- Best thing that's ever happened to you financially, go.
- Easy, sold my car on Carvana, amazing offer.
- Really?
- I hit 200 on the scratcher.
- Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
- No.
- How many scratchers did you hit to get that?
I hit a button on Carvana.com once.
- Okay, that's fair.
- It's like the lottery except you always win.
- Not like the lottery at all, actually.
- Exactly, inexplicably good.
- Offer's worth bragging about.
Sell your car today on Carvana.
- Pick up these may apply.
- You're listening to an air wave media podcast.
- Corn is a tropical grass.
Basically over centuries of native seed selection,
native farmers were able to adapt corn
into a wide variety of cultivars that suited
the particular climatic conditions
for wherever they were planting it.
The Walpenogs in particular were faced with this problem
of developing corn and maintaining actual varieties
of corn after they were developed
with the priority of earlyness.
So it seems like most of these Walpenog crops
by the 17th century, these corn crops could produce
between 1680 days, popping them well underneath
that pundered day frost-free growing season barrier.
And the actual literal way that Walpenog seed savers
would do this is they would select years
from the bottom of the corn stock nearest the ground,
which have been pollinated by other plants
that had flowered the fastest.
(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to episode 426 of Ben Franklin's World.
The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more
about how the people and events of our early American past
have shaped the present day world we live in.
And I'm your host, Liz Covard.
With Thanksgiving next week,
many Americans will gather to reflect on gratitude,
family, and of course, food.
This is the time of year
when we may think about that so-called first Thanksgiving.
And imagine scenes of pilgrims and native peoples
gathering to share in the bounty of their fall harvests.
But how much do we know about the food systems
and agricultural knowledge of the indigenous people
in North America?
And in what ways were the Walpenog people
actually able to contribute to this first Thanksgiving?
Michael Wise, an associate professor of history at the University
of North Texas, and the author of Native foods,
agriculture, indigenity, and settler colonialism
in American history, leads us on an exploration
that will challenge four myths we have
about indigenous food practices.
And help us uncover how native communities shaped
and stewarded the land and its agriculture
long before European colonists ever arrived.
During our exploration, Michael reveals
how indigenous agricultural systems,
like those of the Walpenog and Cherokee,
sustained communities for generations.
Why early American landscapes looked and functioned
very differently than we've been taught?
And how myths about native people being hunters
rather than farmers,
served to justify white dispossession
and erasure of indigenous peoples
from native lands and our histories.
Our conversation is a powerful reminder
that indigenous peoples didn't just survive
in the early American period.
They innovated, cultivated, and thrived
as they nourished their land and their communities.
It's also a good reminder that indigenous people
like the Walpenog and Cherokee are still here,
and they continue to do a lot to contribute
to our shared history and our shared food ways.
Now, before we dive into our conversation with Michael,
I'd like to wish you and your loved ones
a very happy Thanksgiving.
Please know that I am grateful that you are a part
of our Ben Franklin's world community.
Thank you so much for listening
and considering our guest's ideas
and thank you for your support of this work.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Okay, are you ready to rethink native food ways
and the landscapes of early America?
Let's go meet our guest historian.
(upbeat music)
Our guest is an associate professor of history
at the University of North Texas.
His research expertise is an environmental history,
food and agricultural history,
animal human relationships,
and the history of the American West.
He's the author of two books,
producing predators, wolves work and conquest
in the Northern Rockies,
and his second book, Native Foods,
Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism
in American history.
Welcome to Ben Franklin's world, Michael Wise.
- Well, thank you very much.
- Now, in Native Foods,
Michael sets out to reframe the way
that we look at indigenous agriculture and food ways
so that we can see the indigenous landscapes
of North America and to spell four myths
that have informed how we view indigenous agriculture.
Michael, would you tell us how we've been trained
to see the landscape of North America
and about these four myths that inform
how we see that landscape?
- Yeah, the landscape, as far as the story is often
approach the term, is seen as a static place,
or at least something that is biophysical,
sort of like the stage on which human actors
go about their lives and make their decisions,
and really this sort of central insight
that my book is trying to bring to bear
in terms of native and colonial food histories,
the fact that our agricultural landscape
isn't just this sort of static stage,
but as cultural geographers might put it more
like a stage curtain, so the landscape itself
is a curtain that's obscuring many of the stories
and the histories, not only are they ignored often,
but in fact they're intentionally ignored
and subconsciously ignored by historians
who don't always take critically
the sort of inherited landscapes,
the ways of seeing place and ways of seeing the world that,
most of us, you know, the United States
and throughout the Cellar colonial world
have grown up sort of being educated,
whether intentionally or otherwise.
The farm in particular is long been,
one of these landscapes that I'm very interested in,
my mom and dad both grew up on farms,
I'm an agricultural historian,
and the farm in the United States in particular,
is sort of like this primal scene of American history,
and early American historians often,
we always encounter this with Thomas Jefferson's,
sort of Uman, Agrarian, Republic,
where the farm becomes this basic social unit
of American history.
And what we then think of when we think of a farm
becomes specifically tied to what are nine times out of 10,
these culturally white, settler colonial practices,
different relations of gendered labor,
different sets of crops, different sets of ecological
and biophysical communities.
And really what I wanted to do with this book
is reconsider some of those base level assumptions,
I think that represent the lowest common denominator
of historical discourse whenever early American historians
in particular are writing about the environment
of early America of the colonies.
So these four myths that I wanted to use
is my starting point for picking apart this
or complicated cultural history of agricultural landscapes.
First of all, the myth that native people in the United States
never really had agriculture,
this is the foundational myth.
The second myth that because native people
didn't have agriculture that they were basically hunters,
the third myth that native people
because they relied only on the chase
as Thomas Jefferson might put it, we're always hungry.
And then the fourth myth that because native people
are always hungry, they never really developed any taste
or any kind of higher order cuisine
as did the gastronomes of contemporaneous Europe.
So this book addresses all four of those myths
in relation to how those four myths
have become foundational historical understandings
for the ongoing presence of cellular colonialism,
not just in the United States,
but particularly in the historical narratives
that historians in the United States continue to tell.
I mentioned in the book too that even though
I'm calling them myths or not even so much that,
there's something bigger.
They are something that represents an entire discursive
practice on which historians and other folks
in the humanities and social sciences are immersed.
So this is sort of my attempt to offer
an interdisciplinary or perhaps multi-disciplinary look
at early American history that,
among other things, is trying to take seriously the fact
that the way many of us have been subconsciously educated
to see agricultural landscapes, obscures,
as much as it reveals as it goes to sang.
- One of the ideas that really surprised me
when I read Native foods was how we have this idea
of what early American landscapes are supposed to look like.
For example, I grew up and I live in the Northeast.
So I always have a picture of an early New England farm
in my head.
We have the farmhouse, we have the kids,
we have the animals running around the farm,
and that farm occupies open cleared farm space.
And it looks just like a permanent place,
a place that people are going to live in for generations.
But when you think about indigenous or native landscapes,
you realize that indigenous people
in the early American period,
they had much larger landscapes to make use of.
Their homes were miles and miles big.
So they have spaces to farm in these homes,
they have spaces to hunt.
And while their land doesn't look as cleared or permanent
as these European New England farm landscapes look like,
Indigenous agriculture.
space is often did require a lot of moving around. These were permanent spaces, but they were also
mobile spaces where indigenous people went from season to season to take advantage of farming or
hunting or gathering or whatever their food requirements required. So these are still permanent
landscapes, but they're also dynamic and fertile landscapes for growing and hunting food.
Absolutely right, and I think that way of seeing the agricultural landscape is a particular way
that is privileging private property ownership and the sort of vision of 160 acre family farm
that is the domain of an able-bodied heteronormative male property owner with a household of gendered
and different aged labor creating a sort of subsistence for the family and also a market surplus
for sale. This is sort of the American fantasy and one that it took me a while to get to this point,
but one that I realized suffuses historical narratives in the United States and beyond the sort of
Euro-American context which is descended of course from the sort of overall agrarian desires of
English and other European immigrants to the colonies. I think the point here is that this is a fantasy,
this idea and most farms never really looked this way. Even European ones, this particular idea of
private property and private family farm, this is an element that I don't really think emerged even
in English history until closer to the 16th century. So it's something that emerges in England
around about the same time it's reaching its fuller articulation in parts of New England.
Now before we look more closely at the agricultural practices of two or three of the different
indigenous peoples and nations that Michael studied in native foods, we should really talk about
the role of gender and the formation of these formats. Michael, Beth would like to know about the
roles indigenous and European women and men played in the kitchen and in the different food-growing
spaces of the early American period. Great question. I think in reality women and men played a lot
of the same actual roles in the kitchen. However, how those spaces on the farm and in the kitchen
were gendered in terms of the expectations of labor and whose place belonged to whom that differed
dramatically. I think the most striking difference probably just simply boils down to the legal
status in which women found themselves in the American colonies under the English common law of
coverture whereby their identities were subsumed by whomever their male patriarch might have been
a husband or a father. Another substantial difference in terms of labor in the kitchen, movement
around the fields and in and out of the household. I think had to do with polygonal relations that
many native communities and matriarchal polygamous relationships that differ dramatically from
English expectations of a monogamous marriage shaping household. One of the considerations
that I make in the book, particularly in the context of New England, is the fact that
colonists seemed horrified or at least famed horror at this idea of native polygony and yet the
plight of Euro-American women in the colonies in New England in particular was one where each
woman on average gave birth seven times during their lifetime. Many perished young maybe after one or
two births. Basically one ends up happening if you paid close attention to family histories
in colonial New England. I mean men are basically running through why. So this sequential rate for
many of them two, three or more wives over the course of their lifetime in the history of their
own household. So my question is sort of that serial monogamy differ from Wampanoag and other
native community practices of polygony. That's one kind of major difference I think is just in terms
of how native people and colonial people understood what my cost to the proper cooperative relationship
within a household between man and a woman. But I think the realities on the ground were much more
complicated than there was far more variation in terms of the actual division of labor. And one
of the sort of deep insecurities that afflicted colonial society too was the extent to which native
women demonstrated to colonial women and colonial men to the capacities of women to be agriculturalists,
to farm, to butcher animals. These were tasks that colonial women were also doing. They were just
tasks that colonial men thought were tasks that should be provided by the male head of household
more or less. And tasks that represented male propriety over agricultural spaces and male
propriety over economic production. So as all gender performances go I think often we take
the performances or we grant them more power than probably they actually had in terms of
dairy cultural practices and household practices. I think another interesting difference to consider
has to do with the colonial practice of dairying. So women's household production of cheese in
particular, you know this was a foundational source of cash in New England for much of the 17th
century. And this was money generated not through cash crops. Colonial farmers weren't really
growing any cash crops. The only real cash crop on these farms was cheese and milk butter.
So this was wholly within the realm of women's work so to speak the
ticklish business of dairying as folks put it. So if Beth is interested in digging some more into
the sort of maybe unexpected ambiguities between men's and women's labor in the colonial world,
maybe dairying is interesting place to look. In his book Native Foods, Michael traces the
history and food ways of four different native nations to show the development of the four myths
that he mentioned about native agriculture as well as the realities of native food production.
Michael, the first people you investigate in native foods are the Wampanoag who live in what is
now Southern Massachusetts, what we call the Cape and Islands region of Massachusetts,
which happens to include Nane Tucket and Martha's Vineyard. Would you tell us what Wampanoag agriculture
looked like by the turn of the 17th century in this eastern part of the Donlands, which is
how the Wampanoag and other indigenous peoples of New England refer to Massachusetts in New England?
Yeah, Wampanoag agriculture was highly developed, which would come as no surprise, but I think maybe
what's often more surprising to folks who aren't necessarily students of this moment too is how
Wampanoag agriculture produced the surplus that also lived in the pretty massive trade between
what's now Southern New England and parts of Northern New England, where agriculture was less
developed solely due to the fact that there was a shorter growing season. Once you get north of
sort of the present-day boundaries of the state of Massachusetts into southern Vermont in New Hampshire,
the number of frost-free growing days dramatically drops. So Wampanoag and other northern communities
would trade for these Wampanoag agricultural surpluses, exchanging caribou and other kinds of
northern foodstuffs for corn and beans and squash, which thrives along the coast and farther south
in the river valleys of New England, the Connecticut River Valley in particular.
Would you tell us more about the Wampanoag and their establishment of corn as a staple of their
diet? Because as you mentioned, you need at least 100 frost-free days to grow corn, and yet
this is the period of the little ice age in the 17th and 18th centuries. So how did the Wampanoag
manage to cultivate corn and make it a staple of their diet? Knowing that this growing season of
New England is actually very short in this period. This is such an epic story, the entire diffusion
of corn from its sort of earliest domestication, probably thousands of years ago from Tio Sinté
in what's now Central America, and then it's spread. And to North America, as far north,
as we know, is New England where Wampanoag has been growing corn for at least six or seven
centuries before the Plymouth colonists arrived to start digging it up and replanting it.
Corn is a tropical grass. Basically, over centuries of native seed selection, native farmers were
able to adapt corn into a wide variety of cultivars that suited the particular climatic conditions
for wherever they were planting it. The Wampanoag's in particular were faced with this problem of
developing corn and maintaining actual varieties of corn after they were developed with the priority
of earlyness, which is what agronomists in the modern period refer to as like how soon you can get
a crop to eat after planting. So it seems like most of these Wampanoag crops by the 17th century,
these corn crops could produce between 60 and 80 days, popping them well underneath that
hundred-day frost-free growing season barrier. And the actual literal way that Wampanoag seed
savers would do this is they would select years from the bottom of the corn stock nearest the ground,
which have been pollinated by other plants that had flowered the fastest. There are other ways
of inducing earlyness, as you may know, if you're into corn, that crop engineers have used
used through hybridizations and then later on through genetic engineering.
But yeah, the simplest way to select for earlier corn is simply to select corn that had been
pollinated by the plants that had flowered first, the way that corn pollinates, it pollinates
by wind.
So these enormous clouds of corn pollen washed all over the place when the corn is flowering.
And all of those little tiny corn silks on a year of corn, each one of those silks gets
pollinated and then turns into a kernel, the seed.
So if you've ever liked onto the store and you've bought some corn on the cob and brought
it home disappointed to see that like half of the kernels were shriveled up, that's basically
a problem with pollination.
So that's one of the reasons why corn too needs to be planted in big blocks.
If you plant corn just like a handful of plants in your backyard, you're probably not going
to get sufficient pollination because you just need a sort of larger mass of corn planted
at once.
That's a grass.
So I guess I like to have friends growing alongside it.
That profligacy of corn, the fact that pollinates by wind also means that it's very difficult
to isolate different varieties of corn.
So if you have a well-developed agriculture based on corn, one of your challenges is to
separate the different varieties of corn that you're growing.
So one of the ways that Walpinog farmers did this was they would grow out different
varieties of corn through selecting seeds based on color as well, because color is one
of the most reliable indicators of a particular parentage for corn, which is so happens that
it's easy to select corn based on color.
So this allowed Walpinog farmers basically to stagger their plantings.
So you'd have 60 day corns, you'd have 80 day corns, you'd figure out which ones were
earliest, you'd get them all color-coded.
I mean, this is work that took place over generations of seed selection.
And then you could plant your corn by color and successive patterns every couple of weeks
in order to ensure that one color corn, let's say your red corn, was done pollinating by
the time your yellow corn would be pollinating in order to keep them separate.
And then if there was any cross pollination, it'd be easy to tell because the corn would
be the wrong color.
One of the earliest accounts of the Mayflower out on the Cape digging up some corn caches,
some native corn caches, everyone's remarking about the marvelous different colors of corn.
And one of the curious things, I guess for me when I was working on this book was rereading
some of those passages with this sort of knowledge of Walpinog agricultural history too, and just
thinking about all of the things that went on scene in those moments when colonists were
introduced to native food without any kind of context for the enormous amount of work
and thought and organization went into its production.
This is really a remarkable story because if you think about the way we learn early American
history, it's always the Europeans who brought the signs of food and agriculture to North
America.
And it was on their arrival that Europeans supposedly taught indigenous peoples how to cultivate
superior crops.
But when we look at this Walpinog history with corn, we can clearly see that indigenous
people have been applying this food science for generations before Europeans arrived.
And they were quite successful in figuring out how to grow this tropical grass corn in
a region where corn really had no business in growing.
Yeah, and corn has so many advantages over the old world crops that colonists tried to
grow, not only in New England, but elsewhere in North America.
First and foremost, above these advantages is because corn is a tropical grass, thrives
in warm and hot and humid environments.
It's actually a grass that has a different biochemical process for photosynthesis than old
world European grain crops like wheat and oats and barley.
Basically that process is called C4 photosynthesis versus C3 where because the photosynthetic process
has four carbon molecules basically that get released, the plant more efficiently converts
carbon dioxide into sugars without having to release as much oxygen when the plant's
growing.
So on a really hot humid summer day, while the wheat and the barley and the oats are
wilting, corn, it likes those conditions, it seems to do just fine.
So there are other advantages too, I think, just the mechanical advantage of a corn kernel
versus the small seed, wheat obviously, but also rye and barley oats.
When the copacked soils that hadn't been plowed, it's much easier to germinate corn.
Corn will basically germinate anywhere as anyone knows who's just taking a handful of it
and chucked it out or tried to plant it or had swirls spread it around or something like
that.
Corn will germinate on the forest for even in shade.
It's probably not going to do too well or produce a crop in shade, but it'll germinate
anywhere.
So contrast that with the sort of mechanical disadvantage of these small grained old world
crops where the soil had to be worked, at least a little bit in order to get the crop
to germinate, in order to get the seed to actually germinate.
So I think these are the kinds of technical aspects of agricultural production too that
when they're ignored by historians, it makes it a lot easier to just sort of roll along
with this idea that I think you articulated very well that Europeans are the bringers
of agricultural knowledge and science and things like that.
I encourage all of my students and my colleagues, whenever they are writing about agriculture
about food, to try to grow some of it themselves or take seriously the sort of technical aspects
of its production, as an aside, I'm teaching this class at the University of North Texas
and it's called horticultural histories and we're even working in class to extract DNA
out of plants.
It's like not just enough that I want my students to know that genetic engineering has this
history of, you know, how many people in a history class actually ever learn how genetically
modified organisms are produced in a lab.
So I think paying some extra attention to these sort of technical processes of agricultural
production and horticulture can really yield some big insights for historians.
Could you tell us about the creativity the Wampanoag people have with their corn beans
and squash, which they typically grow together and about the different dishes they cook
with these different foods?
One of the famous Wampanoag dishes is suck a tash, which is a dish that was widely adopted
by colonists as well, basically just a corn, squash, and bean soup stew.
So many other corn-based dishes were consumed throughout the Wampanoag culinary world, basically
green corn, of course, the corn before it's dried.
Dried corn itself would be used for all kinds of different purposes, whether it's cooked
in like a stew or ground into a flour.
Ground corn would be baked into sort of like a tortilla and then used as a portable food.
There also, what we think of in the 21st centuries, the Mexican tamal.
In Spanish you call it tamal, this is like a widespread dish that existed in the Americas
for probably thousands of years where different native communities would produce a kind
of corn bread that would be steamed inside some kind of a container, whether that would
be like a corn stock or a banana leaf or whatever might be at hand.
Native communities, the Cherokee are probably most known for using beans to make a kind
of bean bread that's steamed like a tamal, and this is a practice common across North
America.
I think one of the reasons why native cuisine is sort of hidden in plain sight, simply because
so many of these native dishes aren't really considered to be native dishes.
They're considered to be American dishes or they're considered to be Mexican dishes or
Central American dishes or Caribbean dishes when they're sort of like these diaspora,
native foods.
Before we start talking about Cherokee agriculture, something that struck me as a
redger book, native foods, was your discussion of indigenous people in New England.
Now speaking from my experience, New England isn't traditionally a place where we're
taught to recognize that there were and are indigenous people like the Wampanoag who
survived and live in this region today.
And when we're taught to think about indigenous land dispossession, it's always in this later
period with the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s and in a landscape that's really far
removed from New England, because we're taught to think of the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee
on the Trail of Tears and their forced removal to Oklahoma.
So what struck me about your book native foods is how it prompts us to think about not
just earlier periods of indigenous dispossession, like the dispossession that occurred in New
England during the 17th and 18th centuries, but also how that dispossession wasn't just
about the physical removal of indigenous peoples from lands that white Europeans and Americans
coveted.
It was really also a dispossession of indigenous people from the agriculture of their lands,
from their agriculture of their lands.
Yeah, I think a lot of us in the last 40 years in early American history and native and
indigenous studies have looked at New England as kind of a classic example of the erasementality
of settler colonialism in particular how historians in the colonial era also discursively spoke
and wrote out native people out of existence in New England when obviously native communities
persisted in New England, drive the New England, charred on, etc.
One place so where we, as historians haven't spent enough time critically dismantling those myths is thinking about how this process of dispossession worked really through these landscape transformations through these transformations from native fields literally into colonial fields.
I mean, I think the Plymouth colony is perhaps the first obvious example of this, where the colony was founded basically on this town to tuxet that was in all likelihood not simply depopulated by disease, which I think is another element of this myth here that by the time pilgrims arrived, Wampanox were all decimated by smallpox or some other disease.
But if you have knowledge of Wampanox agricultural practices, Wampanox often would just leave fields to fallow for a period of time, maybe 10 or 15 years, for natural soil replenishment before returning to that field.
So it's not like this site had been abandoned, it was just in the state of following, it would be another way to see this. But all up and down the river valleys of New England, in particular the Connecticut Valley, town after town after town in the 17th century was built literally on top of native villages and farm after farm built literally on top of native fields.
Fields that have been cleared by native people using fire and have been utilized for generations to grow corn, bean squash, and a variety of other annual crops.
I'd also like to point out too, I mean, the other way that this transformation worked out wasn't even so much in the fields, but in the forests as well.
The forest to New Englanders was evil wilderness, the den of Satan, a sort of untrammeled landscape. But for native people, the forest was an actively managed landscape.
Basically the Wampanox practice agro forestry, they selectively burned the forest floor and cut down trees and strategic places in order to increase the penetration of sunlight to particular openings in the forest.
With the goal of producing a forest in which deer and other game animals thrived on a study supply of nuts and acorns from mass bearing trees and where these openings between forest and meadow allowed sun to grow different kinds of perennial sources of food like berries, different sorts of berries and other fruits.
And I think it's important to recognize that as an agricultural practice. And we have this term agro forestry that is gaining prominence across the United States I think is more and more land grain institutions and other universities are funding research into permaculture, different forms of sustainable agriculture.
These New England forests were actually food forests and have been managed that way. And one of the big changes that took place over the 17th century into the 18th century under settler colonial intendents, I mean these practices were stopped.
And forests of New England transitioned from kind of an oak savanna to a mixed fur and beach forest that's now dominated primarily by shade tolerant species. So that's sort of the success of state for most of New England's forests rather than a kind of more open parkland forests of the 17th century and before.
Now, like the Wampanoag and Honest Shoney, which Michael also covers in his book Native Foods, the Cherokee were also very skilled farmers. Michael, let's talk about Cherokee agriculture.
Actually, first let's take a moment to thank our episode sponsors and then talk about Cherokee agriculture.
What would it take to reimagine the stories we tell about early America?
At Ben Franklin's World, we explore the lives, ideas and experiences that shaped the past and still shape us today. From indigenous foodways to the daily lives of ordinary people, from enslaved and free communities to voices long left out of our textbooks, we bring you the full human story of our early American past.
This work exists because of listeners like you. As we approach Giving Tuesday on December 2nd, I would like to thank a few supporters who've made our recent episodes possible.
Johnny L. Michael L. Judea L. and Mark M. Your generosity keeps our history honest, inclusive and free for everyone. Thank you so much for your support and for your generosity.
Ben Franklin's World is produced by Cleo Digital Media, a small nonprofit powered entirely by our community. So every gift, whether it's $5 or $100, helps us share more of the stories, the reveal who we are and how we go from here.
And because Cleo Digital Media is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, your donation is fully tax deductible. So if you believe that history should reflect everyone's story, please visit Ben Franklin's World.com/donnie.
That's Ben Franklin's World.com/donnie. And thank you. Thank you for supporting inclusive, curious and courageous history today and on Giving Tuesday.
Evening, buyers remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
You what?
Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it.
So there's no. No, no buyers remorse. More like buyers rejoice.
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.
Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana.
Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com.
Michael, would you tell us about Cherokee agriculture and how it seems similar to and different from the Wampanoag agriculture of the 17th and 18th centuries that we've been discussing?
So Cherokee agriculture in many ways was similar to Wampanoag agriculture in terms of the kinds of crops and the combinations in which they were planted.
I think one of the defining elements of Cherokee agriculture was the inter planting of corn beans and squash, which was a common practice throughout North America.
But one that really dominated Cherokee bottom land farming in particular.
So bottom lands are simply the alluvial flats along rivers. So the lands prone to seasonal flooding.
And on these bottom lands basically the advantages that there is an annual rejuvenation of organic matter to enrich the soil.
What this also provides too is like this organic matter isn't compacted, so it becomes easier to plant seeds and it's easier for them to germinate.
So anyway, the three sisters, this is sort of the common story. I think that students of American history do get in their classes. But if you haven't gotten it, the three sisters refer to corn beans and squash.
And it's this sort of symbiotic relationship they have in the garden where the corn provides a trellis for the beans, the squash, finding out along the base, provides a kind of living mulch to shade out weeds.
And the beans as nitrogen fixing legumes will convert as part of their photosynthesis process nitrogen from the air into nitrogen that's available for the roots of the corn, which is a grass, which is a real high nitrogen intensive crop.
So this is what I think what a culture is now might refer to as like a green manure ring or something like that. But this practice between the alluvial depositions and the nitrogen fixing process of the beans, this enabled Cherokee agriculture to persist in place for many more years.
So one of the differences, you know, whereas Wampanogs would periodically move their fields and allow it sort of natural following process to replenish the soil. Cherokee farmers didn't have to do this as often because of their different strategy.
And you know, this isn't a hard and fast difference. I'm sure actually Wampanogs are probably using similar strategies allowing you England river bottoms. But I think the scale of the Cherokee use of this sort of hydrological assistance was just in general larger.
We've now talked some about how the Cherokee are also very skilled at agriculture. But whites always seem to have this idea that the Cherokee were really hunters, not farmers. So Michael, how did this particular myth develop?
Why did white Europeans and Americans prefer to think of the Cherokee as hunters instead of the skilled agriculturalists that they were? And how did this vision of the Cherokee as hunters assist whites in removing them from their southeastern homelands?
Yeah, one of the ways that this cellar colonial erasen replace process was justified was through this representation of native people as predators, as these kind of beasts of the forest, killing other beasts of the forest, not practicing agriculture, not maintaining a forest as a food forest or something like that. But simply kind of wandering willy nilly trying to hunt and gather.
This was a very, very convenient narrative, particularly in the generation of the American revolution before and after. In order to sort of create some kind of a stark fictional difference between native society and this emerging American nation state, premised around agricultural development.
And so I think a kind of persistent generational prerogative among settler colonialists and the early republic and before, you know, you can trace a through line from George Washington that Andrew Jackson on this is a sort of insistence on representing the Cherokee in particular as hunters and disavowing the centuries long history of Cherokee agriculture and agricultural ingenuity really agricultural dependence.
One of my favorite quotations is from a story in Barbara Graymont to refer to Sullivan's expedition during the revolutionary war.
war, as a war on vegetables, where Sullivan and his troops basically systematically destroyed
urequeous farms all across what's now upstate New York.
And the same thing happened with the Cherokee during the various Anglo-Cherokee wars during
the American Revolutionary War.
So I think by the time of this revolutionary generation by the end of the Revolutionary
War, a lot of Cherokees are kind of starving and hunting, trying to procure food and desperation,
but not because they'd never had agricultural practices, but because their agricultural
capabilities had been systematically destroyed by American militias and, you know, really
through the sort of long string of wars across the second half of the 18th century.
So there's this famous letter George Washington wrote this letter to the Cherokees in the
1790s basically exhorting them to take up the plow and stop hunting, you know, civilize
themselves through agriculture, and this is just such a disingenuous letter because of
course George Washington himself with his own background with Cherokees over as many
years.
I mean, he knew very well that the Cherokees were an agricultural people.
They were farmers and you have to take up the plow.
They had just been dispossessed, disenfranchised and murdered over the course of the late 18th
century.
So transforming in this kind of discursive way, native people from farmers and to hunters
was a major strategy in terms of both trying to justify other representations of native
people as so-called savages or barbarians, but also to justify the dispossession of native
lands by insinuating that native communities didn't use those lands productively, when
in fact they did.
How did the myth that Native Americans never had any farms or practice any agriculture
begin?
And why does this myth seem to be so necessary to our image of the founding of the United
States?
This is a question I don't think I've been able to answer to my satisfaction.
But I think where I'm kind of going in terms of thinking this through is that this seizure
of native agricultural spaces is what you might think of as like a primitive accumulation
of settler colonialism.
So that term primitive accumulation, you might remember it from your econ courses or
then that refers to the initial moment in which capitalists seize the means of production
according to Karl Marx and Marxian critiques of political economy that has subfused American
social history, an economic history.
But thinking of that seizure very concretely as this kind of retitling of the North American
continent.
I mean this is something that is performed I think in ways that historians haven't fully
explored.
And it's performed through historical narratives where historical narratives become a type of
recitation in the performance of land title.
So if you own property or know someone who owns property and you take a look at the title,
all the title is the sort of legal recitation, a legal narrative of whose own the land and
when it was exchanged.
And there's nothing of course innate about private property ownership or something that's
unnatural.
It's a kind of social contract.
It's something that has to be culturally adjudicated, something that has to be performed.
And I think historians need to reckon with the fact that the histories that we tell
about early America and the histories we tell about native agriculture and native food
are part of that recitation of land title.
They don't necessarily have to be that way.
But I think there is something sort of substantial that's hidden in the way that historians narrate
American history where the kind of teleological end is to narrate the possession of North
America by settler colonists.
I think this is also one of the kind of unmentioned aspects of a land acknowledgement for instance
too.
That is actually quite beneficial if you think about a land acknowledgement as something
representative of indigenous protocol or something that they often mention.
Why are people critical of that and less critical of this sort of settler colonial protocol?
Which is conventional historical narratives that seek as their endpoint a sort of reestablishment
of settler claims to the North American landscape.
And so this is something that sounds very sort of offensive and distasteful.
So instead of having to say it, we've just had this thing called the farm that we kind
of represent as a symbol of this sense of possession.
So I don't know if this answers your question entirely.
But when did this happen?
I think it kind of happened from the moment that pilgrims planted their corn crops on
Wampanoag fields.
It was a separate to put historical practice which certainly looked different in the 17th
century than it does now, but still an effort to put historical practice into the service
of performing title to land.
It's now time for a segment 1776 in context.
As we're now in the midst of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, in your opinion
Michael, how do you think your research into Indigenous agriculture and food ways helps
us better understand the American Revolution and its impact?
One of my favorite works of really American history at James McVilliams is book "A Revolution
in Eating."
What I like is kind of overall argument is not that the revolution changed how Americans
were eating, but it changed how Americans talked about what they were eating.
This is the kind of moment where Thomas Jefferson was spurned by Patrick Henry for a
juring his native fixtuals.
This is a moment I think that's interesting to the revolution.
That phrase, the native fixtuals of North America, I think that's this really wonderful
tacit acknowledgement that Patrick Henry's making about the sort of indigeneity of American
cuisine.
One of the things I'm exploring in this book, Native Foods, is what happens in Native
Foods?
How come we don't have more Native restaurants?
We don't have any Native American restaurants, but all of these other cuisines that are widely
represented.
I think the answer is simply because Native cuisine has been co-opted as American cuisine,
and that is this moment during the revolution when a lot of this takes place alongside these
popular shifts among settler colonists to dissociate themselves from a British empire
and part by embracing corn and other Native foods and making them their own.
Now that you've written about Native Foods, Michael, where is your interest in agricultural
history taking you now?
I've got a number of projects right now.
One is the creation of an edible landscape on the University of North Texas campus that's
informed by a large oral history project where I've got student assistants conducting interviews
with folks in our region who are affiliated in some capacity with food and agriculture,
from folks working in restaurant kitchens to farmers, and some multilingual project that's
trying to document experiences of immigrants, Native people, and other communities throughout
Northern Texas, and so no Oklahoma and beyond.
And then ultimately what we'd like to do is use the sort of interstitial places on campus
to not only grow food for kind of public ownership and public consumption, but also offer some
sort of historical interpretation.
That does more than just kind of identify so-called heirloom or heritage crops or something
like that.
But also speak to the broader historical narratives that those crops represent or might represent
if they are interpreted that way.
That's what I'm working on now, and I'll probably write some stuff related to it, but I'm
not exactly sure what yet.
It sounds like a really great project.
And I can imagine now walking through your campus, the North Texas campus, and maybe grabbing
an ear of corn or an apple or a pear or some piece of produce that isn't typically grown
in North Texas.
Yeah, it's my students already just in this class like they planted about 800 chili transplants
through different kinds that we're going to give away to the public.
That does sound great.
Then Michael, if we have more questions about native foods or your work, where's the best
place for us to contact you?
Just send me an email,
[email protected].
Michael Wise, thank you for introducing us to native foods and the history and agriculture
of the Wampanoag and Cherokee Peoples.
It's been my pleasure, thanks so much.
Michael's insights remind us that indigenous people were not just passive figures in early
American history.
They were scientists, farmers, and culinary innovators whose deep knowledge of the land
shaped everything from what early Americans ate to how they lived.
The histories we've inherited in learned in school describe native peoples as hunters
and gatherers who were dependent on the environment.
But as new scholarship like Michael's reveals, native communities like the Wampanoag and Cherokee
had longstanding agricultural systems that were grounded in observation, a practice of
agriculture, and cultural knowledge.
What's fascinating is not just how this agricultural knowledge was just as sophisticated if not
more so than European agricultural knowledge.
It was also adapted to specific places and shaped by generations of trial, error, and
innovation.
This new more accurate view of native food and agricultural practices forces us to rethink
what we know about how settler colonialism worked.
Not just through land seizure and dispossession, but also through erasure.
By denying native peoples their role as farmers, agricultural experts, and stewards of the
land, it made it easier for white colonists and settlers to justify their actions against
native peoples and claim sole possession of all the innovations that we've come to associate
with American ingenuity.
You can find more information about Michael, his book, Native Foods, plus notes, links,
and a transcript for everything we talked about today on the show notes.
BendFrancklandsWorld.com/426
Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts.
So if you enjoy BendFrancklands World, please tell your friends and family about it.
Production assistance for this podcast comes from Joseph Adelman, Karen Wolf, and Morgan McCullough.
Break Master Sylvinder composed our custom theme music.
This podcast is part of the AirWave Media Podcast Network.
To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit AirWaveMedia.com.
Finally, what food or food traditions do you associate with early American history?
And how might our new insight into indigenous agriculture change how you see them?
This is something that I'm going to be thinking about for a while and I'd love to trade ideas with you.
So email me, Liz at BendFrancklandsWorld.com.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
PodcastTranscript AI