take and control them, and plug them into global mercantile trade networks. For example, the “Irish” potato, domesticated in the Andes over 8000 years ago, underwent colonial expropriation, was taken to Europe in the mid-1500s, then reintroduced to the North American colonies early in the eighteenth century, and quickly became a staple in colonists’ diets (Smith 2011). The means of justifying these takings was based on division represented by colonial insider and colonized outsider, including the common belief that indigenous and African people were incapable of truly utilizing their own knowledge properly. The final step in this knowledge extraction, was to replace the indigenous origins of agricultural knowledge with their own “better” (read: proper, more efficient, and profitable) uses of such knowledge, thereby erasing the distinction between inner and outer commons, and effectuating a conquest of more than territory.
One of the earliest visual records of North American indigenous agricultural skill were the watercolors John White, created as part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke expedition in 1585 (Oberg 2010). His bird’s eye view of the Algonquian village of Secoton (Figure 2.1) reveals orderly rows of corn planted in rotation from “corne newly sprung,” to “their greene corne,” and then to “their rype corne.” In Secoton, a boy perches in a raised shelter to discourage birds from eating the corn while it dries, and nearby a neatly staged hulling area testifies to the care these American farmers took in harvesting and preserving this valuable source of nutrition. Another painting (Figure 2.2) depicts the diversity of aquatic life available to harvest, but also the techniques Algonquians used to harvest and preserve their catch, including the use of an elaborate weir. Fish weirs were of course not exclusively an indigenous American technology, but this image does demonstrate an organizational system for resource extraction, which gives the lie to many colonizer descriptions of “nomadic bands,” “scattered tribes,” and rootless wanderers. Abundant evidence can be found that Indigenous Americans both husbanded game and extracted it conservatively, something which became apparent as colonizer markets promoted over-extraction (Morrissey 2015).
Figure 2.1 Secoton, an Algonquian village, watercolor by John White during Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke expedition in 1585. John White/Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
Figure 2.2 Algonquian fish harvesting, watercolor by John White during Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke expedition in 1585. John White illustration of Algonquian fishing techniques, 1585/National Park Service.
Successive cropping demonstrates a high level of stability in the agricultural cycle, which counters long-standing myths—now debunked—of widespread use of swidden (slash and burn) requiring regular field rotation due to soil depletion (Doolittle 2000). Jane Mt. Pleasant (2015), building on the work of William E. Doolittle, argues that Native American agriculturalists “practiced what today is called conservation tillage, which minimizes or eliminates plow tillage.” Instead, Native farmers used the hand trowel to cultivate the soil, minimizing the depletion of the valuable yet fragile alluvial soils (Inceptisols). This technique enabled successive plantings in the same location without exhausting the soil. Indigenous agricultural techniques were highly productive. In the 1680s, the Governor of New France destroyed more than a million bushels (42,000 tons) of corn from just four Haudenosaunee villages (Mann 2005, quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz 2014). “Today,” Mt. Pleasant reminds us, “growing crops without plows is a primary characteristic of environmentally sustainable farming” (Mt. Pleasant 2015). As Jennifer Anderson has explored for the Algonquian farmers of Long Island, when fields became depleted, indigenous farmers most likely did use fish fertilizer, a practice the New English readily adopted (J. Anderson 2015).
The metis the original Americans developed around the production of corn, both in creating its various cultigens as well as in its cultivation, harvesting, and storage, evolved over thousands of years. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that corn’s ancient lineage, as well as the fact that it requires careful cultivation, demonstrates that the Americas were an “old” not a “new” world. Three of the world’s seven so-called birthplaces of agriculture were American. One was in the eastern woodlands of North America. Agriculture is ancient on the continent, a fact many colonizers apparently could not apprehend or chose to ignore as they made arguments about why they should take possession of “the wild common of nature.” Historian Cynthia Radding echoes Dunbar-Ortiz by pointing out that maize constituted just one of a wide and delicious array of distinctive American crops developed by indigenous agriculturalists. Besides the Three Sisters triplex of corn, beans, and squash, Amerindian cultigens included amaranths, cotton, tomatoes, chilies, and chocolate. They also perfected “many different species of agaves, nopales, pitahayas, and other xerophytic plants, as well as quinoa and potatoes [in the] Andes” (Smith 2011; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Radding 2015). Henequen and sisal were two of these drought-tolerant cultivars, which Mayan Peoples grew and experimented with, developing a “rasping” technique to extract these plants’ strong fibers, ideal for cordage used in a myriad of useful products such as rope, hammocks, sandals, and eventually the McCormick reaper (Evans 2007). Po’pay, the Ohkay Owingeh shaman and warrior, a name which means “ripe squash” in Tewa, deployed such knotted maguey ropes as an early form of information technology, in order to coordinate the uprising of Puebloan Peoples in the Upper Rio Grande Valley in 1680, resulting in a thirteen-year land reclamation from the Spanish (Roberts 2004).
Acknowledging the high-level of indigenous agricultural self-sufficiency before colonization helps us understand the extreme destabilization caused by Europeans and explains how and why Europeans sought to expropriate the mtis of the colonized. Indigenous agriculturalists wrought such technologies over generations of trial and error, and in all regions and subregions of North America. Their agricultural practices were adapted to specific locales, climates, and soil types, and flourished even in some of the harshest continental locations, such as the Great Plains (Hurt 1987). The fruits of this experimentation were what colonizers coveted, because their assumptions about climate, their cultivars, and many of their methods did not work with the cultigens developed by Indigenous Peoples. This was something the settlers at Jamestown learned quickly. After they had exhausted all efforts, even going so far as committing horrifying acts of violence to acquire corn from local Algonquians, they adapted their agriculture to the climate and soil, and learned how to plant and raise corn. Nevertheless, they either could not or would not learn from indigenous agriculturalists about their methods and techniques, and so soil erosion, depletion, and the search for fertilizers ensued (Kupperman 1982; Cushman 2013).
In the upper reaches of the Spanish Empire, in what is today the Southwestern US, awidespread forced knowledge transfer was the extensive and highly adapted water technologies, which Native Peoples had developed. Gravity canals were abundant at the time of colonization, which enabled the relocation and conservation of water. These acequias, often credited to the Spanish, and which are still commonly used today in New Mexico, were actually an indigenous technology. Indigenous groups in the region also employed terracing and check dams to control water (Doolittle 1992). The nature of Spanish colonization, which expropriated land with the people who lived on it, meant that they adopted nearly wholescale indigenous agricultural technologies. In Mexico, Spaniards were able to make into reality their visions for large-scale irrigation projects by using existing indigenous technical and mechanical knowledge (Candiani 2014; Norton 2017). Stuart Schwartz explains how coastal Indigenes utilized a variety of techniques to manage and remedy the annual cycles of the Caribbean hurricane season (Schwartz 2016). Extracting the knowledge and experience of those who were colonized was fundamental to the survival of colonizers and the continued viability of their projects of colonization.
This truism of colonial American agricultural history was never as true as with the cultivation of rice. In the millennium before the African slave trade, people living in coastal Guinea’s Rio Nunez region made “key innovations in their rice farming
