Lunch & Learn: Corn is King
Corn is King: A look at the Return of King Philip’s Corn to Wôpanâak Homelands
Join Assistant Guest Experience Manager of the Historic Patuxet Homesite Danielle Alonso-Wynne as she seeks to take guests through a story of cultural resilience and Indigenous reclamation found within the seeds of America's most beloved crops, corn. Learn about corn's humble beginnings in Mexico before it made its way here to the North East, how it influenced the shaping of Wampanoag society into thriving horticultural communities, and a journey home 400 years in the making.
Location
In-person and online tickets available.
Funding
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Plymouth Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
About the Speaker
Danielle is a Third Generation Mexican-American born and raised in the Southside of Chicago. Her paternal grandparents were Indigenous migrants from Michoacan’s la Meseta P'urhépecha, first settling in Texas before establishing roots in the Windy City’s Little Village neighborhood. Inspired by her father’s stories of their rich, cultural Mexican heritage, and his summers spent there, led her to pursue a degree in anthropology with an Indigenous focus. She received her B.A. in Anthropology with a concentration in Native American Studies from The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in 2015, the first in her immediate family to do so. Post grad she served as an intern at the Field Museum with the ethnological and archaeological collections from Meso & South America.
Having seen her ancestral artifacts first hand, drew her to wanting to learn more about the archaeological process. After looking at several field schools throughout the US within an Indigenous lense, she ultimately decided on the Plymouth Colony Archaeological Fieldschool in downtown Plymouth, MA. Through UMass Boston’s Historical Archaeology graduate program, Danielle attended the 5 week course in the summer of 2016, where she worked alongside historians and cultural resource monitors from the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. This experience and the friendships she formed with community members would lead her to return the following summer as a Native History Educator for the museum’s Wampanoag Indigenous Program (WIP), where she met her future husband Phillip. Today, Danielle and Phillip live in Aptuxet (Bourne) with their two children Xōchitl and Uanhasï, raising them to be strong and steadfast in their Wôpanâak and Pʼurhépecha identities.
[Image: Kathy Tarantola/Plimoth Patuxet Museums]