The Three Sisters method was how Americans used to grow corn before the Europeans invaded.

You put a dead fish into a hole, and follow it in with three corn niblets. When the corn stalks are about six inches tall you take away the two weaker ones and sow three beans and three squash seeds. Again, when they're big enough to judge, take out the two weaker ones of each.

As they grow, the fish fertilises the corn, which supports the beans, the beans set nitrogen in the soil and the squash's hairy leaves keep mice from the beans and corn.

For the people who invented this method (and also gardening with multiple canals for climate moderation and watering), the corn goddess was central to life. I can only conjecture how shocked they would have been at the genetic modification of maize, the most GM-messed-with plant on earth.

One of Cortez's men wrote an account of the invasion in which he describes walking for several days past a single field of corn planted in this way.