Even autumn, colorful corn bundles adorn the stores as ‘ornamental corn’ but natives used it as food. Institutional charities were often used to disburse handouts but pushing commodity foods into the mouths of natives was the nail in the coffin. Already restricted to the confines of the reservation, this limited their access to wild foods and assimilated foods lack the diversity of a hunter and gatherer diets. Food restriction was a controlling factor for governments for many other circumstances like mass killing of buffalo on the Great Plains or the burning of amaranth grains by conquistadors in Mexico. All for the sake of civilizing the savages.
