Blue Corn Open Sesame to Big Business for Small Pueblo Indian Tribe : New Mexico: Crops open creative eyes of 110 families for more enterprises, a release from poor dirt farming.

Thirty years after it all but abandoned centuries of subsistence farming, this small Indian tribe is once again planting fields, reviving the traditional blue corn harvest and self-reliance.

The tribe’s enterprises now range from a Christmas tree farm to a golf course to a serendipitous collaboration with an international cosmetics firm that found a way to use blue corn in its various products.

Rehabilitation of pueblo fields along the Rio Grande has moved the Santa Ana Pueblo tribe toward economic independence and away from the federal aid relied upon by many tribes.

“The Tribal Council has been able to do a lot with the income that has been generated, and only the Tribal Council decides how it is appropriated and for what purposes,” said Roy Montoya, tribal administrator.

Pueblo farmers, unable to sustain family plots without expensive modern equipment and stymied by a ban on credit for sovereign Indian lands, walked away from the fields between the 1940s and 1960s in search of off-reservation jobs in nearby Albuquerque.

“Farming methods at that time were horse and horse-drawn implements,” Montoya said. “In today’s economy, it’s very difficult--if not impossible--to raise a family strictly on farming small plots of land.”

So the tribe began planning for a future that would not only strengthen the 63,000-acre pueblo’s economy but also provide its 110 families with traditional foods and protect water rights by irrigation from the Rio Grande.

The resulting projects, all begun since 1986, include an 82-acre farm producing such traditional crops as blue corn, chili, beans and medicinal herbs sold at cost to tribal members; the Christmas trees; a native plant nursery supplying hundreds of species to landscapers; a corn mill, and 18 acres of alfalfa rotated with blue corn intended for bulk sales.

Some of the blue corn is turned into three packaged items--meal, roasted meal and parched corn, similar to corn nuts--sold to specialty food shops nationwide, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Shop.

All edibles are grown organically, without chemical pesticides or fertilizers, on the tribe’s ancestral farming, hunting and gathering lands.

While the programs were launched with federal, state or private grants, they now are virtually self-sustaining--a requirement of the Tribal Council.

“Aside from the social and philosophic reasons, the bottom line is we have to make them self-supporting,” said Gerald Kinsman, agriculture project director and one of several non-Indian administrators. “These things have to work as a business.”

Then one lucky day, Anita Roddick came by. She’s founder of the British cosmetic firm The Body Shop, which sells skin and hair-care products at its 860 stores in 42 countries.

The company has a 6-year-old program to help developing communities worldwide turn traditional crops into profit-making ingredients for its cosmetics.

A search for an American project led her to Santa Ana Pueblo and its blue corn.

Unsure what she would do with the grain, Roddick carried a sackful to her research and development team.

“Nobody had ever seen this blue corn before,” Roddick said by telephone from company headquarters in Littlehampton, England. “They said, ‘Did they dye it?’ ”

A year and a half later, the team had developed seven blue corn items--including moisturizer, soap and body oil--that are sold only in The Body Shop’s 130 U.S. stores.

“It’s been in the shops only a month, and in some shops it’s 7% to 8% of their turnover,” compared with a more normal 2% to 4%, Roddick said. “And Canada is very hot to take this product as well.”

To launch the Santa Ana project, Roddick advanced the tribe $2,000 on an order of 8 tons so it could buy a larger corn grinder, which increased the mill’s capacity from 60 pounds an hour to 300.

“Very serendipitously, The Body Shop walked through the door,” Kinsman said. “Our perception of bulk sales was 200 or 300 pounds at a time. We weren’t thinking in scales of 16,000 pounds.”

Blue corn, important to the tribe as a traditional food staple and for use in religious ceremonies, is now the pueblo’s most profitable venture--but also its most risky.

“It’s a gamble,” Kinsman said. “Blue corn itself may be a fad as a food product and it may be a fad for The Body Shop.”

But the tribe said it is prepared for such an eventuality through the flexibility and diversity of its agricultural program.

Other income is generated by new commercial development on pueblo land west of the Rio Grande, including a golf course, restaurant, office space and mobile home park.

The pueblo’s creative planning has attracted substantial interest.

“We’ve received a lot of requests for information about the projects from other tribes and from governmental institutions,” Kinsman said. “And we’re talking about one of the smaller tribes, certainly in New Mexico--and they’ve been able to put it all together and make it work.”

A $20,000 award this year from the Ford Foundation for innovative government practices will be used to build the tribe’s newest venture--a retail garden center set to open in the spring.