Three Sisters (agriculture)
Indigenous peoples throughout North America cultivated different varieties of the Three Sisters, adapted to varying local environments.
European records from the sixteenth century describe highly productive Indigenous agriculture based on cultivation of the Three Sisters throughout what are now the Eastern United States and Canada, where the crops were used for both food and trade.
Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".
[4] In the northeastern U.S., this practice increases soil temperature in the mound and improves drainage, both of which benefit maize planted in spring.
[3] Much of this research was performed in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and published in several volumes of Biochemical and Physiological Bases for Plant Interactions in Phytocenosis edited by Andrey Mikhailovich Grodzinsky [uk; ru].
[3] Dzubenko & Petrenko 1971, Lykhvar & Nazarova 1970 and Pronin et al. 1970 find a wide number of leguminous crops increase the growth and yield of maize, while Gulyaev et al. 1970 select later maturing lines of beans to produce the converse effect, increasing even further the yield gain of beans when planted with maize.
[3] Pronin et al. 1972 find increased productivity and root exudate in both crops when combining faba beans with maize, and even more so in soils with preexisting high nitrogen fixing microorganism activity.
[3] Indigenous peoples throughout North America cultivated different varieties of the Three Sisters, adapted to varying local environments.
The Tewa and other peoples of the North American Southwest often included a "fourth Sister", the Rocky Mountain beeplant, which attracts bees to help pollinate the beans and squash.
[11] European records from the sixteenth century describe highly productive Indigenous agriculture based on cultivation of the Three Sisters throughout what are now the Eastern United States and Canada, from Florida to Ontario.
[5] The geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".
[15] In a similar experiment to reproduce Native American agricultural practices in Minnesota, Munson-Scullin and Scullin reported that over three years, the per-acre annual maize yields declined from 40 to 30 to 25 bushels (2.5, 1.9, and 1.6 t/ha).
Pleasant and Burt concluded that their lands retained more organic matter and thus were higher in yields of maize than early Euro-American farms in North America.
[23][24] From 800 AD, Three Sisters crop organization was used in the largest Native American city north of the Rio Grande known as Cahokia, located in the Mississippi floodplain to the east of modern St. Louis, Missouri.
[26] The cultivation of the Three Sisters crops by Cahokian residents produced a food surplus large enough to support Cahokia's expanded population, as well as further cultures throughout the extended Mississippi River system such as those of the Mississippian and Muscogee.
[30] Out of Earth Woman's body parts grew various plants: the spirits of the corn, beans, and squash came from her breasts, hands, and navel respectively; sunflowers from her legs; strawberries from her heart; tobacco from her head; and purple potatoes or sunchokes from her feet.
Handsome Lake, grief-stricken, envisioned a visit by the spirits of the Three Sisters, prompting him to return to and re-teach his fellow Haudenosaunee their traditional agricultural practices.
Male roles traditionally included extended periods of travel, such as for hunting expeditions, diplomatic missions, or military raids.
[32] Based on archaeological findings, paleobotanist John Hart concludes that the Haudenosaunee began growing the three crops as a polyculture sometime after 700 BP.
When the Indigenous boy visits again during the season of harvest, he overhears the eldest sister's cries and brings her back to his mother and father's lodge to cheer her up.
