What can two corn cobs do for a community reclaiming their language and culture?

Four months before the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, curator Mary Linn and production staff began preparing the teaching garden for the Native Language Reclamation in the U.S. program. The first week of my internship, we took a trip to the Smithsonian Gardens greenhouses in Suitland, Maryland, to witness the planting of myaamia miincipi, a unique variety of corn cultivated by myaamiaki, the Myaamia or Miami people. The journey of miincipi reflects the journey of the Myaamia people, who have been working tirelessly to reclaim their language and culture.

The ancestral land of the Myaamia is in what is known today as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Through two forced removals, the Myaamia were pushed to northeast Oklahoma, the current location of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.

As a result of displacement and forced assimilation, the Myaamia language ceased to have fluent first-language speakers in the 1960s. Since the early 1990s, the nation has worked to reawaken their language through archival materials, linguistic reconstruction, and the hard work of learning the language and rebuilding community. 

One effort of the reawakening is the Myaamia Center, established as part of the long-term collaboration between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University of Ohio (MUO) in Oxford, Ohio. Here, Myaamia students can learn about their language, culture, and history through classes and events.

At the 2025 Festival, students from the Myaamia Center discussed and demonstrated their journey of language and cultural reclamation. They showed us how they connect learning their language with traditional art, knowledge, and games. They demonstrated peepankišaapiikahkia (ribbon work), taught language lessons, played several traditional games in the Language Lodge, and taught visitors how to play peekitahaminki, or Myaamia lacrosse.

Another part of their heritage lessons are about traditional crops and foraged plants. MUO has an active teaching garden, and students take seasonal field trips to see different stages of plants in forests and fields. Among all the plants, miincipi is key to Myaamia culture and traditional diet. Its cultivation and harvest is marked in myaamia kiilhswaakani, the Myaamia Lunar Calendar, such as during kiišiinkwia kiilhswa (Green Corn Moon) when the kernels are sweet and ready to eat on the cob. The miincipi they use today descends from only two dried cobs, which survived the many challenges faced by Myaamia over the years.

Linn worked with mahkoonsihkwa Kara Strass, director of Miami Tribe relations at MUO and a mentor to the Myaamia participants, to make sure the Smithsonian could grow miincipi for the Festival. To do this respectfully and properly, we enlisted the help of Dr. Tim McCoy, a Miami citizen and curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Together we visited the Smithsonian Gardens greenhouses in March to plant the miincipi.

McCoy soaked each kernel of miincipi in his mouth to break down its hull. As he planted them in the soil, he sang a traditional song to the miincipi in the Myaamia language.

In addition to planting the corn kernels, McCoy offered a gift in the form of tobacco, which he sprinkled over each potted plant. Many North American tribes, including the Myaamia, offer tobacco as a form of respect when asking for assistance. Planting beliefs and practices are variable among Myaamia today, and McCoy’s practices represent just one approach.

Less than a month after planting, the miincipi had sprouted up under the care of staff at Smithsonian Gardens. Meanwhile, we at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage were busy preparing all the other aspects of the Festival.

The day before the Festival, our Gardens colleagues delivered mature stalks of miincipi to the National Mall. They were set to be replanted in Gifts from the Land, the garden containing plants of cultural significance to the Native groups participating in the Native Language Reclamation program.

We unloaded the cornstalks along with other plants for the garden, getting our hands dirty with gardens coordinator Kyra Uphoff and volunteers to move them carefully into planters. In four months, the stalks had grown to around ten feet tall.

In the garden, Myaamia Center students and their staff mentors shared with Festival visitors the meaning of miincipi in Myaamia culture, as well as the significance of miincipi’s restoration for future generations of Myaamia people.

After the Festival ended, the miincipi continued its journey by returning to Tim McCoy. Using a hand cart through the National Museum of Natural History, the corn made its way to his office. There it overlooked the National Mall, where it had lived for over a week and welcomed many visitors.

McCoy has since harvested the miincipi, its ears having fully matured in the few months after planting. Although most of the corn had begun to mold due to the high humidity on the National Mall, he was able to harvest one perfect ear. This will be dried and used to seed the next generation.

The Myaamia uses for miincipi do not stop at cooking or gardening. Education and community activities surrounding miincipi help to revitalize the Myaamia language and transmit cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. From just two dried cobs to a few kernels in a Smithsonian greenhouse to tall stalks on America’s Front Lawn, miincipihas taken us on a journey that helps to further the Myaamia people’s broader language and cultural reclamation.

Sofia Wallace is a Native Language Reclamation program intern for the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and a rising senior at Dartmouth College, majoring in linguistics and minoring in Russian.