Members of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network explain the cultural importance of access to traditional seed varieties.īut Native communities often lack access to resources such as farming equipment, soil testing, fertilizer and pest prevention techniques.
Taken together, these policies almost entirely eradicated three sisters agriculture from Native communities in the Midwest by the 1930s. Instead they were forced to eat Western foods, turning their palates away from their traditional preferences. Native children were forced to attend boarding schools, where they had no opportunity to learn Native agriculture techniques or preservation and preparation of Indigenous foods. Allotment policies assigned small plots to nuclear families, further limiting Native Americans’ access to land and preventing them from using communal farming practices. government officials discouraged Native women from cultivating anything larger than small garden plots and pressured Native men to practice Euro-American style monoculture. policy to force Native peoples from their home locations, pushing them onto subpar lands. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which made it official U.S. My research is exploring how, 200 years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great Lakes and along the Missouri and Red rivers fed fur traders with their diverse vegetable products.Īs Euro-Americans settled permanently on the most fertile North American lands and acquired seeds that Native growers had carefully bred, they imposed policies that made Native farming practices impossible. The first Europeans who reached the Americas were shocked at the abundant food crops they found. Interplanting these agricultural sisters produced bountiful harvests that sustained large Native communities and spurred fruitful trade economies. And sunflowers planted around the edges of the garden created a natural fence, protecting other plants from wind and animals and attracting pollinators. Heritage squash varieties also had spines that discouraged deer and raccoons from visiting the garden for a snack. Squash plants contributed by shading the ground with their broad leaves, preventing weeds from growing and retaining water in the soil. Today we know the reason: Bacteria living on bean plant roots pull nitrogen – an essential plant nutrient – from the air and convert it to a form that both beans and corn can use. They also certainly observed that corn and bean plants growing together tended to be healthier than when raised separately. Corn stalks created a trellis for beans to climb, and beans’ twining vines secured the corn in high winds. Native growers knew that planting corn, beans, squash and sunflowers together produced mutual benefits. They selected seeds for many different traits, such as flavor, texture and color. Historically, Native people throughout the Americas bred indigenous plant varieties specific to the growing conditions of their homelands. Gail Danforth, an Elder of the Oneida Nation in Northeast Wisconsin, explains “three sisters” gardening. As a scholar of Indigenous studies focusing on Native relationships with the land, I began to wonder why Native farming practices had declined and what benefits could emerge from bringing them back. And nationwide, many Native American communities lack access to healthy food. Today three-quarters of Native Americans live off of reservations, mainly in urban areas.
They called the plants sisters to reflect how they thrived when they were cultivated together. And traditional Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were part of that 1621 dinner too.įor centuries before Europeans reached North America, many Native Americans grew these foods together in one plot, along with the less familiar sunflower. Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
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