Corn likes people. It benefits from human contact, when it’s thinned out and hand-pollinated, explains Taylor Keen (MPA 1996/ MBA 1997). Corn thrives when sung to and spoken to—something Keen does in the language of his mother’s Omaha Tribe, where he is known as Bison Mane. Keen is also an active member of the Cherokee Nation, his father’s people, where his tribal name is Blackberry. He grew up between Omaha and the Cherokee reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, where he was a football player and top student—not a plant whisperer.

It would be decades before Keen fully understood the role that growing things could play in educating others about indigenous cultures. Now he talks about the intelligence of corn—how it changes color to optimize filtration of ultraviolet light: Soon, he explains, the corn leaves will be tinted a deep purplish-red. Keen has taught a course on the economics of corn at Creighton University’s Heider College of Business, where he has been on the faculty for 15 years. He will tell you that corn’s symbiotic relationship with humans stretches back 10,000 years, originating in Mesoamerica and migrating north about 1,000 years ago with its human caretakers. The bond is practical, based on sustenance, but also spiritual: In Native American cosmology, Mother Corn—Selu in Cherokee—is the first woman.

It’s an epic history that has its continuing point at this moment in late July, in an unassuming volunteer garden on the site of a reclaimed golf course in suburban Omaha, Nebraska. This garden is a living ambassador of the Sacred Seed project, a nonprofit Keen founded in 2014 to simultaneously promote more sustainable agricultural methods and educate others about indigenous culture—the seed, if you will, for an alternative to the high-yield, soil-depleting cycle of tilling, pesticides, and fertilization that could ultimately endanger the planet’s ability to grow enough food for its people.

Through gardens planted with heirloom crops like Omaha Sacred Red Corn, Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans, and Mandan Squash—the “Three Sisters” of Native American lore that thrive when planted together—Sacred Seed is modeling a different approach based on agricultural practices that are thousands of years old. Cornstalks provide a natural climbing pole for beans, which fix nitrogen in the soil. Squash vines slow the evaporation of precious moisture and offer a natural barrier to weeds; its spiny foliage also discourages rabbits and raccoons. (Sunflowers are sometimes considered the fourth sister for the protection they provide from damaging winds. Their seeds also distract birds from the corn.)

Keen wades into the mass of foliage, checking the corn’s progress: “Oh, cool. A little bird relative dropped us a feather.” Solid and broad-shouldered, he’s a sensitive observer but also a Nebraska Golden Gloves boxer. “I found my sweet spot in heavyweights, although I was a lot smaller, because I was a good inside fighter,” Keen says later. “I could take a lot of stomach hits. You get me up against the ropes and I can fight.” He also was a punter and placekicker on the football team his first year at Dartmouth, before moving over to rugby, a sport he played with bone-breaking gusto throughout college and into HBS. That intensity has been channeled by mentors throughout Keen’s life. One such person is Deward Walker, who in 2007 challenged Keen with a question that has a recurring role in Sacred Seed’s origin story: What are you doing to protect your corn?

“Deward is famous for kicking me in the pants every now and again about things he thinks are important,” Keen says. Walker, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Colorado, has written extensively about Native Americans and is one of the “good guys,” Keen says. In the past, academics would sometimes claim to be more of an expert on indigenous populations than the people themselves. Keen says Walker was before his time in using his research to partner with, and help, the tribes he studied.

“I said, ‘Corn? What are you talking about, Deward?’ And in typical fashion, he got a bit short with me and said, ‘Your tribal corn.’” Walker told Keen that big ag was displacing indigenous seeds in India with GMO crops, a story later told in the 2016 documentary Seed.

At the time, Keen was serving as a representative on the Cherokee National Council. During a meeting of its Environmental Resources Group, Senior Director Pat Gwin showed the group a photo of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—a meticulously cataloged collection of more than 1.1 million seed varieties located 150 meters inside a mountain, on an island between Norway and the North Pole. “He said we should be doing something like it ourselves,” Keen recalls, “and I brought up what Deward had said, and asked if he thought big ag had our Cherokee seeds and what we should do about it.

“His answer was, ‘Yeah, they probably have them. But that doesn’t matter.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? It matters. They have our seeds. I want them back.’

And he said, ‘What matters is that we as Cherokees embrace our traditional ag lifeways and find a relationship with corn again, as a tribal nation and as a people.’ ”

Keen majored in English and history at Dartmouth; his acceptance to HBS came with the caveat that he add another year of work experience to the two already listed on his résumé and complete some of the quantitative courses his transcript lacked. He spent the year in Omaha, working as a project manager for the Omaha Nation in health care, with a focus on preventing diabetes in indigenous populations. “I quickly realized that business alone was not enough to reverse the dysfunction of some tribal economies,” says Keen. Earlier, he’d experienced the fallout of an LBO at Maine shipbuilder Bath Iron Works, where he’d worked fresh out of college as a management trainee. “The first thing they told us was, ‘The good news is that despite the big reengineering effort, you guys are safe. The bad news is that you’re going to help us do it, and get to our number.’”

Keen wanted to prove himself to fit in, he says. When an incentive award was announced for the best new application of technology, he set his sights on winning it—and did. “AutoCAD had been around, but it wasn’t being used at Bath Iron Works,” he recalls. “I ran the numbers on the cost savings and—lo and behold—won the award. Management was secretive about it because it resulted in a number of layoffs. Even so, I remember someone pointing at me in a bar, and we hustled out of there. It certainly left a taste in my mouth of the power of strategy and thought, but I felt really bad about it.”

The tension between straight-ahead shareholder capitalism and broader interpretations of business’s role in society surfaces throughout Keen’s story. He wrote his HBS application essay about wanting to learn the tactics of corporate business for the good of tribal peoples—to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing, in effect. But Keen received his MBA at the height of the dot-com boom. At a tribal ceremony to celebrate his graduation, he remembers feeling the acute dichotomy between the go-go culture of HBS and the words of a tribal elder: “He was translating back and forth in Omaha,” Keen recalls, “and he said, ‘From what people have told me, that education you got is one of the best that’s available in the white man’s world. You’re my own blood. But be wary of that outside world because they worship money. And Wakonda, the creator, doesn’t want us to do that.’

“Then he said, ‘When you’ve walked the four hills of life and it’s time for God to call you home, no one’s going to remember how much money you made or what titles you had. All that people will remember is what you did for them, especially those who love you.’ It was a little embarrassing, because I had been trying to get the best-paying job I could and was joining a telecom.”

That nagging discomfort persisted, though Keen excelled in his work. A paper he’d written, using game theory to explore the liberalization of telecoms, was the ticket to his first job at Metropolitan Fiber Systems; an early project involved analyzing the best stock exchange for the company to go public. After an acquisition by WorldCom, Keen joined Level 3, a startup competitor—but was fired when his strategic recommendations for expansion didn’t align with upper management’s. At that point, Keen made good on his HBS application essay and joined Cherokee Nation Enterprises (now Cherokee Nation Businesses), where he served as vice president of business development, among other roles, and led development of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.

After five years he made the jump to government, serving as the first at-large member of the Cherokee National Council. “I got to apply my Kennedy School knowledge,” Keen says of the legislation he helped draft around raising the minimum wage and reforming the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court. But he also got a bruising lesson in politics when he spoke out against disenfranchisement of the Cherokee Freedmen, a group that includes descendants of African Americans enslaved by the Cherokee, as well as those born into unions of the two groups. The Freedmen had struggled for decades to establish their rights as Cherokee citizens, and briefly gained those rights in 2006; in 2007, however, the Cherokee Nation held a vote to amend its constitution, restricting tribal citizenship to those listed in the “Cherokee by Blood” section of the Dawes Rolls. That set off a series of lawsuits, with a federal court ruling in favor of the Freedmen in 2017, a decision reaffirmed in 2021 by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court.

Keen’s support of Freedmen citizenship went against popular opinion of the time. “This is a sad chapter in Cherokee history,” he told the New York Times. “But this is not my Cherokee Nation. My Cherokee Nation is one that honors all parts of her past.” Keen, who traces his own lineage back to James Vann—a powerful Cherokee born in the early 1760s who owned an estimated 100 slaves—received death threats and was spit on in public. He did not win reelection to the council and found himself shut out of work opportunities in the area.

“It was time to return to Omaha,” he says. “We were heading into the downturn of 2008, so no better place to ride things out than the town of Warren Buffet.”

Keen started a consulting firm, Talon Strategy; he also joined the faculty at Creighton, teaching strategy and entrepreneurship. He was ready to move on from his experiences in business and politics, yet Pat Gwin’s notion of Cherokees rediscovering their relationship with corn stuck with him. He talked to local organic farmers to learn more about the nuts and bolts of planting, watering, and harvesting. Hundreds of miles to the northwest, at the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska, he found indigenous seeds to plant in his backyard. He also discovered the 2002 edition of Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri, a book originally published in 1917. Featuring interviews with women planters recalling the tools, methods, and seed varieties their tribes had used, the book was a “treasure trove,” says Keen, illuminating the strong spiritual, cultural, and economic connections that once existed between corn and indigenous people.

At the same time, Keen and his students were brainstorming potential directions for what would become Sacred Seed. Initially they viewed the organization through a business-school lens: maybe they should apply for USDA grants, become a seed bank, and consider a revenue model. Then the students read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In it, she writes of the inherent wisdom of the plant and animal nations, and the surprising power of an economy based on reciprocal giving rather than cash exchange. After that the group decided the project’s most important quality was its sacred potential to educate others about Native peoples themselves and their place in history, using Sacred Seed’s gardens as one of its most visible teaching tools.

One of those gardens is planted on the 38-acre grounds of the Tri-Faith Initiative, a Sacred Seed partner. A joint effort by local Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities, Tri-Faith fosters shared values through lectures, events, and activities. A few years ago, when plans for a garden began to percolate, volunteer director Bonni Leiserowitz remembers the conversation turning to “honoring those who came before us.” She and Keen connected and talked for nearly three hours about “reclamation of the soil, honoring history, respecting nature, and listening to the world as you plant,” Leiserowitz says. It’s an approach rooted in Native American values—and at its heart, she says, that of any dedicated environmentalist. “We may wear different uniforms, but we’re still playing the same music. The three sisters, polyculture—whatever the term, it’s an approach that’s been fine-tuned over hundreds of years: scientifically, it’s absolutely elegant.”

Above ground, the garden is a tranquil vision of rustling corn, nodding sunflowers, and whirring insects. Below ground, things are less idyllic. The site’s previous life as a golf course—and repeated cycles of fertilization and pesticide applications—have stripped the soil of natural life, making it especially difficult to grow things here. “We have absolutely no topsoil left on this property,” Leiserowitz says. “It’s all subsoil. The fields of native grass that grew when the Omaha lived here are gone—and that soil is gone.”

There are three layers to the soil, Leiserowitz explains: a rich, dark topsoil, teeming with microbes, decomposed organic material, insects, and the mycorrhizal fungi that come together to create a vast, unseen ecosystem that helps plants better absorb water and nutrients. Below the topsoil is subsoil: lighter in color and much denser, with more sand, clay, and rocks in its composition and very little organic matter. Below that, bedrock.

December 5 marks World Soil Day, an effort launched in 2014 by the United Nations to raise awareness around the importance of soil health and the benefits of more sustainable agricultural practices like no-till farming and polyculture—in other words, the same practices used by indigenous cultures and promoted by Sacred Seed through gardens like the one at the Tri-Faith Initiative.

Growing food on a smaller, more sustainable scale is not just good for the soil, Keen says; it can also lead to better nutrition and economic sustainability for an indigenous population that has long suffered from obesity, diabetes, and poverty. Far from alone, Keen and Sacred Seed are part of a growing food sovereignty movement dedicated to building self-reliance and better health through the cultivation of local, fresh food. Outside of Syracuse, New York, Braiding the Sacred includes a refrigerated seed bank of more than 4,000 varieties of corn. When Keen asked if the group had any Omaha Rainbow Flint corn, for example, they shared the halfear they had available. It’s just one example of the formal and informal networks in place to pass along Native heirloom seeds. Each season, Keen can request two varieties from the Cherokee Nation seed bank, and the volunteers at the Tri-Faith garden are always careful to save back some of the crop for next year’s planting.

Researching the economic history of corn for a course at Creighton, Keen learned that many Plains tribes between 1858 and 1870 were nearly or entirely self-reliant through the sale of excess corn, until the United States government partitioned the land and established reservations. An economic model existed once, until it was broken; Keen wondered if maybe it could exist, in some form, again. He acknowledges the practical necessity of what Monsanto, Syngenta, and other big ag enterprises do in feeding the world’s growing population. But there’s a place for seed diversity and sustainable farming methods, too, he says—and opportunities to raise awareness of indigenous cultures in general.

And while education remains Sacred Seed’s primary mission, Keen keeps coming back to the 19th-century economic model of growing indigenous crops on tribal lands. It’s the Holy Grail, he admits, but would benefit the health of the soil and that of the people living on it. “As a tribal nation it gives us better things to eat,” he says, “and the socioeconomic indicators go up after that.”

That vision drives Keen as he continues to expand Sacred Seed’s reach through small gardens and larger partners like the Land Institute, a nonprofit committed to developing sustainable agricultural models. He’s busier than ever, teaching at Creighton and collaborating with University of Kansas ethnobotanist Kelly Kindscher on a project studying the Omaha language and the tribe’s historic use of plants. He’s under contract to publish a book, Rediscovering America, and advises local institutions including the Josyln Art Museum, the Omaha Children’s Museum, and the Kiewit Luminarium on depictions of indigenous culture.

Omaha translates to “against the current,” and there’s something of that in Keen, despite all this activity in established institutions. At HBS, he racked the exhaust pipes on his old, turquoise-blue Ford pickup with the express purpose of setting off car alarms in the Soldiers Field Park garage. He used game theory in a classroom negotiation exercise with great success—and also generated plenty of controversy in the process. Going against the current is a mode in which Keen has long been comfortable, but it seems to have found its fullest expression through Sacred Seed and the group’s work of rewriting the long-accepted narrative of America as a pristine Eden settled by white pioneers.

The role of teacher and storyteller is one that Keen slips into naturally, without lecturing or dominating. It seems natural to him. In May, at a birthday party marking the Tri-Faith garden’s third year, the forecast was somewhat ominous, Leiserowitz recalls. And in fact, as Keen offered a blessing, the heavens opened. “Taylor held out his hands, said ‘This is good,’ and explained why the rain was welcome,” she says. “No one moved. It was beautiful. He puts on a cloak that was made for him when he speaks,” Leiserowitz continues. “I think a lot of the clergy do that. You can see a personality shift. You can tell when they’re really on.”

It’s been 25 years since the tribal ceremony that marked his graduation from Harvard. In the blessings he offers at planting and harvest times, Keen often asks for the humility to listen to the wisdom of the animal and plant nations. “It’s changed me as a person, to understand the cycles of how things grow,” he says. “Something in my DNA has been reawakened by planting these seeds.”

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