Indigenous

Corn, beans and squash fed this continent long before cows arrived

By WhyStopHarmingAnimals.com

For many Native nations, plants were the center of the diet[1]. Corn, beans and squash, the Three Sisters, fed farming towns across the continent[1][3], and the cows, pigs and chickens that fill U.S. feedlots today arrived with European colonists[7][8], along with the honey bee used for commercial honey[8][9].

Much of what follows comes from Rita Laws, Ph.D., a Choctaw and Cherokee scholar whose 1994 essay on Native Americans and vegetarianism appeared in Vegetarian Journal and is republished by the IVU[1]. Laws is careful about what she claims[1]. In an interview with Indian Country Today she said Choctaw people were not vegetarians “on purpose[2].” Meat was the exception rather than the rule because plant agriculture fed the nation[2]. Native nations were many and different, and some hunted a great deal, especially later on[1]. Her point is that the popular image of Native food is a narrow one[1].

The Three Sisters

Corn, beans and squash are planted together so that each helps the others[3]. The corn gives the beans something to climb, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, and the squash covers the ground as a mulch[3]. The USDA’s National Agricultural Library, which still teaches the method, explains that the Iroquois and Cherokee called the three plants sisters because they nurture each other like family[3].

Laws writes that nearly half the plant foods grown on Earth were first cultivated by American Indians, among them corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, cacao, vanilla, sunflower and cranberry[1]. When Europeans arrived, the continent was already productive farmland[3].

Farming towns, even beside the buffalo

The picture most people carry of Native food is a Plains horseman chasing buffalo[1]. Laws describes that image as late and regional, amplified after Europeans brought horses and guns[1]. Before then, she argues, hunting was often a side activity[1]. The Osage, Pawnee, Arikara, Mandan, Wichita and Caddoan peoples lived in permanent farming towns of timber and earth homes and kept planting even when buffalo were nearby. In the Southeast, the Creek, Chickasaw and Choctaw depended little on killing animals. Choctaw food was corn, pumpkin, beans and acorn bread, with small game eaten only infrequently[1]. Ceremonies often used tobacco rather than meat, and harvest festivals centered on corn.

Laws also notes that after contact the direction of change ran both ways: some Indigenous diets moved toward animals while settlers moved toward vegetables[1]. Squanto, a Pawtuxet man, taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn and live on plant foods. More than two centuries later, George Catlin, travelling through Choctaw country in the 1840s, described grapes, plums, currants, gooseberries and prickly pear in such quantity that they slowed his travel.

Corn for children, and a story about killing

Laws writes that Aztec, Maya and Zapotec children ate only plant foods, mostly corn, until at least age ten[1]. Families believed this made children strong, less likely to get sick, and more likely to keep loving grain for life. Healers told the sick to “return to the arms of Mother Corn,” and atole, a corn drink, was treated as sacred food. Laws adds that Spanish observers were struck by how long people lived[1]. This is her reading of a tradition, not a modern clinical trial, and it shows that meat was delayed rather than treated as something a child needed. Mexicolore’s summary of Aztec food is consistent with it: without cows, sheep or goats, the Mexica ate mainly vegetables, fruit and grains, and maize was the first staple, eaten as tortillas, pozole and atole[5].

James Mooney recorded a Cherokee story, the origin of disease and medicine, in which humans, plants and animals first lived as equals, without killing[6]. When humans began eating the animals, the animals invented diseases; the plants, still friendly, offered medicine[6]. Laws sets this story beside those of other nations whose afterlife is full of fruit rather than flesh[1]. In each of them, the world goes wrong at the turn toward killing.

What came on the ships

When Europeans reached the Americas there were no cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, goats or horses here[7][8]. Alfred Crosby’s account of the Columbian Exchange, summarized by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, describes pigs, cows and chickens crossing the Atlantic with the colonists[7]. Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493, carried cows, pigs and chickens[8]. The animals whose flesh now dominates U.S. plates are not native species[8], and the hamburger is an import.

The honey bee sold in grocery-store jars is an import too[8][9]. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Apis mellifera, the species used in commercial honey production, is not native to North America[9]. It was brought from Europe in the 17th century[9], and English colonists carried hives to Virginia in 1622[9], landing them at Jamestown[10]. As the swarms spread west ahead of settlement, some Native nations called them “white man’s flies[10].” Thousands of species of native bees were already here[9], and Mesoamerica had its own stingless bees. The managed hive came with settlement[9][10].

The farm animals that dominate the American diet today are newcomers to this land[7][8]. The foods that fed it for far longer were corn, beans and squash[1][3], and they are still grown the same way[3].