My Winnebago tribe has this field of Indian corn that the youth bring up and learn to process. Found out it got mowed down by a local white farmer. The 8k from sale goes toward scholarships for the youth. Seems like somebody is not happy that we are buying our land back? 
All these processes are part of ceremony for us, as this corn is sacred to our people. We hold a green corn dance to pray for a good harvest. It’s heartbreaking is what it is. This is how much some people hate us Natives.
White farmers bought up a lot of reservation land after Homestead Act & Dawes Act, so our land became fractionated. A lot of reservation is just corn fields owned primarily by white farmers. We had a buyback program, where we starting purchasing our land back.
Winnebago Tribe has been making efforts toward food sovereignty and traditional education through HCI Farms. They set people up with backyard gardens, one is mine. There’s a grand opening Saturday for our own farmer’s market.
This land plot was a piece of reservation land we purchased back from a farmer. Some say a certain white farmer in the area was implying HCI farms made him look bad. Some people want to believe it was a misunderstanding. I wish I could believe that.
Looking to history, settlers often attacked food supplies of Native people and it was passed down through stories as traumatic events. George Washington burned Haudenosaunee corn fields. Buffalo Bill killed the buffalo that Lakota/Dakota & other Plains tribes subsisted on.
When Indigenous people become a threat, settlers will attack our food and way of life, if they can’t get to us directly. This is genocide. Many rezzes are food deserts, where we are limited to processed canned/boxed food. This the reason we have been starting community gardens.
Some of my people upon hearing the news of the corn fields and seeing pictures, were brought to tears including me. Some of it is probably linked to ancestral memory of when we were intentionally starved by U.S. government or fed rotten provisions during forced removal.
Environmental destruction and resource extraction has always been directly tied to Native genocide. Look to the suspect Amazon fires that occurred after a successful lawsuit by the Waorani people to protect sacred land. Settler colonialism is ongoing.
I created a GoFundMe to go toward the Winnebago Public Foundation Fund, where the money from sale of the corn would have gone, if it was not mowed down. Please share and donate to help recover the loss. gofundme.com/f/v4dkk-a-caus…
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