Which indians farmed

Rajagopalan 2, ; has established calcium deficiency as the cause of an outbreak of non-bacterial abortion in equines. Indian Farming gives much attention to processing and marketing, including the canning and dairying industries, and the grading of eggs and oranges, and whenever possible simple devices adapted to Indian conditions are described in order that quality shall be improved.

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Advanced search. Most cultures give a central role to the production, preparation and consumption of food. What happens when the land that grew traditional foods is drowned by dams? Standing Rock , the Lakota reservation, is sandwiched between the Dakotas, and borders the Missouri River. The underground seedpods of the hog peanut AKA mouse bean , were collected by prairie voles. With the death of this one plant was the death of a little piece of our culture.

The hog peanut was part of a larger cycle, Jones says. Nothing was ripe at exactly the same time. When the plants are no longer there, the cycle is broken.

Jones, a Ph. Millions of people made a living for thousands of years in the New World, she says. Corn is an indisputable triumph of Native American agriculture.

The plant, domesticated thousands of years ago in Mexico and Central America, was a staple of the American diet and is now the largest crop in the world global production in was million metric tons. Pleasant, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University. Pleasant says. Pleasant, who directs the American Indian Program at Cornell. The soil should be the starting point for understanding agriculture, says Mt.

While many soils on the Eastern Seaboard are not great, large parts of upstate New York had good soil that still supports productive farms. About years ago, the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of five later six tribes, lived in the area, and evidence for their farm productivity comes, ironically, from armies that sought to destroy them.

In modern tests of corn varieties believed to resemble those grown by the Senecas, one of the Iroquois tribes, Mt. Pleasant got yields of 2, to 3, pounds per acre 45 to 54 bushels per acre or 2, to 3, kilograms per hectare. Turner calculated that the Iroquois could support roughly three times as many people on an acre as contemporaneous Europeans could with their wheat crops.

But observers have long wondered how this production could have occurred with neither plow nor draft animals, usually deemed the hallmarks of agricultural progress. Plows, however, are now viewed as mixed blessing by many soil scientists. Although they prepare a good seedbed and bury weeds, they expose soil to the air, which encourages oxidation of humus, the organic content that supports essential microorganisms.

Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades. And thus on balance, Mt. By the s, in the United States, pressure by settlers for reservation lands became acute and Congress responded with the General Allotment Act also known as the Dawes Act in , which provided for the allotment of land to individual tribal members.

Under this legislation, each head of household received a plot of land, generally acres, leaving the remainder of the reservations to be sold as surplus lands. Individuals who took allotments would receive title to their land after a trust period of twenty-five years.

The Canadian reserves were also allotted. The U. In Congress passed the Burke Act, which enabled the secretary of the interior to declare an allotted farmer competent to manage his or her own affairs before the end of the trust period.

Landowners who were declared competent received title to their lands and often sold it, a process that further hindered the successful development of Native American agriculture.

During the s the federal government attempted to aid Plains Indian farmers by providing cattle to help build tribal herds, and several tribes organized livestock associations to improve breeding and marketing practices.

By the end of World War II, however, high crop and livestock prices accelerated white demands to lease or purchase Indian lands because, it was claimed, they were not being cultivated or grazed to capacity. After only the white farmers who could command the necessary capital and credit, and who had access to new forms of science and technology and large acreages, could earn a profit from commercial agriculture. Native Americans in the Great Plains remained subsistence farmers, if they practiced agriculture at all.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, on many reserves and reservations in the Great Plains, Native American agriculture has nearly ceased. There are important exceptions, of course, such as Montana Reserve in Alberta, which has a successful ranch and feed operation.