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The discussion in this chapter demonstrates how a subaltern agricultural knowledge system transferred to North America transformed in the sociopolitical dynamics of colonialism. Its transformation into the means of indigenous dispossession and land theft, while partly serendipitous and partly intentional, was only possible because of the larger imperialist structures that enabled Europeans to dominate: disease, metropolitan industrialization, global trade networks, and overweening demographics. There was another kind of transfer in colonialism, of indigenous “knowledge systems,” the understanding of which historian Judith Carney argues in the case of rice cultivation, are key to revealing the “agrarian genealogy” of agricultural practices central to the success of colonialism (Carney 2001). This section of this chapter surveys a broad swath of the work exploring these forced knowledge transfers.

Some scholars have missed a significant step in the evolution of colonial agriculture by failing to highlight colonizers’ extractions of this wisdom, know-how, or metis, to identify, cultivate, and produce agricultural commodities. Certainly the many agricultural commodities, whose origins lay in the deep past of indigenous time, mattered to the successes of colonialism. The seductive and coercive regimes instituted to produce them also mattered. The labor of brown people to serve white agendas is also obviously important. Yet, knowledge and know-how are equally significant. In fact, whether transported to colonial North America as in the case of the know-how to cultivate rice, sugar, and marijuana, or expropriated in the colonies such as methods of planting and harvesting tobacco, henequen and sisal fiber, potatoes, and chocolate, forced knowledge transfers were a key part of what made colonial agriculture productive and successful. Marcy Norton persuasively argues that seeing such commodities as “technologies … usefully concretize[s their] analytic utility” (Norton 2017). Colonial agricultural commodities were more than products, they represented ways of knowing and doing, which were almost wholly locked away in indigenous minds.

The sociopolitical dynamics of the commons also applied to the extractions of indigenous technological, geographical, and meteorological knowledge systems, which occurred in the colonial outer commons. Making this distinction is important, for the implicit line dividing inner and outer commons, became a clear color line in knowledge expropriation. Rather than being a passive boundary violation of indigenous space by means of grazing, disease, or the spread of invasive cultivars, forced knowledge transfers required the active discernment and theft of Indigenous knowledge. Colonizers appreciated indigenous agricultural commodities and methods, and understood the potential they represented for wealth creation, if they could 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 and land-use strategies,” according to historian Edda L. Fields-Black. The knowledge of rice cultivation, which historian Judith Carney labels an “indigenous knowledge system,” was the knowledge of both how to grow the plant but also where it would grow (Carney 2001). Rice requires a distinctive balance between saline and alkali water, and aridity. Rice and the knowledge for growing it transplanted to the coastal regions in the Americas, where slaves in Georgia and South Carolina cultivated rice for their own use in small plots provided to supplement their nutrition. Planters recognized the potential value of this knowledge, and over time grew to understand that particular Africans knew how to grow this lucrative crop. Linguistic analysis and economic data confirms that a vast majority of slaves transported to rice-growing regions of North America came from the same regions in Africa (Fields-Black 2008).

Eventually, as with other forced knowledge transfers, white planters erased the African indigenous origins of their knowledge and instead emphasized their ability to manage large hydraulic systems for growing rice in economies of scale. Nevertheless, the story of the transference of rice mētis to North America was the story of particular indigenous groups carefully controlling the transmission of knowledge within the parameters of white supremacy. Africans tried to limit the transfer of knowledge to other Africans, who did not know how to cultivate rice, who in turn passed it on in turn to other Africans. The forced knowledge transfer aspect, was that the usage of this knowledge was done within the brutalizing system of chattel slavery and as the means of carving out a more autonomous existence (Carney 2001). In cases when slaves were able to free themselves, their agricultural knowledge became the means of adaptation and survival as studies of maroon communities has demonstrated (J. Carney and Rosomoff 2011; Norton 2017).

Tracing the origins of forced knowledge transfers can be tricky, as with the case of tobacco, which became the basis on which Great Britain built Virginia into a profitable venture. Every history of Jamestown acknowledges that tobacco was an indigenous crop. Yet, tobacco is a finicky plant that requires careful cultivation and very specialized treatment to have value as a drug (Hahn 2011). William Tatham hunted for “the first Knowledge of the Tobacco Plant” in the late eighteenth-century, and had traveled widely in North America. He stated that he could “not recollect one single instance where [he] met with tobacco growing wild … [though he had] found a few spontaneous plants about the arable and trodden grounds of deserted habitations” (Tatham 1800). Tatham credits the Spanish in Florida with the first usage of the plant, which local people had gifted them. The most common first gift of tobacco was when Arawak diplomats met Christopher Columbus in 1492 in the Bahamas. Thomas Harriot, who visited Secoton with John White in 1585, reported that an herb precious to the Algonquian People called uppowoc, was customarily “fowne apart by itfelf” and “the leaves … being dried and brought into powder [the Algonquians] ufe to take the fume or fmoke thereof, by fucking it through pipes made of clay.” In his recent Master’s thesis, Cole Hawkins explores how Haudenosaunee diplomats taught white colonials how to use tobacco and the tobacco pipe effectively in political negotiations (Hawkins 2020). Of significant further importance, it is thought that a slave in Tidewater Virginia perfected the method of “brightening” tobacco, that is curing it in smoke for maximum flavor and potency (Hahn 2011). Thus, it is clear that to Indigenous Americans tobacco was a plant worthy of reverence. Yet, its very uniqueness made it highly unlikely that Algonquians or other Indigenes would have parted with their knowledge of how to cultivate and use it with colonials.

Is it really possible that the origins of the transfer of an agricultural technology of such complexity and great importance to British imperial power as tobacco, could be an historical mystery? The archival silence on the subject of tobacco knowledge transfer might be itself the evidence of a purposeful erasure. Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that gaps, lacunae, and absences are themselves the evidence of intention and the making of archives (Trouillot 1995). Take, as another possible example of this phenomenon, cannabis. Africans carried the knowledge (and possibly the seeds) of cannabis cultivation, refining, and use with them through the fearsome Middle Passage. Passed down from person to person, cannabis metis enabled the drug to survive, spread, and eventually become a global phenomenon. Yet, while its control and regulation are a primary objective of governments, and even though it has shaped the lives and impacted the destinies of hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of people in the United States, it has garnered almost no attention from the historical profession, according to geographer Chris S. Duvall (Duvall 2019). The reason for this disjuncture in Duvall’s opinion is simple: “Africa is ignored in the collective historical narrative” even though “African knowledge is foundational to the now global use of cannabis as a smoked drug.” Indeed, Duvall demonstrates that we perceive every aspect of cannabis, the knowledge of its cultivation, its effects, how to use it, as well as who uses it, through a racialized lens. Marcy Norton explains there has been a desire in colonialism to “appropriate ‘resources’ and leave behind the cultural baggage” of the brown people who have produced them. The obverse is also true. Colonizers have tried to erase the baggage of their own dependence on and enmeshment in indigenous knowledge and technologies, and simply enjoy the high (Norton 2017).

Unearthing this secret history of agriculture may be the particular charge of the agricultural history discipline, for it possesses an intimate awareness of how the history and practice of agriculture has reified European ways of engaging with nature and extracting resources: part of a teleological pathway toward societal development. Grounded in Eurocentrism and white supremacy, the assumption that sedentary agriculture was a sign of progress still holds sway in many corners, and keeps agricultural history mired in a nostalgic false consciousness. This chapter has sought to challenge that mystification.

The most accurate way to see these forced agricultural knowledge transfers in colonial settings was as unidirectional. European colonizers were in indigenous spaces for the purpose of gain, not to make equal exchanges. They extracted whatever they could find of value, including the know-how from Native American, African, and/or other Indigenous Peoples from other colonial locations. Market exchanges, cultural cross-fertilization, or the collaboration of local populations with colonizers, even as they gave the colonized some latitude for ameliorating the imbalance of the relationship, did not reverse the one-way aggressive intentions of colonizers. While it is possible that in some instances indigenous populations freely shared their knowledge with colonizers, the overall motivation for these knowledge transfers was larcenous intent on the part of the colonizers.

In 1973, the then president of the Agricultural History Society, Clarence Danhof, made the case for a tighter, more restrictive definition of agricultural history: “Should not our small guild be able to make a greater contribution if we could agree on a set of boundaries less inclusive in character and more sharply defining the end products we seek for our efforts” (quoted in Hurt 2004). This chapter proposes one way of limiting the scope of agricultural history by restricting it to studies that directly focus on the violence of imperialism and colonialism, as well as the ways that agriculture practices served indigenous resistance to colonization. There are certainly others, but, while Sterling Evans is correct when he says scholars must “continue crossing national and disciplinary boundaries” in order to reveal the hidden dependencies created by interconnected pathways of extraction and production, the transnational peregrinations have their limits, which was the “total social fact” of colonization and empire (Evans 2007).

As agricultural historians continue to demystify the underlying deceit often inherent in the evolution of the most fundamental of practices for human sustenance, agriculture, the discipline will be called to serve current and ongoing efforts to recompense the forced expropriation of the agricultural knowledge of the colonized in service to empire and nation. Agricultural history should play a central role in ongoing efforts for reparations and truth and reconciliation (Hawkins 2020).