Photo courtesy of Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College

“In the beginning Tirawa gave to man the corn. The corn told man that she is mother—almighty, like Tirawa. If a grain of corn be split, within it will be found a juice like mother’s milk. So the corn is mother, because she nourishes.” —Letakots-Lesa, chief of the Pita-hau-erat band of the Pawnee tribe

In 1823, Paul Wilhelm, the Duke of Württemberg, embarked on a journey up the Missouri river into what is today Nebraska. His aim was to explore and chronicle the land and peoples on behalf of his native Prussia. When he reached the confluence of the Platte river, he encountered the Pawnee Nation. Wilhelm was struck by their abundance and thriving communities. “The Pawnee Nation count[s] as many heads as the stars in the sky,” Head Chief Scharkerul-leschar told him.

What made the Pawnees so well-off, abundant, and successful was their mixed form of subsistence. With earth lodge villages concentrated in the fertile creek bottoms and ravines of the Platte and its tributaries, the Pawnees lived in the transition zone between the eastern tallgrass prairies and the expansive western plains. Like the Cheyennes, Comanches, Lakotas, and other plains tribes, the Pawnees embarked on seasonal bison hunts. Throughout the year, they hunted and trapped deer, otters, and beavers, while also taking fish and shellfish from their local rivers. They gathered wild potatoes, mushrooms, onions, cucumbers, artichokes, and chokecherries as well as milkweed, mint, and tobacco for ceremonial and medicinal purposes. Hunting, fishing, and gathering helped sustain the Pawnees, but the real key to their success and food security was their gardens.

The Pawnees planted a host of crops, including multiple varieties of corn, beans, pumpkins, watermelons, and squash. They meticulously cultivated and tended their gardens as if they were their children, growing thickets of sunflowers around their plots to protect them from foraging deer and other animals. The soil in the creek bottoms was naturally productive, as it regenerated every spring, but the eco-conscious Pawnees were also master horticulturalists. With all their crops planted together in the same plots, Pawnee gardens looked messy, tangled, and unkempt to many non-Native observers like Wilhelm who were accustomed to single-crop agriculture. However, the Pawnees understood how groupings of crops could work symbiotically by balancing soil nutrients and creating the right combination of sun and shade.

Women played the central role in Pawnee agriculture. They tilled, planted, cultivated, and harvested. One missionary wrote that Pawnee women were the most industrious people he had ever seen, noting that they perform all the “hard labor.” Ceremony and medicine bundles were also essential to the Pawnee growing cycle. Sacred rituals had to be performed at the right time and in the right place for a successful harvest. For the Pawnees, like many Indigenous peoples, took a holistic view of the heavens, the earth and its bounty, the animals, and humankind—all were inextricable parts of a larger dynamic order.

For generations, the Pawnees’ mixed form of subsistence served as an insurance policy of sorts against famine. If one part failed, there were others that could be relied upon through tough times. Their system held until European settlement and colonization stressed it to the breaking point. The first changes came in the late-seventeenth or early-eighteenth centuries with the arrival of the horse. To be sure, horses made the seasonal bison hunts safer and more efficient. Indeed, some tribes simply abandoned agriculture altogether to become full-time hunters. At the same time, however, horses also generated greater social inequality and led to increased raiding. Horses required vast grazing lands, which not only created tensions between neighboring tribes, but which also forced deer and other game to forage elsewhere. New trade goods, most notably guns, further unhinged the socio-territorial order of the central plains, making intertribal warfare exponentially more deadly.

The Pawnees never abandoned their fields, but this did not prevent others from plundering them, especially during droughts and times of want. Following bison hunts, Pawnees would return to their villages to find their earth lodges destroyed and their fields ravaged. With greater competition for access to dwindling bison herds, epidemic diseases, encroaching settlements of non-Native farmers, and increased raiding of their gardens and food stores, the Pawnees’ mixed subsistence economy finally broke in 1874, when the tribe was forced to petition the U.S. government for a reservation in Indian Territory. Their relocation meant a loss of the old ways, including generations of horticultural knowledge. The history of the Pawnees rings familiar for many Indigenous peoples. The loss of traditional subsistence patterns was accompanied by radical dietary changes and an overall decline in health and well-being. This legacy continues to plague Native peoples today, as much of Indian Country is classified as a “food desert,” where there is a dearth of whole foods and fresh fruits and vegetables. Preventable maladies such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and obesity affect Native communities at rates that are sometimes twice the national average. Despite these grim realities there is hope of regeneration—and tribal colleges and universities are leading the way.

From the North Slope of Alaska to the high desert of New Mexico, TCUs have made it part of their core mission to revitalize traditional horticulture, address diet-related health disparities, and increase food sovereignty among Native nations. Designated as land grant institutions in 1994, tribal colleges have built extension programs that are launching a variety of imaginative initiatives that incorporate traditional knowledge with cutting-edge agronomy. At Aaniiih Nakoda College, this has meant bringing in elders and community members for the college’s TEAM initiative—Together Everyone Accomplishes More. In the feature article, “Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Community,” Manuel Morales and Scott Friskics underscore how ANC’s demonstration garden and greenhouse are raising the collective conscience of the Fort Belknap reservation through a variety of outreach activities, all the while offering its bounty to the tribal community and providing unprecedented agricultural research opportunities for ANC students.

Far to the south at the College of the Muscogee Nation (CMN), the Mvskoke Cultural Community Garden is likewise restoring traditional horticulture by preserving heirloom seeds and revitalizing Mvskoke crops for the Seventh generation. Like other TCUs—and the Pawnee Nation—CMN has adopted a holistic approach, fusing corn into the college’s curricula and even its assessment plan. Find out more in the feature article, “Este Mvskokvlke Em Vye Cvpofuce.”

These efforts and many others—as revealed in this issue’s On Campus, research, and Talking Circle departments— are confronting and working to mitigate colonialism’s enduring repercussions. Most importantly, tribal colleges’ community gardens are healing people. Nowhere is this more evident than at Little Big Horn College (LBHC). This issue of Tribal College Journal concludes with the story of Latonna Old Elk, a Crow tribal member and director of LBHC’s Extension Program. Old Elk’s story of personal loss and family healing through tending and caring for the very things that give us sustenance underscores the power of the community garden and the importance of tribal colleges and universities across the nation.

Bradley Shreve, PhD, is managing editor of Tribal College Journal.

REFERENCES

Curtis, N. (Ed.). (1923). The Indians’ Book: Songs and Legends of the American Indians. New York: Harper Collins. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. (2008). The State of the Native Nations: Conditions Under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination. New York: Oxford University Press.

White, r. (1983). The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.