The agricultural history of Native Americans on the North American continent is the story of profound achievement prior to contact with European civilization; thereafter, it is a chronicle of decline and failure. Before the Christian era many Indian cultural groups of North America cultivated plants of Mesoamerican and indigenous origin. By a.d. 1000 corn (maize), beans, and squash were their most important cultivated food plants. Although other crops, such as cotton in the Southwest and wild rice in the Great Lakes region, remained important locally, the "three sisters" provided the nutritional base and chief source of subsistence and trade from agriculture until the twentieth century.
Native American farmers became skilled plant breeders. They carefully practiced the art of selection and adaptation to develop varieties for specific areas, such as corn that matured in sixty days near the Canadian border, where a cool, short growing season limited agriculture, as well as varieties for the hot, dry Southwest. Native American farmers also developed many varieties of beans and squash to meet local environmental conditions. Indian women were the primary agriculturists among most cultural groups, the peoples of the Southwest being an exception.
Indian farmers cultivated the rich, friable soils of the river valleys and flood plains, where wooden, stone, and bone hoes easily stirred the soil. In the uplands, grass-covered and heavy clay soils could not be tilled with these implements. East of the Mississippi River, Indian farmers girdled trees to help prepare the land for crops by eliminating unwanted shade. They used hoes and fire to remove brush. By burning weeds and the remains of the past season's crops they added potash, calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium to the soil, but they did not intentionally fertilize their croplands. A sharp-pointed digging or dibble stick served as the common tool for opening the soil to plant seeds. Some cultural groups such as the Mohawks soaked their seeds in a potion of hellebore to poison crows, while the Navajos sprinkled squash plants with a mixture of urine and goat's milk to protect against damage by chinch bugs and cockroaches. Indian farmers also picked insects and worms off plants with their fingers.
Native American farmers used a peg to help remove the husks from ears of corn, and some may have used shells to loosen the kernels from the cob. Women used a gathering stick, called a hoop, and a knife to harvest wild rice. They also used sticks, pestles, and mortars to thresh corn, beans, and other crops. Indian women used baskets to winnow the threshed corn and beans. In the North, Native American farmers also used baskets to store corn in their houses. Some cultural groups in the South stored their corn in roofed granaries to protect it from the weather and rodents. In the Midwest and West, many farming peoples dug storage pits, called caches, to preserve their corn, beans, and squash from spoilage and to protect their foodstuffs from thieves.
In the present-day eastern United States, Native Americans developed two forms of land tenure, one communal and the other individual. The village or cultural group claimed sovereignty over a particular area, and individual women controlled the use of specific fields. As long as a woman used a portion of land for agriculture, she had the continuing right of usage. If she stopped cultivating that land, however, either someone else would take the plot or it would revert to communal or village control. If the village moved, the headmen allotted new lands to the women in each lineage or family for cultivation. No fixed rules determined the size of a plot or the amount of land that an individual could claim. Each woman, sometimes aided by the men in the household, could clear as much land as she needed. While land could be inherited matrilineally, no one could claim absolute right to it. Land ultimately belonged to the village that owned or controlled it. In the Southwest, land-tenure customs differed from those of the East and Great Plains. There, individual males could own land and inherit it. Rights of communal and individual use were similar to eastern practices, although inherited land sometimes passed from father to son—that is, patrilineally—as among the Pimas, Papagos, and Yumas. Matrilineal inheritance and usage rights prevailed among the Pueblos, while the Navajos practiced shared use and inheritance customs.
Native Americans, then, recognized a group right to uncultivated land and individual rights to cultivated land. They did not believe that land could be bought or sold, because it did not belong to the present generation. Rather, Native Americans considered themselves trustees of the land for future generations. Because land belonged only temporarily to the generation inhabiting it, Native Americans could not accept the white man's concept of sale and absolute ownership. After European contact, Native Americans soon learned that land ownership for white farmers did not depend on use but rather on signed pieces of paper that could pass easily from person to person, the possession of which gave the holder exclusive right to the land described on it. This new cultural system of land ownership ultimately ended Native American agricultural practices east of the Mississippi River by the mid-nineteenth century.
European settlers on the eastern coast of North America learned to raise corn from the Indians, but no evidence exists that proves the Indians also taught them to fertilize with fish. At the same time that the Native Americans shared their agricultural traditions with the Europeans, they also adopted European agricultural practices, such as raising wheat and livestock, using the plow, and producing for a market economy.
When white settlers began to occupy lands in the trans-Mississippi West, the federal government adopted a reservation system to limit Indian land claims so that white agriculture could expand. Government officials and friends of the Indians believed that acculturation and assimilation could be achieved only when Native Americans learned to farm in the white tradition and own their own lands. This idea achieved partial fruition with the passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887, which provided for the allotment of Indian lands to individual Indian farmers. Few Native Americans, however, had access to the education, science, technology, or capital necessary to begin farming and achieve economic independence. Although federal agricultural policy was based on good intentions, it proved detrimental to the Indians. The allotment process enabled whites to gain control of Indian lands both legally and illegally. Between 1887 and 1934, the Indian land base declined by 90 million acres.
During the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Collier supported the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), which ended the practice of allotting Indian lands, and he worked to improve the livestock and farming practices of Native Americans. Not all Indians, however, agreed with his policy, which required stock reductions to conserve the rangelands. Although Collier expanded the Indian land base, Congress failed to provide funds to establish the educational and credit programs necessary to support the development of Indian agriculture to the level of its white counterpart and thus to permit economic assimilation.
After World War II environmental limitations in the West, coupled with government policy designed to make Native Americans into small-scale subsistence farmers in the white tradition, prevented Indian agriculturists from becoming commercial farmers. Indian farmers continued to lack the scientific, technological, and financial resources to become independent agriculturists, and many Native Americans preferred to rent or sell their lands to white farmers in order to earn income. In 1950, Indian farmers averaged five hundred dollars in income annually, compared with twenty-five hundred dollars for white farmers. A decade later, less than 10 percent of Native Americans practiced agriculture, down from 45 percent in 1940. At the same time, approximately 70 percent of Native Americans lived in rural areas, although they composed less than 1 percent of the total population. Native Americans could not meet their subsistence needs by farming, and they had no possibility of competing with white agriculturalists on a commercial scale because of inadequate capital resources, technical skills, and managerial abilities. By the mid-1960s, each Indian who remained on the reservations earned an average of only $1,888 annually, while non-reservation Indians had annual incomes averaging $5,710. Federal agricultural policy had utterly failed to acculturate Native Americans and assimilate them into white culture and society. In addition, federal termination policy, designed to end tribal reliance on the federal government, further hindered the development of a strong agricultural base for Native Americans.
In the twentieth century, as white farmers began using western lands more intensively, they threatened Indian water rights, and the contest between Native Americans and whites over who owned and controlled the western waters became increasingly entangled in the courts. During the 1970s, white challenges to Indian water rights further threatened Native American agriculture. With water their most important natural resource, and with much of their land unsuitable for agriculture without it, water rights became the most significant issue related to Indian farming after 1970. Although Native Americans had used the courts to maintain their water rights since the Winters decision (1908), the federal judiciary has not yet quantified Indian water rights nor determined whether the government or the tribes reserved the water rights on reservations created by treaties. In the western United States urban demands for water have placed Native American water rights in jeopardy.
By the late twentieth century, Native Americans controlled 52 million acres of land, 42 million under tribal ownership and 10 million owned by individuals. Federal programs provided little aid specifically for Indian farmers, although Indian agriculturists could participate in a variety of programs offered by the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, the Commodity Credit Corporation, and the Farmers Home Administration. Yet Native American farmers had so little land under their control and so little capital that participation in federal agricultural programs proved impossible or impractical for most, because these programs were designed to aid commercial agriculturalists who operated on a relatively large scale.
By the early 1980s, the U.S. Census Bureau counted only 7,211 Native American farmers. Each of these agriculturalists usually cultivated or raised livestock on fewer than five hundred acres, a scale too small in the semi-arid and arid lands of the West to permit commercial production. Subsistence agriculture prevailed in the best circumstances, and most Native American farmers lived below the poverty level, earning less than ten thousand dollars annually from agriculture. Of these Indian farmers, only about two thousand operated as full-time farmers, and they averaged 50.4 years of age. By the 1987 census only 7,134 Native American farmers remained, and only 2,289 earned more than ten thousand dollars from the sale of agricultural commodities. The federal government stopped counting Indian farmers as a separate category for the 1992 agricultural census, because their number had become insignificant.
Although the Navajos and several other cultural groups were exceptions, by the late twentieth century most Native Americans did not have sufficient land or financial means to live independently as farmers. Federal Indian policy had failed to acculturate the Indians and assimilate them into white society by making them small-scale farmers. Although Native Americans had once been the most skilled agriculturists on the North American continent, their agricultural achievements lay in the past, and they had little hope for an agricultural future.
See also
Food and Cuisine;
Water Rights.
R. Douglas Hurt, Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987); George F. Will and George E. Hyde, Corn among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964); Gilbert L. Wilson, Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987).
R. Douglas Hurt
Iowa State University
