Corn Dance extends gratitude and recognition to corn as one of the Three Sisters along with beans and squash, who are the Life Sustainers of the Haudenosaunee people. In the Haudenosaunee Creation story, corn was a gift from Sky Woman to her children at the beginning of human life. Traditional stories describe the three plants in the forms of human sisters, each of whom offers something unique to help humans, as in this story told by a Mohawk elder (Ganondagan 2023):

Once upon a time very long ago, there were three sisters who lived together in a field. These sisters were quite different from one another in their size and also in their way of dressing. One of the three was a little sister, so young that she could only crawl at first and she was dressed in green. The second of the three wore a frock of bright yellow and she had a way of running off by herself when the sun shone and the soft wind blew in her face. The third was the eldest sister, standing always very straight and tall above the other sisters and trying to guard them. She wore a pale green shawl, and she had long yellow hair that tossed about her head in the breezes. There was only one way in which the three sisters were alike. They loved one another very dearly, and they were never separated.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Lewis Henry Morgan recounted the Seneca teachings he had heard in almost identical language, explaining the idea of inseparable sisters: This last belief is illustrated by the natural adaptation of the plants themselves to grow up together in the same field, and perhaps from the same hill (Morgan 1851, 161). What Morgan does not acknowledge is that the Three Sisters gardens of the Haudenosaunee were no natural occurence or accident, but were instead an ingenious invention of ancient Americans that they developed in a dynamic relationship with these plants.

Corn, the Three Sisters, and Indigenous Ingenuity

Indigenous people in what is now central Mexico domesticated corn about six thousand years ago (Waldman 2000, 30), and archaeological evidence shows that people began growing corn in today’s Seneca territory as early as 100 CE, with widespread cultivation by 900 CE (Kerber 2007, 91; Hart and Lovis 2013). All of the Six Nations’ languages share cognate words for corn with the same root as the Seneca onëö’, which suggests that the languages diverged from Cherokee and others in the Iroquoian family after the first introduction of corn (Schillaci, Kopris, Wichmann, and Dewar 2017). The development of more frost-resistant strains of corn, and the full use of the great trio of native plants—corn, beans, and squash—increased storable food resources and contributed greatly to the flourishing of Native communities (Tanner 1995, 24, 26). Charred remnants from the inside of clay cooking pots from about two thousand years ago indicate that people in this region were cooking corn in ways that would still be recognizable to Seneca people today (Hart, Thompson, and Brumbach 2007).

Two of the most common traditional ways of preparing corn are onò:hgwa’ (corn soup) and gá:hdok (cornbread) (video 2). Both recipes start by soaking parched corn in water with ash, an indigenous invention (called nixtamalization after the Náhuatl term for it) that greatly enhances the nutritional value of corn, as Sioux chef Sean Sherman explains (Sherman and Dooley 2017, 47–49). Within the traditional Seneca community, most of the dishes used in ceremonies are corn-based. Non-Native people can find corn soup at powwows and public cultural festivals on Haudenosaunee territory.

According to the Potawatomi biologist and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, corn, beans, and squash grow in such a way that each complements the other: the corn grows straight and tall, providing a pole for the vining beans to climb, while the squash spreads out along the base, protecting the plants from weeds and insects (Kimmerer 2013, 128–140). The beans provide nitrogen that the other plants need. When eaten together, each food balances out what the others lack to provide complete nutrition for humans.

Corn, Colonization, and Resistance

The Euro-American colonizers also understood that corn was a life sustainer of the Haudenosaunee; that is why they repeatedly targeted their corn supplies and fields. In 1687 the French Marquis Denonville, in the expedition that destroyed the city at Ganondagan, reported that while they were at the four Seneca villages [...] all that time we spent in destroying the corn, which in such great abundance, that the loss, including old corn which was in cache which we burnt, and that which was standing, was computed according to the estimate afterwards made, at four hundred thousand minots [1.2 million bushels] of Indian corn (quoted in Morgan 1851, 199). In the midst of the US Revolutionary War in 1779, General George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to tear through Seneca country effecting total destruction and devastation of their settlements, writing, It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more (Washington 1779; National Park Service 2024).

Lewis Henry Morgan, writing in Rochester at the height of the grain-export boom that made that city the Flour City, described corn as one of the gifts of the Indian to the world and recognized that the security of our entire race—the white race, he meant—could depend on the corn supplies grown on ancestral Indian land (Morgan 1851, 370–374). Morgan believed that Haudenosaunee people would have to lose their traditions in order to survive in civilization, but the survival of Corn Dance in living oral tradition shows how wrong Morgan was. Whenever it is sung and danced, Corn Dance testifies that Seneca people like Bill have not forgotten their ancient relationship with corn or their connection to their ancestral lands. For settlers on Seneca territory like Andrew, Corn Dance can remind them that so much of their food is an indigenous product, just as most of the corn fields of western New York are on land guaranteed to the Seneca Nation by the 1794 Treaty of Candandaigua, which was never legally revoked or superseded (Hauptman 1999; Nëhdöwes [Randy A. John] 2018; Deloria, Jr. 1985).

Visionary Seneca leader John Mohawk founded the Iroquois White Corn Project specifically to oppose colonial legacies and foster indigenous sovereignty over food and land (Mohawk 2010). The project, which continues today at Ganondagan State Historic Site, works to restore the farming, consumption, and distribution of traditional White Corn to Native American communities and to offer White Corn products to the community at large, using heirloom seeds dating back at least 1,400 years in Haudenosaunee communities (Ganondagan 2023). John Mohawk recognized that in order to reestablish traditional agriculture, Seneca people also needed to cultivate the traditional songs and ceremonies connected to food.

No Corn without Corn Dances

From a Western perspective it might seem that songs and dances are merely folkloric, tangential to the science and business of food production, but from a traditional Haudenosaunee outlook, culture and agriculture are closely intertwined. Dances like Corn Dance are not just about corn, but are an integral part of how the community relates to and maintains their food sources, and traditionally were actually part of the planting and harvesting processes. In fact, according to Seneca oral tradition, we would not have corn without dances for the corn.

As Bill Crouse tells the story, when the late-eighteenth-century prophet Handsome Lake was walking between the ripe corn in late summer, he heard the Corn Spirit speaking to him in the whispering of the leaves. The people had lost track of the Creator’s Original Instructions, she told him, and were living in disorder; so she had decided to leave the land. The prophet begged her to stay and asked what the people needed to do to repair their relationship. She told him to have the people sing a specific set of songs dedicated to her in a ceremony for the Three Sisters several times a year. These songs, which are still sung at Ohi:yo’ today, go through the whole agricultural life cycle of corn from planting to harvest.

Corn Dance is a separate social dance that is not used in ceremonies on the Allegany Territory, though it is used ceremonially elsewhere. Even though the Handsome Lake story is not specifically about the social Corn Dance we are discussing here, it shows that dance and song were integral to the domestication and growing of corn. The people needed songs and ceremonies to revive the agricultural practices. As in the story of Robin Dance, the non-human being gives these songs to the people as a way for them to maintain a proper reciprocal relationship with them.

The traditional teachings reminded people that should they neglect their relationships with the life-sustaining plants, they could lose them, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says about a similar story that recurs across Native North America: One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence (Kimmerer 2013, 190). Corn Dance, whether done as part of these Three Sisters ceremonies or as a social dance, provides a way for people to orient themselves in a good way in relationships to the corn, a way rooted in gratitude and responsibility.

Ceremonial vs. Social Use

On the Allegany territory of the Seneca Nation, Corn Dance is a social dance and therefore appropriate for sharing with the public. On other Seneca territories, Corn Dance is considered a ceremonial dance, but this project reflects the local traditions at Allegany as practiced by Bill Crouse.

In the 1940s, Jesse Cornplanter told anthropologist William Fenton and dance ethnographer Gertrude Kurath that Corn Dance was changing from social to ceremonial use at Newtown Longhouse on the Cattaraugus Territory and on the Tonawanda Territory (Cornplanter 1948):

WILLIAM FENTON: And now tell me: when [is] this Corn Dance performed? When do the people dance Corn Dance?

JESSE CORNPLANTER: According to the old custom, it used to be, in the time when they had the ceremonies dedicated to the Three Sisters, the main support of our lives, what we call Johehgöh, that was the time they used to dance this dance. But now, since we lost the old customs and the ways of doing things like the old-timers did, we use them now as a social dance in all occasions.

FENTON: Are there no dances—Is there no time at Newtown longhouse when the Corn Dance belongs to the Three Sisters and is danced especially for them?

CORNPLANTER: It is now. It was introduced, just recently, and for quite a long time they used that dance instead of that Hand in Hand Dance, because this Corn Dance, according to one of the old chiefs, thought it was dedicated to the Corn, one of the sisters that composed the Three Sisters, our main support of life. [...] Now it’s used as a social dance.

Bill’s teachers told him that all of the social dances at one time were ceremonial, but over time they lost their ceremonial functions. In his view, Corn Dance is just one of the dances to change its function more recently. It would certainly be interesting to scholars to know whether Corn Dance was originally ceremonial, why it stopped being used that way, and why in some places it was restored but not others. But we must also respect Seneca faithkeepers’ restrictions on discussing ceremonial outside the Seneca community and leave such questions for those who can bear the proper responsibility for that knowledge. Additionally, the details of varying practice between the different territories are fascinating but outside the scope of this project, which focuses on Ohi:yo’.

How Old is Corn Dance?

Corn has been cultivated in Seneca territory for around two thousand years. Could Corn Dance be that old? Corn was one of the things the Haudenosaunee nations had in common before Peacemaker visited them, one of the kindred cultural practices like building longhouses that enabled him to form the league to begin with. Those practices have probably always included some kinds of songs and dances offered in reciprocal relationship with these plant beings. Certainly since the time of Handsome Lake, circa 1790, there have been some kind of songs and dances connected to corn growing, and that story suggests that there were much more ancient practices that were actually falling into disuse and needed to be restored.

Jesse Cornplanter, asked by Fenton how he learned the Corn Dance songs, replied, According to my memory, from what I heard, it has always been used amongst us Seneca longhouses, ages, ages back, handed down from one singer to another. And the way I sing is just the way I was taught (Cornplanter 1948). Nearly a century earlier in 1850, Eli Parker wrote much the same to Lewis Henry Morgan in response to a query about the age of Maple Dance (Parker 1850):

I cannot tell you when it was instituted, and I will say now in regard to all the dances that I cannot tell when any of them were instituted. They are all among the ancient customs of the Iroquois, and are all, besides many other feats which are now discontinued, spoken of by all the early writers, both French and English.

Without recordings or notated music from before the twentieth century we cannot answer whether or how much these songs may have changed over time in their musical details. One source of evidence for the longevity of music, dance, and ceremonial practices are the archaeological remains of turtle-shell rattles in Haudenosaunee sites from one thousand years ago, when corn cultivation was becoming widespread (Pearce 2005; Conklin and Sturtevant 1953). Turtle-shell rattles have been found elsewhere in North America from as early as ten thousand years ago, from the very earliest period of human settlement on the continent Gillreath-Brown 2019. Descriptions of turtle-shell and horn rattles appear in the earliest European descriptions of Iroquoian peoples, such as the Jesuit writer Lafitau’s 1724 account (Lafitau 1724, 215).

Whether the tunes of Corn Dance songs have changed over the years or not, their social function and meaning remained consistent across centuries. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that there has been some kind of Corn Dance heard on the fertile fields of the Genesee Valley and across Seneca territory for as long as corn has been planted there. Long before settlers sang of the amber waves of grain as a central symbol of their country, before corn became a staple for the whole planet, Seneca people and their ancestors were singing some form of Corn Dance on their territory. That dance is not just as a sentimental celebration of corn; it is an active way of maintaining a mutually sustaining relationship with the plants that sustain human life.

Words

As with other Earth Songs, the words of Corn Dance are vocables with no linguistic meaning (table 1). Most of the songs include a version of the antiphonal response hai:wihah. Songs with similar vocables are usually similar in other ways, as in the several songs that include weniyo:h, wenuya:h, and weganawiyo:h.

Musical Structure

As with other social dances, the songs for Corn Dance bear a strong family resemblance to each other even though they contrast in many ways. Most of the songs seem to follow the model of one of the first two songs in their melodic outline, phrasing, and rhythmic patterns. The Corn Dance songs are distinctive for using a limited set of pitches—most use only four pitches. Most of the songs feature call and response, but even some of the songs that are sung in unsion include elements that seem like implied responses. See the analysis for a more detailed look at the patterns that tie together these songs.

Versions

Jesse Cornplanter, 1948 and 1954

Three recordings of Jesse Cornplanter singing Corn Dance songs survive among William Fenton’s papers (American Philosophical Society Mss. Rec. 138.06/02-01, 138.07/04-01, and 138.07/04.16). They were recorded at the Tonawanda Reservation, on August 26, 1948, and March 23, 1954. The earlier one specifies it was recorded at Cornplanter’s house. A third recording is probably from the same 1954 session. Cornplanter introduces the 1948 recording as the Seneca Corn Dance, Newtown version. That recording also includes an interview with William Fenton and Gertrude Kurath.

Cornplanter sings ten songs on the 1948 recording, comparing to the 2002 Dowdy reference version (tables 2 and 3). The shorter 1954 recording, a fragment, includes two songs: Dowdy song 12, and then Dowdy song 13 and 2 combined.

Table 2. Corn Dance Songs sung by Jesse Cornplanter in 1948 recording, compared to those in Dowdy 2002 recording

Cornplanter	Dowdy
1	1
2	Unique
3	Unique
4	14 + 2 combined
5	11
6	7
7	Unique
8	10 variant
9	Unique
10	13 + 2 combined

Table 3. Corn Dance Songs sung by Jesse Cornplanter in 1954 recording, compared to those in Dowdy 2002 recording

Cornplanter	Dowdy
1	1
2	2, melodic variant
3	5, different words
4	7, variant words
5	Unique (= Cornplanter 1948 song 2)
6	11, variant words
7	14 + 2 combined
8	11 variant, repeat of above
9	7 variant, repeat of above

In 1948, Cornplanter’s final was around F♯, and the 1954 recordings were slightly lower in pitch, on E (longer recording) and F♮. His tempo slowed down for each successive recording, from 92 beats per minute in 1948 to 90 and then 85 in 1954.

These recordings, stemming from practice at Newtown, include four unique songs that the Allegany Singers never recorded (in the 1948 recording, Cornplanter’s songs 2, 3, 7, and 9). The others only differ slightly from those sung at Ohi:yo’ today. The unique songs are most similar in style and outline to Dowdy’s song 14, following a three-phrase pattern similar to ab cd cd (music example 1). They all share a major pitch collection of /0 2 4 7 9/; in the 1948 recording Cornplanter’s song 9 adds ̂4 to produce a set of /0 2 4 5 7 9/.

In each recorded set, Cornplanter also sings songs that combine separate ones in the Allegany Singers’ recordings: he combines Dowdy’s songs 13 and 2 as a single song, and does the same with 13 and 2. Though the recording, with only one singer, does not make clear which parts are antiphonal, Dowdy’s song 13 and 14 are unison (with perhaps the remnant of what used to be a response), while song 2 has an obvious call-and-response texture.

In an interview with William Fenton and Gertrude Kurath on the 1948 recording, Cornplanter explains how he learned the songs and identifies two songs as originating at Onondaga:

William Fenton: Let’s talk about the Corn Dance a moment, Jesse. Where did these songs you sang originate? Where did they come from?

Jesse Cornplanter: According to my memory, from what I heard, it has always been used amongst us Seneca longhouses, ages, ages back, handed down from one singer to another. And the way I sing is just the way I was taught.

Fenton: Who taught you to sing these songs?

Cornplanter: My father was a great singer of all those social and other ceremonial dances. And then he taught me all those songs.

Fenton: So your father was Edward Cornplanter, the one they call Sošendo:wah?

Cornplanter: Yes he was.

Fenton: There were two songs that you told me while we were playing it back, that your father brought with him from Onondaga. Which two songs were they? If we could identify those on the record, it would make it easier.

Cornplanter: It was that song that goes like this: [sings the start of his song 8] That was one of ’em.

Fenton: And what was the other song that your father brought back from Onondaga longhouse?

Cornplanter: [sings the start of his song 7] Those are the ones.

Fenton: Those are the two that came from Onondaga longhouse near Syracuse, New York?

Cornplanter: Right.

The first of the two songs Cornplanter says came from Onondaga is the same as Dowdy’s song 10; the other is only recorded by Cornplanter. Were these songs originally part of Corn Dance at Tonawanda but then lost, and had to be restored from the Onondaga repertoire? Did they also come to Allegany from Onondaga, or were they part of their practice all along? How many other songs in sets today were brought from other places? Only additional comparative study will tell.