On August 3, the Niagara College community had the opportunity to experience and taste a popular Indigenous dish that has been shared by multiple generations – corn soup.
At a demonstration hosted by Indigenous Education, NC’s Indigenous Cultural Consultant Karl Dockstader cooked up a batch of soup, while sharing his knowledge about the long-standing tradition.
Dockstader, who is Oneida, Bear Clan, explained that corn soup has been a staple for Indigenous communities and is a cultural tradition that continues to unite Indigenous peoples today.
“Western societies have lived off of flour, other societies have lived off of rice. At any given time, we would have kept years of corn in reserve to make sure we had a good supply of food,” he said.
“Because corn is so harsh on the land to grow in that it takes a lot of nutrients, it reminds us of our responsibility to keep the lands rich and in balance,” he added.
The appeal of corn is also rooted in its nutritional benefits.
“My teachings around corn are that our ‘white corn,’ which is starchier and has a thick hull closer to grits corn or hominy corn, but better, is that this is a good staple for an Ukwehú:we (pronounced oong-gway-WHO-way) diet,” he said. “It is a complex carb that makes you feel full longer, is chock full of nutrients, but most importantly is delicious.”
White corn sourced from Fort Erie goes through the lying process
The process
Not just your average bowl of soup, traditional corn soup takes hours to make. It requires multiple steps to break down the hull of its star ingredient – dried corn from the land – through a process called nixtamalization or lying.
The demo began at sunrise on Aug. 3 with the lighting of a c
Dockstader, who is an alumnus from NC’s Renewable Energies Technician program (2013) and a former red seal chef, began the cooking process for his Oneida-style corn soup at the crack of dawn. He set up a fire at 6 a.m. by the Indigenous Garden at the Daniel J. Patterson Campus in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where he tended to his recipe for hours.
“I add hard wood ashes to the first boil of corn to help break that corn down in a good way for a while,” he said. “Then, I was taught to boil corn more times to help wash off those toxic ashes and get the corn cooked up all nice for the soup.”
After this boiling process, the recipe comes together by adding kidney beans and salt pork to the lyed corn, the traditional corn soup ingredients.
“We’re really proud of our ability to preserve corn soup as a practice. It’s tied to our own sense of self-determination and sovereignty,” said Dockstader, who explained how the tradition is connected to the Land Back movement.
“Land Back isn’t about taking things from non-Indigenous people, it’s about remembering that this thing I’m doing today is connected to a practice that is thousands of years old. If we lose that, not just Indigenous people, but all people will have lost something really important and something that is fundamentally rooted in society.”
Karl Dockstader cooks corn soup with Mike Buck, a Six Nations citizen residing in Niagara who took an interest in educating himself on this traditional practice. Mike assisted Karl all day, from sunrise until after noon.
On Aug. 3, members of the NC community had the opportunity to sample the soup when it was ready.
A group including NC staff from Indigenous Education and ncLibraries enjoy corn soup
Corn soup documentary
In 2020, Dockstader participated in a documentary about the tradition of making corn soup. The documentary, which was filmed in Fort Erie, was featured on Season 20 of CBC’s Absolutely Canadian, a national one-hour series showcasing documentaries and performance programs that tell unique stories from communities across Canada.
Watch “Stories from the Land – Corn Soup and The Last Fishermen” on CBC Gem here.
