A Story about Corn Pollen

I’ve been reading the excellent memoir by Chester Nez called Code Talker. Mr. Nez was one of the original Navajo Code Talkers who devised the code, and his memoir about growing up in Navajo land is wonderful and heartbreaking. His grandmother saying the blessing with corn pollen reminded me of something that happened when I had first moved out to Navajo country.

The boarding school built a new clinic, and the first week a snake came up through the duct. This was a very bad sign, so a medicine man was called. He brought some bear weed and mixed it up in a water bottle and squirted it around the clinic. (I was hoping for something a bit more vigorous, like a rifle).

It was a very relaxed and casual sort of blessing ceremony. After he finished with the bear weed, he looked around at me and said, “I need some corn pollen.”

Corn pollen? What? Where was I supposed to get corn pollen? “What, you mean like corn pollen? From corn plants? It’s April. Corn doesn’t grow right now, does it?”

The women around me were giggling and digging into their purses. The lady who sold the burritos handed the medicine man some pollen, then she looked over at me. “Everybody has corn pollen.”

My new EMT nodded. “Navajo women never go out without corn pollen in their purses. Traditional women, I mean.”

“They do? Who would have guessed.”

The fire chief gave me a nudge. “Hey, Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The medicine man gave me the rest of the bottle of bear weed and we put it in the cabinet with the controlled substances.