During Annie’s corn tasting lab we consumed the American staple crop in many different forms. We nibbled on cornbread, polenta, corn flake cereal, corn slushie, cornstarch, corn syrup, and whiskey.

As I consumed all of these corn abstractions I could not help but think about corn as a trope for the exploitation of Native peoples. It is very rare in our culture of food and resources that we simply appreciate these natural treasures for what they are, in their simplest and most organic form.

This mentality of commodification is something that is foreign to the mentality of Native peoples, who culturally have appreciated the earth’s resources as gifts or extensions of themselves, and in the case of corn, as brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers.

These values highly contradict with current day American commodification and exploitation practices, which we see expressed both through the abstraction of corn products and in our exploitation and abstraction of lands, customs, and civil rights belonging to indigenous Americans.

When I consumed these various corn products I was amazed by how much we can manipulate organic matter to create different products for profit. The cornstarch and corn syrup were particularly fascinating to me, because they are usually used as staple ingredients in processed foods, but consumed alone their abstract and unnatural properties are startling and unrecognizable as a corn product whatsoever.

This distance and expulsion from the natural, unadulterated earth is reflected in the way we have been able to distance ourselves from the history of the oppression and theft faced by Native peoples that has led to a white settler narrative ascribed to “American” values.