ABSTRACT

Native agriculture has a strange place in the popular imagination of the Americas. Its position in hemispheric cultural history is not well sustained. Of course, it is well known that food produced by indigenous peoples nurtured European newcomers in the Americas, enabling them to survive their businesses of exploration, trade, and conquest in sufficient numbers. But the familiar narratives about the reservoir of Indian corn dug up by the desperate Puritans, who had arrived at Cape Cod in November (months past the growing season), resound with faith in divine intervention rather than surprise at the wealth of the stocks the newcomers had discovered. Schoolchildren usually know and wonder about the food traded for seeming trifles by Columbus. They might also be aware of Captain John Smith’s ardent negotiations concerning agricultural produce supplied by the Powhatan in Virginia. But by the time students reach the academy, they are nevertheless unprepared to find that colonial reports about the New World are very much taken with indigenous agriculture. Contemporary readers are too familiar with stories about the shortcomings of native farming, too convinced by assumptions about the superiority of farming built on European engineering and domestic animals, and too exposed to myths of vacant lands and unused wildernesses to take note of the striking hermeneutics that have helped to incorporate – and thus swallow – indigenous farming in colonial descriptions of unfamiliar lands. When Jane Mt. Pleasant published research on the very high productivity of colonial Iroquoian maize farming, a hoe-driven style of agriculture that yielded more grain than its European competitors at the time, she first had to indicate that decades of research had made it inconceivable that anything outside Western-style plow-and manure-based agriculture could count as productive, professional farming (Pleasant 460-462).