Growing traditions

will never forget the taste of his mother’s traditional blue corn mush. An earthy, hearty dish made with ground-up blue cornmeal, water and juniper ash, its recipe has been passed down for generations, from his great-grandmother to his grandmother to his mother, and now at last to his own bowl and spoon. Biyáál doesn’t claim to have mastered the recipe quite as well as his mother did. But each time Biyáál — a traditional farmer who tends his family’s farm in the San Juan River Valley near Shiprock on the Navajo Nation — scoops up another mouthful of corn mush, he pays homage not only to those who came before