Native Life: Agriculture

A common justification for taking Native land was that the Natives either could not or would not farm, the land was going to waste and should be put to better use.  No one who spouted this theory stopped to consider that Natives had been using some very sophisticated means of farming for centuries before Settlers arrived in North America.

The method that Squanto taught the Pilgrims when they first landed in 1620 of planting corn, beans and squash together and fertilizing them with dead fish is a form of companion planting, where the seeds of various food crops were sown together to maximize the use of available soil and allow the plants to benefit each other.  Maize was the first of the three to be planted, and fertilized with dead eels or fish when the soil was poor.  When the maize stalks grew tall enough, beans were added.  The beans would use the stalks of the maize plants to climb.  Bean plants also provided important nutrients to the soil.  Finally, the squash was added.  Squash vines running along the ground provided several benefits.  The vines allowed no room for weeds to grow.  They shade kept the soil underneath all three crops stable and moist, and the leaves provided mulch as another form of fertilizer.  The resulting staple crops, called the Three Sisters in Iroquois legend, were rich in carbs and amino acids.  They could be stored for long periods of time and be a reliable, nutritious food source when other means of sustenance, such as hunting, weren't yielding as much.

For this reason, tribes who subsisted by farming maintained relatively stable home grounds, though they could move an entire village when the soil played out.  Chilicothe, the Native town for which the City was named, changed location several times during this period.  Tribes sometimes migrated seasonally between their farmland or their hunting range, each of which was vital to surviving the next year.  Because of their experience as farmers, Eastern tribes were open to new agricultural ideas, Nancy Ward of the Cherokee asking Washington for farm implements was one example.  When Sullivan's men raided the Iroquois villages in 1779, they were surprised by the prosperous farms, including livestock and farmhouses, that the Iroquois had built.

Another criticism leveled at Native societies was that the women did all the farm work.  While they did the lion's share of it, men divided the labor hunting, fishing, and keeping intruders away from the villages and off the tribal hunting range.  Among the Creek and other Southeastern tribes, during the corn season, everyone worked to get the corn harvested as quickly as possible.  Even a war leader like Osceola did his time in the fields without complaint.  People who remembered him as a young man remembered that his cheerfulness and energy in this work helped everyone else to bear up. 

As with their Northern counterparts, White settlers admired the farms and even plantations of their Native neighbors.  Assuming it was the rich soil, not the labor of Native farmers, that produced the bounty, Settlers soon wanted the land for themselves.  After the Trails of Tears of the 1830's, tribes relocating to Oklahoma weren't provided with seed or farm implements and rations were scarce, leading to starvation and illness.  Successive delegations of Native leaders failed to move government officials to address these concerns.