Illustration by Joe Poccia

Howard-Yana Shapiro, the global director of plant science and external research at Mars Incorporated, will give a talk about the mythology of chocolate and its relationship with indigenous peoples at 2 p.m. on both days.

Over his long career Shapiro has taught sustainable agriculture in universities, junior colleges and high schools throughout the United States. In documenting the oral history of seeds, he turned to the cacao bean—the basis of chocolate—and traced it through agricultural practices and archives to its roots in the cultures of the Mayans and their ancestors.

Shapiro is the co-author with Louis E. Grivetti of “Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage” (Wiley, 2009), a book that takes a long look at the fascinating history of chocolate. Shapiro recently joined American Indian News Service editor Kara Briggs for a conversation about the Native American roots of chocolate.

Shapiro: From a domestic standpoint, chocolate really goes back only 1,500 years from the Mayans. The Olmecs, or however you refer to the people before the Mayans, are the ones who domesticated it. From a simple perspective, it’s a fairly recent crop, but because there has been so much complicated history about how it fits into mythology and the world story, it has really taken on this amazing role in culture.

Briggs: In your research you found stories about how cacao came to be sacred.

Shapiro: In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico—where I was doing research on the Zapotecs and their use of cacao—it was so integrated into their lives, its preparation and its ceremonial use. There were myths about how the chocolate came into being. There is a Mayan myth about how it was like any other tree in the forest, then Christ appeared and he was persecuted by his enemies and he ran into the forest and took refuge under the cacao tree. When he touched it, the tree blossomed with white flowers, and the flowers covered him. He gave the tree to the people; they called it a tree of knowledge. Later when they used the cacao beans for money, it lost its power. There is another story that while the emperor was away, his enemies came and assaulted his wife. Still she wouldn’t tell them where the treasure was hidden. They killed her, so the cacao beans are bitter like suffering, and they are strong seeds like virtue.

Briggs: Is the history of the cacao bean tied to indigenous people both in its origins and in its ongoing cultivation, by indigenous peoples who live near the equator around the world?

Courtesy of Mars, Incorporated Howard-Yana Shapiro

Shapiro: When we consider chocolate was domesticated by the Olmecs, used by the Mayans, spread around the world by the Spanish, cultivated by the Ivoirians of West Africa and the Indonesians, it’s been inextricably linked to indigenous people for 1,500 years. The cacao tree is very susceptible to diseases. In history we find references shortly after the conquest of Mexico that the tree already showed signs of suffering from diseases, suffering because it didn’t have enough shade. In the 1,500 years when it was domesticated, it has suffered from disease.

Briggs: Is chocolate still a significant crop in the Americas? Is it still farmed? Is it still used culturally by Native peoples?

Shapiro: It’s significantly farmed in Brazil, which was the second-largest producer in the world until the late 1980s, when this disease called witches’ broom wiped out the production. West Africa produces 70 percent of the cacao crop. Indonesia and Brazil are coming back under different production models. It is grown a little in Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Panama. Farther south, there is a substantial production in Ecuador and Venezuela. Mexico absolutely is where its hold went beyond mythology to a central part of culture. In Oaxaca, and in Mexico City and Monterrey, on the Day of the Dead it is completely integrated in the culture. Even around Veracruz, the indigenous peoples are still very involved with cacao. I’ve seen necklaces strung of cacao beans and corn hung around the necks of church statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ. I’ve seen processions of people carrying strings of cacao beans on bamboo poles to be blessed by priests. In the Oaxacan lowlands, the Sierra highlands and the Sierra mountains, it is expected that you will be served hot chocolate made with water and sometimes chile in the mornings. There are ceremonies where they will add a froth on top, and that is an extreme honor.

Briggs: Is the chocolate bar the most common use of chocolate in the world?

Shapiro: The ubiquitous chocolate bars made by companies like Mars Incorporated, include its brands M&M’S®, SNICKERS® and others. Mars is the largest user of cacao beans. We source from all over the world. It’s hard to go somewhere where there hasn’t been a traditional use of chocolate, or else they are evolving it, like in China. China is developing a taste for chocolate.

Briggs: Eleven years ago, Mars Incorporated convened a meeting with the Smithsonian Institution and non-governmental organizations from around the world to talk about the role of the cacao tree in sustaining the tropics, and maybe sustaining the peoples of the tropics.

Shapiro: Out of that meeting, Mars developed a program to encourage best practices in farming the cacao tree. In West Africa, we do it through the sustainable tree program. Since June 6, 2006, we have been sequencing the cacao genome. The findings are being put in the public domain and they won’t be able to be patented. That is unique in the world of agricultural research.

Briggs: What does this mean for cacao farmers, who as we’ve said are indigenous from many regions of the world, and who are small farmers, who eke out a living from this globally-traded, fragile crop.

Shapiro: In modern times we assumed there were only three genetic structures of the cacao tree. Over the centuries people bred these and didn’t make other selections. Over the last 15 months, we discovered that there are 10 genetic structures of the cacao, and there is a potential to add to the gene pool. All those things point to the potential to strengthen this fragile tree that is cultivated by indigenous people around the world, but is linked to the GNPs (gross national product) of countries. It is 30 percent of the GNP of the Ivory Coast and 20 percent of the GNP of Ghana. It is more valuable in modern times than gold, and it is dependant on 6.5 million small farmers around the world, working an average of 2.5 hectares (about 6 acres) of land each.

Briggs: Mars Incorporated is the largest buyer of cacao beans in the world, and since 2002 it has set a goal of buying cacao beans which have been certified to have been grown using best practices.

Shapiro: When we started, there were probably only 20,000 metric tons of sustainably-grown cacao beans available globally. Now there are probably over one million metric tons that you would call certifiable. Mars is forming a coalition of the largest chocolate companies, and with these partnerships, it is likely that the idea of sustainability will soon sweep the chocolate world. The result—that farmers will have better yield and better productivity, matched with the social issues—is amazing to consider. A farmer should be able to triple his yield with good agronomy, and to get out of the kind of marginal life we imagine in North Africa. With a triple yield, the farmer should be able to get out of the poverty cycle

Briggs: Does chocolate, which began in its earliest-known use as a sacred plant, still carry some of that importance even in other cultures? I ask considering the deep feelings that people express through the giving of chocolate?

Shapiro: In Central Sulawesi, a state in Indonesia, in a town that has been built largely on the success of cacao farming, there is a statue, a set of hands 18 to 20 feet high which hold a giant cacao pod. I’ve seen metaphors like that on different scales everywhere. Chocolate is one of the great stories of the world. Unlike corn or wheat that can be grown on a large scale, cacao will always be a crop for small, indigenous farmers. Even if we can make the crop more robust, it will still be a tropical plant, grown in forests as an understory plant. You can’t get to it by tractors, you can only harvest it with the human hand.

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By Mathieu Génon, courtesy of Brian Jungen “Carapace,” 2009, is a work made from industrial waste bins by Brian Jungen of the Dunne-za First Nations in British Columbia. “Strange Comfort,” an exhibition of his sculpture, is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian until Aug. 8.

An emu on roller skates and a two-tone crocodile—both crafted from plastic luggage—hang from a mobile in the Potomac Atrium. In the retrospective’s gallery, a whale skeleton hangs resplendent under lights. Only upon closer inspection does it become clear that the whale’s bones are cut from common plastic chairs.

Jungen, 40, of the Dunne-za First Nations in British Columbia, is called the best Native artist of his generation by Paul Chaat Smith, curator of “Strange Comfort.” Jungen’s work is usually shown by modern art galleries in cities such as New York, Montreal, Rotterdam and Munich. Never have his creations been made available, as they are now, to the zoo-going set.

The museum is visited by about 40,000 schoolchildren a year. On a recent Wednesday, about a dozen third-graders from Emmanuel Christian School in Springfield, Va., found themselves sitting on the gallery floor, surrounded by Jungen’s “Carapace.” The children didn’t know the word carapace means exoskeleton or shell.

So the museum’s lead cultural interpreter, Sharyl Pahe, who is San Carlos Apache and Navajo, asks the students to do a little deductive work.

“If we look at what is all around us,” she asks, “what does it look like?”

Trash bins, the third-graders answer in unison.

“You’ll see that this artist has taken something useful like a trash bin and cut it in two,” Pahe says. “Is it still useful?”

No, the children almost sing.

“But what does this make you think of?”

A hut, a fort, a forest or bleachers, the third-graders offer.

“Could it be a turtle shell?” Pahe asks.

The children look with new eyes at the plastic shell.

“Why is this turtle shell so big?”

The children look quizzically at her. She explains, “To some tribes, the turtle represents the earth. The shell is important because it is like the land.”

The children nod in understanding. They’ve visited this landscape of the imagination before, though perhaps not through the works of a Dunne-za artist who could be the age of their parents, but who, like them, lives in a society where white plastic chairs and green garbage cans can be the backdrop of imagination.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian A Walla Walla bag, made about 1915 of seed beads, wool, canvas, hide and cotton thread, is on display in "A Song for the Horse Nation" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

The exhibition celebrates the relationship between American Indians and horses, featuring 98 elaborate examples that include horse trappings, objects with horse motifs and new works specially commissioned for the show. Originally indigenous to the Americas, the horse had become extinct before being reintroduced to the Western Hemisphere by way of European ships in the 15^th century. The exhibition revolves around the return of what some Native peoples call the Horse Nation, a great ally to the Native nations.

“Even though the pinnacle of the horse lasted only a century, this exhibition details how Native people rapidly integrated the horse into their lifeways, quickly becoming among the best mounted soldiers in the world,” said National Museum of the American Indian Director Kevin Gover, who is Pawnee.

The online exhibition, www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation, shares the script with the actual one, offering photos of many objects on display at the museum. Web viewers who live far away from the museums in Washington, D.C., and New York get a chance to share the experience in real time thanks to the online version’s simultaneous launch.

“It’s a comprehensive representation of the gallery exhibition that will grow in time to include additional educational resources and incorporate more interactive elements that might not be possible in the physical exhibition,” said Jason Wigfield, a web developer for the museum. “It’s a good opportunity for people, who, geographically speaking, may not be able to make it to the museum. And in addition to that, it’s accessible anytime and for long after the exhibition closes.

“This online exhibition is a great resource for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in exploring this topic.”

Interactive features, such as the opportunity to hear the word for “horse” in several Native languages through the computer, are a natural on the Web. Both the online exhibition and the one in New York provide recordings for the following languages: in Assiniboine, thongatch-shonga or sho-a-thin-ga (“big dog”); in A’aninin (Gros Ventre), it-shuma-shunga (“red dog”); in Lakota, Sunkakhan (“holy dog” or “mystery dog”); in Siksika of the Blackfoot, ponoka-mita (“elk dog”); in Cree, mistatim (“big dog”).

The exhibition uses video, images and commissioned artwork to carry the story of American Indians’ relationship with the horse into contemporary times.

“A Song for the Horse Nation” will be on view at the museum in New York until July 7, 2011. It is scheduled to reopen at the museum in Washington, D.C., in October 2011 and run through January 2013, followed by a national tour.

If you can’t wait for a chance to see it in person, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation to view it from home or classroom.

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Sam Devenney A Comanche family in the early 1900s. The elder man is Ta-Ten-e-quer and his wife is Ta-Tat-ty. Their niece, center, is Wife-per, also known as Frances E. Wright. Her father was a Buffalo Soldier, an African American cavalryman, who deserted and married into the Comanches. Henry, center left, and Lorenzano, center right, are her sons. Click photo for full resolution version.

“IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” is an exhibition of 20 banners bearing photographs and text. It will be shown at the museum in Washington from Nov. 10 through May 31, 2010. A symposium on the topic of the exhibition will be held at 3 p.m. on Nov.13 at the museum.

Guest curator Thunder Williams, a Washington, D.C., radio talk show host, is Carib Indian, African and European. “The exhibition touches a deep interest in African American communities because of their links with Native America,” he said. Published accounts estimate that 60 percent of African Americans may share Native American ancestry, he said.

“People in the U.S. tend to be black or white, linear thinkers,” Williams said. “We have been indoctrinated by a race-centered system where vestiges of the ‘one-drop’ of black blood rule persist. When I acknowledge my Carib Indian and European ancestors, it is not a disclaimer of my African heritage. I am all of them, my blood is indivisible.”

The exhibition takes the long view of history, traveling in a few short panels that illustrate the 1600s, when intermarriage and slavery brought Native peoples and African slaves together, to present-day families for whom this dual identity is indivisible.

“It’s a very provocative topic,” said curator Gabrielle Tayac, who is Piscataway. “The huge back story is that it all has to do with interactions brought about by the European, with practices of slavery on the continent.”

Many panels, which feature contemporary and historic photos, touch core issues of identity for people of racially mixed heritage. The discussion is emotionally charged, Tayac said.

“In many Native communities on the Atlantic seaboard, African American mixing has had consequences historically,” Tayac said. “It may have them be erroneously viewed as less Indian, and it plays out in acknowledgement and enrollment. In African American communities, there is a controversy of whether people should identify as mixed race.”

Foxx Family (Mashpee Wampanoag), 2008. From left: Anne, Monet, Majai, Aisha, and Maurice Foxx. Photo by Kevin Cartwright. Courtesy NMAI. Click photo for full resolution version.

Ideas about the identities of mixed-heritage people grow out of colonial policies, which viewed black and Native people as dangerous.

“In colonial Mexico (the word) lobo, the wolf is the blend of Indian and black,” Tayac said. “The combination was thought to be dangerous, that you could have two colonized and enslaved people, if they come together it could be dangerous. How much did we absorb those ideas?”

The emotions stirred by the exhibition are so close to the surface that even staff at the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture sometimes felt uncomfortable.

“Though sometimes there were things that were uncomfortable, we decided to keep it in the exhibition,” Tayac said. “There are difficult stories; the Cherokee Freedmen on one side, the Buffalo Soldiers on the other. What’s been interesting is people keep coming to us saying, ‘I have a story to tell you about this.’ ”

Guest curator Penny Gamble-Williams, a spiritual leader of the Chappaquiddick Band of the Wampanoag Nation, knows people who denied their Indian heritage and others who would not talk about it. Some embraced their Native roots later in life.

She remembers some tearfully approaching her to ask how they could get information about the Blackfeet or Cherokee tribes, to which people from the South may have heard their family elders say they had blood ties. Many are eager, she said, “to find the missing pieces of their identity, to fill the void of belonging.”

In the end, such questions need to be answered with genealogical research, Gamble-Williams said. Or, perhaps acceptance, Tayac said, if a family story doesn’t check out.

IndiVisible doesn’t try to provide all the answers, Tayac observed. The exhibition often turns the question back to viewers.

And many will get the chance to reflect on them in the coming year. African American museums and schools across the U.S. have already scheduled the traveling version of the IndiVisible exhibition, which will visit Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Rome, Ga.; Aurora, Ill.; and Los Angeles, among other cities through 2011.

– By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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By Joelle ClarkNorthern Arizona University Irvin Poleahla, who is Hopi, films at Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde National Park, Colo., during a day with Footprints of the Ancestors, a six-year project to deepen cultural knowledge among Hopi youth. The Northern Arizona University program brought high-school-age students together with Hopi elders at archaeological sites.

The group, which included staff from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, visited the museum’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., where they viewed ancient Hopi cultural items. They met with curators and other staff to confer about the 16 students’ ideas for creating their own exhibition about Hopi culture.

Joelle Clark, of Northern Arizona University, said many of the students brought some part of their traditional dress to the museum and sang a Hopi song for the staff. The group was able to view the museum’s collection of Hopi objects including woven clothing several hundred years old, which most had not seen before.

The museum staff hosted a potluck to welcome them. “They brought this incredible feast,” said Clark, who coordinates professional development projects in the anthropology department. “Everything was special. I think that’s something that Native people don’t expect when they visit a museum.”

By George GumermanNorthern Arizona UniversityAs part of the Footprints of the Ancestors program, Hopi students came to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to see artifacts and enjoy a potluck with staff.

The trip, which also brought the Hopi visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is the culmination of a six-year project to promote Hopi culture among youth. Students will develop multimedia exhibitions in the coming months based on what they’ve learned.

Over the past several years, the program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brought the students to Hopi archaeological sites, where elders shared history with them. Teachers developed curriculum and students learned about the footprints of their ancestors, as the Hopi call the archaeological sites and related oral history.

The program was developed in collaboration between Northern Arizona University and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. Dr. George Gumerman IV, an anthropology professor at the university, said the program has deeply affected the teens involved.

“One mother became very emotional when sharing just how much these experiences have influenced her daughter,” Gumerman said. “With tears in her eyes, the mother exclaimed how our summer journeys to their ancestral sites have changed her daughter’s life.”

The National Museum of the American Indian welcomes tribal groups to visit the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. Appointments to view artifacts in the museum’s storage facility should be made two or three months in advance. To make an appointment, call Pat Nietfeld at (301) 238-1454 or fax at (301) 238-3210 or email at nmaicollections@si.edu.

–By Kara Briggs