmelon plant,
Your face on garden looks.

during the Butterfly dance, according to Elsie Clews Parsons. Alexander Stephen saw the Hopi at Walpi include watermelon seeds with those of cotton, gourd and sweet corn in the "paps of the effigy of the mother Pa’tlülükpñüh" in the Horned Water Serpent dance in 1893.

Parsons said the Hopi cut images of watermelon and corn during the Soyal winter solstice ceremony to bury in an orchard or field. The association remained after bands were Christianized. In the early twentieth century, the Santa Clara cut chunks "into ornamental patterns" to offer on the Day of the Dead in the churchyard.

Watermelon played an equally important role in social rituals that brought groups together. It seems to have functioned like the calumet in the midwest as a sign people were meeting in peace. When Diego de Vargas was negotiating with Ácoma during the Reconquest, they lowered "many watermelons, tortillas, and cooked pumpkin down to me, praising Our Lord for our great success."

At Santa Clara in the early twentieth century, the fruits were "the favorite luxury of the people - given as presents, and produced on festive occasions and for honored guests, especially in winter." Barbara Friere-Marreco said they and apples were provided "when neighbors are invited for Christian prayers."

I talked to someone from Santa Clara last year. He said when he went to one of the western pueblos a few year’s back to return a repaired ritual item, he sent his son into the local grocers to buy a watermelon. Even though he was doing them a favor, he was the one entering their pueblo.

The varieties grown by the Hopi and Santa Clara that were dried for winter use may have been some hybrid inadvertently developed in the pueblos that had the fat and keeping value of the older melons with some of the flavor of the newer ones. Paul Vestal said the Ramah Navajo often planted several varieties in "one small field." The plants are fertilized by bees, and accept pollen from cousins.

Some of the old ways have passed since new seeds were introduced. Alfred Whiting said, many Hopi were dismayed when their watermelons no longer kept until February.

Large watermelons were a Midwestern staple when I was a child. No refrigerator was large enough to hold them. No family could eat a whole one. They were reserved for large gatherings. I remember large metal tubs filled with ice and melons at 4-H camp.

Seedless melons are smaller than those large ovals, and inducive to smaller groups. A family can eat one in a few days, anytime they’re in season.

However, even the small melons produce large plants that ramble over the ground. People with small yards can’t give them space. They rarely appear in vegetable patches in the valley.

Until the listeria outbreak in 2011 that damaged the reputation of Colorado cantaloupes, peddlers would fill pick-up beds and sell Rocky Ford watermelons by the side of the road. I haven’t seem them the past few years.

That same summer, one of the local market farmers had planted melons in early June. On September 10 I could "see some round melons and a few large, oval ones." On September 12, the Centers for Disease Control announced the bacteria infection in Colorado had affected 15 people.

When I passed on the 24^th, the field had been abandoned. It lay fallow until this year, when they raised peas there.

Rocky Ford watermelons were stigmatized then, and haven’t yet regained their ceremonial role. A bad season like this, when few local melons matured enough to reach the local farmer’s market, perpetuates the break in tradition.

Notes:
Friere-Marreco, Barbara, John Peabody Harrington and William Wilfred Robbins. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Hopi Journal, 1936.

Popé. Quoted by Pedro Naranjo of San Felipe, declaration of 19 December 1682; reprinted in Charles Wilson Hackett, Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, volume 2, 1942.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, translated in Parsons.

Vargas, Diego de. Letter to Charles V, 16 May 1693, translated in John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith Dodge, To the Royal Crown Restored, 1995.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Photographs:
1. The only watermelon for sale in the local farmer’s market in the past two weeks. The farmer grew it in Velarde. He said he put in a bunch of seeds, but they all shriveled up.

2. His honeydews did a little better.

Watermelon Diffusion

Weather: Ground wet Thursday morning, but all the forecast rain produced were clouds.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, morning glories, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, David and purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, African marigolds, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, scarlet creeper, green-leaf five-eyes, yellow and white prairie evening primroses, leather leaf globe mallow, green amaranth, pigweed, Hopi tea, native sunflower, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters, side oats grama grass.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, caryopteris, garlic chives, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, Maximilian sunflowers, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, purple and cut-leaf coneflowers, Mönch aster, yellow and reseeded Sensation cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, moss roses, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Woodpecker in the black locust, small birds, geckos, cabbage butterflies, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, dragonflies.

Weekly update: This hasn’t been a good year for watermelon. When it rains, the vines and leaves grow; when it rains a lot, as it has this year, they’re all that grow. Female flowers abort. Fungus attacks.

The vines have survived worse. They grew in the valley for nearly 300 years before seed companies began selling packets. That’s 300 times the annual reproduced enough for farmers to gather seeds for the next spring.

The melon’s path north to San Juan, where it was seen by Juan de Oñate in 1598, is impossible to trace today. All we know is when Spaniards saw the fruits. That’s a record of colonial expansion not ecological diffusion.

In 1582, Antonio Espejo rode north tracing some Franciscans who had gone to Tigua. Two days from his starting point at San Bartolomé in Chihuahua, he saw Conchos rancherías where they grew "some crops of maize, gourds, Castilian melons, and watermelons, like winter melons."

Their neighbors, the Pazaguantes, grew "food like the Conchos." Espejo continued north to Sia, then went west to the Hopi. All he recorded were maize, beans and gourds. It’s sometimes hard to trust a soldier’s vegetation report. Military men only see what grows where they ride, report only what they recognize. Depending on the season, squash, gourds and watermelons all look alike, trailing vines with yellow flowers.

The important thing is that at each place Espejo stopped, the natives told them about the next group north or west. His journal suggests the communication links that existed between bands fifteen years before Oñate. We have to guess seeds flowed through those networks.

The colonists brought their own watermelon seeds. In 1600, Juan de Torquemada wrote "many good melons and sandías" were growing under irrigation along the Chama river. Since he was a Franciscan, he may have been referring to mission gardens, and not the crops of the settlers in the area now called Chamita.

The same caveat applies to the comments of Alonso de Benavides in 1630 that the land was fertile, "yielding in great abundance from whatever seeds are planted." The Franciscan’s list included "squashes and pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupes and cucumbers."

Watermelons reached the Hopi before the Pueblo revolt of 1680. Seeds were found buried in the destroyed pueblo of Awátovi. They may have been chewed to create binders for the pigments on the murals. They did become the fat used to grease stones used to make piki bread.

To their west, Eusebio Kino recorded the Yuma grew "fields of maize, beans, calabashes, and watermelons" in 1698. Earlier Pima speakers had met him with "many of the foods from their fields - maize, beans, and watermelons." So far as he knew, the Jesuit priest was the first to explore that part of Sonora and Arizona.

Leonard Blake thinks the reason melons were so quickly accepted by Native Americans is they could be grown like the familiar squashes. He noted the Huron sprouted squash seeds in "a box filled with rotted wood, which was moistened and suspended over the smoke of a fire."

In 1721, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix observed "Sun-Flowers, Water-Melons and Pomkins are set by themselves; and before they sow the Seed, they make it shoot in Smoke, in light and black earth." At the time, he was at the Jesuit’s mission to the Potawatomi in western Michigan.

The similarities were more fundamental than planting techniques. Squash and watermelon are, after all, in the same gourd plant family.

Squashes could be planted in spring by nomadic bands. Unlike corn, they could be abandoned during the summer and harvested in fall.

William Weaver says watermelons are uniquely adapted to drought. During wet periods they store water in their fruits, then go dormant "when the vines die and the thick-rinded fruit lies scattered in the sun." When the time comes to reproduce, the melons split open and seedlings that have germinated in the watery reservoir spread forth.

The Ramah Navaho replicated nature by soaking seeds in cold water with golden smoke or spreading yellow cress. Both have yellow flowers like watermelons. Corydalis aurea is in the poppy family. Rorippa sinuata is a mustard.

The Navajo and Apache probably got their seeds after the Revolt, perhaps from the pueblos, perhaps from abandoned fields. Roque de Madrid led an expedition against the Navajo living in what is now northwestern New Mexico in 1705. Years after, Antonio Tafoya remembered he had seen them growing "maize, beans, squash and watermelons in the cañadas."

Fourteen years later, Juan de Ulibarrí led an expedition to the Apache living at El Cuartelejo on the plains. He reported, they were "growing corn, watermelon, pumpkin, wheat, kidney bean."

Historians attribute their appearance in the Awátovi ruins to the priests who built their church over the original kiva. However, the Hopi words for watermelon suggest they had the fruits first and, in the absence of a name, used descriptive labels for them. Kawa’yo and kawaivatnga meant horse pumpkin. They told Alfred Whiting the fresh fruit smelled like sweating horses.

Barbara Friere-Marreco said the Santa Clara name for watermelon was tuwi’ig for spotted. She added the word was used "in the presence of Mexicans, as it is feared that they will understand sandía."

It was politic to not show vines to Espejo, and wise to not mention them to local Spanish-speaking settlers.

Notes: The last post mentioned the melons found at San Juan in 1598. Piki bread was discussed in the post for 28 February 2015.

Benavides, Alonso de. Memorial que fray Juan de Santaner de la Orden de S. Francisco Presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Quarto, 1630, translated in Baker H. Morrow, A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, 1996.

Blake, Leonard W. "Early Acceptance of Watermelon by Indians of the United States," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 1:193-199:1981.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimeria Alta, 1683-1711, 1919, on Yuma.

_____. The Rim of Christendom, 1936, on Pima.

Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de. Letters to the Dutchess Lesdiguierres, 1763, anonymous translator. He also wrote about watermelon when he was in the area of the Iroquois and at Kaskaskia in 1721.

Espejo, Antonio. "Account of the Journey to the Provinces and Settlements of New Mexico," 1583, translated in Herbert Eugene Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, 1916.

Friere-Marreco, Barbara, John Peabody Harrington and, William Wilfred Robbins. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Montgomery, Ross Gordon, Watson Smith and John Otis Brew. Franciscan Awatovi, 1949, cited by Robert W. Preucel, Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, 2007.

Tafoya, Antonio. Quoted in Rick Hendricks and John P. Wilson, The Navajos in 1705, 1996.

Torquemada, Juan de. Monarquía Indiana, 1615, cited by Friere-Marreco.

Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706, translated in Alfred B. Thomas, After Coronado, 1935.

Vossen, H. A. M. van der, O. A. Denton, and I. M. El Tahir. "Citrullus lanatus," in G. J. H. Grubben and O. A. Denton, Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, volume 2, 2004.

Weaver, William Woys. Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, 1997.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Photographs: Taken in the area on 21 August 2015.

1. Large leaves in back dwarf the peppers; the vine looping in front rambles over ten feet without a fruit or flower.

2. White spots on leaves, probably a fungus.

Growing Beans

Weather: Rained Wednesday and Thursday.

What’s blooming in the area: Apricots and a pink flowered tree, forsythia; globe and younger weeping willows, roses and lilacs leafing; flower buds on Bradford pear; alfalfa growing.

Beyond the walls and fences: Siberian elms greening, salt bushes leafing, dandelions up.

What’s come back in my yard: Spirea, fernbush, iris, garlic, tulips, daffodils, oriental poppy, Queen Anne’s lace, alfilerillo, bouncing Bess, coral beardtongue, golden spur columbine, vinca, anthemis, white yarrow, Shasta daisy.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: As soon as leaves emerge on beans, they need sun for photosynthesis.

Alexander Stephen doesn’t say how the Hopi kivas managed it for the beans they were growing indoors in 1893 for ritual purposes. Some built above ground had windows, but others did not. Still, plants in kivas with stoves varied from 10" to 14" in height on day eight, when most were only 3" to 5".

Mine were shorter. They may have been sitting in a widow, but the sun only came through a few hours in early February. When we had storms, it never appeared. If I turned the beans, the leaves reoriented themselves to always face the light.

Stephen measured the Hopi plants again on day thirteen when the ones in the stove kiva were 18" high. The next day, my stem was longer, and the third leaves were preparing to open. The bud that had emerged from the stem joint was longer, and more leaf shaped. The first leaves were beginning to wither on the edges.

On day fifteen, the Hopi pulled the plants and boiled them. If they were like mine, they had fully formed second pairs of leaves and the first ones weren’t yet unpalatable.

I didn’t eat my bean plants. I let them continue growing.

When the third leaves appeared, the plants moved from childhood to adolescence. The first and second leaves were pairs, but these were a set of three, with the center one much longer. The fourth set was already forming at the joint. The roots were now brown and reaching the base of the rock-glass sized plastic cup.

A few days later I repotted them into a clear plastic tumbler. For days, the roots stayed snarled at the junction between the old and new soil.

Five days later, on day 28, the stems were so long the ends were thin vines with sparsely spaced, tiny leaves. When the first leaves finally fell, they left scars on the lower stem, which was reddish. Thick roots were reaching into the new soil.

Two weeks later, on day 42, the original leaves began to multiply. That is, new leaf buds were emerging from their joints.

Last Sunday, on day 58, the base of the plant is thick with new triplets of leaves. Tiny pairs of leaves now sit under each leaf joint, mimicking the behavior of the first leaves.

The stems on the two plants that emerged have grown away from each other. The thin stems must have been abandoned since they had grown beyond the reach of the morning sun.

The roots are beginning to pool at the bottom and it’s just possible to see hairs on them.

They probably won’t reach adulthood in the house. I doubt they get enough sun to stimulate the growth of flower buds.

Notes:
Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Photographs: Native Seeds Search, Tucson, Hopi Gray lima bean.
1. 15 March 2015, full plant.

2. Day 14, 2 February 2015, second leaves ready to eat.

3. Day 19, 7 February 2015, third leaves unfurling.

4. Day 28, 16 February 2015, elongated vining stem.

5. Day 28, 16 February 2015, base stem with scars from first leaves.

6. Day 42, 1 March 2015, new leaves emerging from older notes.

7. Day 58, 15 March 2015, roots have grown into ridge in glass, can see hairs.

Sprouting Beans

Weather: Mornings five to ten degrees warmer.  Last snow 2/28.

What’s still green: Juniper, piñon, and other evergreens, yuccas, rose stems; leaves on grape hyacinth, Japanese honeysuckle, alfilerillo, June grass.

What’s gray: Salt bushes, winterfat, snow-in-summer.

What’s reddened: Cholla, twigs on peach, apricot, apple, sandcherry and sandbar willow; purple aster leaves.

What’s yellowed: Yellow on globe and weeping willows fading.

What’s blooming indoors: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds; ground squirrel run across the road near the wash-out.

Weekly update: Planting beans inside a dirt walled kiva in the middle of winter is an audacious ritual that depends on elements beyond anyone’s control. In the best of conditions, outdoors, it takes lima beans seven to ten days to germinate. Indoors, it’s best done when temperatures can be kept at seventy degrees.

The Hopi did it every year at Powamu, and forecast their planting season based on it. The trial was a partially valid test of seed viability. When I planted ten seeds this January, a few days before the Hopi planted them in 1893, only two germinated. Five were one variety. The ones that sprouted were Hopi Gray lima beans. Native Seeds said Maasi Hatiki was "sometimes sprouted and used in ceremonies."

The first requirement is dirt. Legumes require rhizobia bacteria to grow to convert nitrogen from the air into soil fertilizer. Gardeners buy chemical inoculants to mimic the process. Andrew Stephen said, the Hopi used sand from a "particular mound." I used soil that had been sitting in a pot on the back porch for years.

Warm soil is the second necessity. Men slept in each kiva during the two weeks of Powamu to keep the greasewood fire continuously stoked. They closed the hatches with mats to keep in the heat.

Stephen watched men in several kivas bring in a stove. They realized it was cheating, but they were plantsmen curious to see if it would make a difference.

Stephen must have grown up in a rural part of Scotland. He stopped by every few days to check their growth like any farmer or gardener or botanist. The wonder was anything happened.

On the third day, the beans in kivas with stoves were "peeping through already," but not in the ones "that depend on the fireplace." My seeds had begun sprouting underground, and shrugged off some of their dirt. I recovered them.

Mine didn’t actually show signs of emerging until day six, when the arch of the stem was exposed.

On day seven, the seedling finally emerged, with the first leaves clasped around the second like a fan dancer dislodging them from the soil. At Walpi on that day, forty vessels were planted in every kiva, and all were "sprouting vigorously." The forcing didn’t accelerate the natural process.

Notes:
Reilly, Ann. Park’s Success with Seeds, 1978.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Photographs: Native Seeds Search, Tucson, Hopi Gray lima bean.
1. Day 6, 25 January 2015, seedling beginning to emerge.
2. Day 7, 26 January 2015, first leaves leaving ground.
3. Day 8, 27 January 2015, second leaves opening.
4. Day 9, 28 January 2015 second leaves open.
5. Day 11, 30 January 2015, roots.

Red Piki

Weather: A little rain Wednesday.

What’s still green: Juniper, piñon, and other evergreens, yuccas. Rose stems; leaves on grape hyacinth, Japanese honeysuckle, alfilerillo.

What’s gray: Salt bushes, winterfat, snow-in-summer.

What’s reddened: Cholla, twigs on peach, apricot, apple, sandcherry and sandbar willow; purple aster leaves.

What’s yellowed: Young stems on globe and weeping willows; arborvitae have browned.

What’s blooming indoors: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: Piki dyed red with amaranth existed in the late nineteenth century. However, kachinas giving it to onlookers at their dances appears to be more recent.

In 1891, Jesse Walter Fewkes said most piki was the color of "woodwork," but that "bright red striped and other colored piki are made." He said it was not unusual to see "several rolls of variegated pi-ki tied together side by side" on the "walls in dwelling rooms."

He saw a "considerable quantity of red" among the prizes the clowns and kachinas brought to the Niman ceremonial footrace at Hano. It wasn’t given to spectators, but to the winners. He added this was the only race that featured prizes.

Hano is the Tewa-speaking pueblo that shares First Mesa with Walpi and Sichomovi.

Piki was used in ceremonies, but its color wasn’t important. Voth says at Soyal in the early 1890s at Oraibi on Third Mesa, some Soyal "Katcinas carry presents (piki, watermelons, corn, etc.)" and priests throw presents to spectators.

A few years later, Barbara Friere-Marreco said "red and yellow mowa, used by certain kachina, is made by mixing vegetal dyes in the dough" at Hano. Fewkes reported amaranth was "used to impart a red color to the piki or paper bread distributed at katcina exhibitions" without specifying where or when.

A similar progression from noting the use of amaranth to vague comments of function appears in the observations at Zuñi made by Matilda Coxe Stevenson. In 1901, she simply said women occasionally dyed their piki red. In 1915, she added the colored wafer bread was "carried by impersonators of anthropic gods and thrown by them to the populace between the dances" without specifying which dances.

Observers in the 1930s reported seeing colored piki, but again were vague. Alfred Whiting said amaranth was "used as a dye to color the piki (wafer bread) a brilliant pink." At Hotevilla, Mischa Titiev saw kachinas use "parched and popped corn, melons, piki bread in various colors, and baked sweet corn" as a comic gift at an October dance.

Hotevilla is the Third Mesa settlement made by the conservatives who withdrew from Oraibi in 1906. Because it has no physical home for its kachinas, the spirits don’t disappear at Niman, but are available for harvest rituals.

By the 1970s, tourists and others uniformly remember red piki being given at Niman, the only outdoor kachina ceremony. Harold Courlander saw "kachinas give out bread, piki, fruit and other gifts to spectators." Raymond Sokolov noticed "brightly colored piki, made from white corn meal to which red or yellow dyes have been added, is distributed only by katsinas during the dances."

Between Titiev and Courlander the number of people who attended public dances increased, and their knowledge decreased. Pueblos became interchangeable, all dancers were kachinas, and gift giving was assumed.

In fact, the major gift giving dance had been the Basket Dance described in the posting made 5 February 2012. However, a major change had occurred. Baskets originally were thrown to favored men in the audience. As the number of spectators increased, women no longer spent time making special baskets since they were unlikely to land in the desired hands. Instead, Helga Teiwes says at Shungopovi on Second Mesa, "enormous amounts of plastic and aluminum kitchen items, rolls of paper towels and toilet paper, boxes of Cracker Jack" are "showered on the crowd."

Today, the knowledge of red piki as a gift is both more universal and less specific. Native Seeds notes, "The Hopi" use one of its offered varieties to "make a scarlet natural food dye to color piki bread."

A more boutique seed company has altered that to say the same plant is "still used by the Hopi to color cornbread rich red." Corn bread, of course, is not treated with lime derived from calcium, so that may explain why the color is "red" and not the "pink" of Whiting.

Another company has gone a step farther. It markets Supai Red Parch Corn as a "traditional southwestern snack, often accented with chile lime salt!" You see those green fruits on packages of lime-flavored corn chips.

It’s a long ways from the Hopi who used piki as a traveler’s food and the Iroquois who used parched corn. It’s even farther from the time when only the bravest ran from kachinas at Niman, because if they were caught they were beaten with yucca whips. Only those who evaded them got piki.

It’s farther still from the time when Alexander Stephen said a red ear was kept for four days where a person died. Then it was attached to the ceiling. "If it is still there next planting season, he who has the bravest heart takes it out and plants it."

Notes:
Courlander, Harold. The Fourth World of the Hopis, 1971.

Fewkes, J. Walter Fewkes. "The Wa-Wac-Ka-Tci-Na, a Tusayan Foot Race," The Essex Institute Bulletin 24:113-133:1892 and "A Contribution to Ethnobotany," American Anthropologist 9:14-21:1896.

Friere-Marreco, Barbara, William Wilfred Robbins, and John Peabody Harrington. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Sokolov, Raymond A. Fading Feast, 1981.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. The Zuñi Indians, 1904, and Ethnobotany of the Zuñi Indians, 1915.

Teiwes, Helga. Hopi Basket Making, 1996.

Titiev, Mischa. Old Oraibi, 1944.

Voth, H. R. and George A. Dorsey. The Oraibi Soyal Ceremony, 1901.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Photographs:
1. Red amaranth plants have been buried by snow twice this season; 23 November 2014.

2. The Hopi did not cultivate a pure red corn; instead they treated ears of all red kernels as something special. The Italians are the ones who created a red flint corn in the Valsugana valley. Floriana was given to seed companies in this country by William Rubel.

3. The meal has red shells mixed with yellow and white interiors; from Mohr-Fry Ranches and Ian Johnson, Lodi, California.

4. Recently, Carl Barnes, bred Glass Gem specifically for its brilliant colors. Barnes was a part-Cherokee agricultural extension agent in Kansas. He developed the corn after he retired to Oklahoma. He thinks it came from crossing Pawnee miniature corn with an Osage red flour corn and another Osage corn called Gray Horse.