Indigenous horticulture
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Indigenous horticulture is practised in various ways across all inhabited continents. Indigenous refers to the native peoples of a given area and horticulture is the practice of small-scale intercropping.
Africa
North Africa
In North Africa, one such example is the farming practices of the Eggon, a
West Africa
In West Africa, the
The prevalence of wetlands in West Africa has helped to support local indigenous horticulture. Seasonal flooding of major rivers in the region, such as the Niger, the Sudd, and the Senegal, have made it possible for flood-cropping in many areas. Indigenous people have utilized a variety of irrigation techniques in order to take advantage of this flooding. Additionally, they plan their plantings and harvests specifically around the flooding of local rivers. For example, some farmers choose to plant on rising floods and harvest as the flooding diminishes. This techniques is utilized when cultivating rice.[1]
East Africa
East Africa is one of the areas most affected by
Southern Africa
In Southern Africa, conglomerates of farming companies have primarily written-off the lands in Northwest
South Pacific
Highlander horticulture
The Enga of the Western Highlands Province in New Guinea receive most of their food from growing sweet potatoes Ipomoea batatas which they plant in mulch mounds at elevations up to 2,700 m or higher.[2] The mounds that the Enga make to plant their crops of potatoes are formed from by piling large amounts of grass taken from fallow, or unplanted, plots then by covering the grass with dirt.[3] The size of the mounds depends on elevation; the higher the elevation; the bigger the mounds will be. Mounds above 2,500 m in altitude can have a height of 0.85 m in height; while crops below 1,500 m are not mounded at all.[4] The function of the mound is to protect the crops from the frequent frosts that occur at the high altitudes of the Enga. With sweet potatoes having a very long maturation period of nine months, the Enga also invest their time and space on the mounds with planting other crops that have much shorter maturation periods such as peas in case a heavy frost does claim the crop.[5]
The planting of the mounds is done so that the plants which have a higher frost tolerance, such as the Irish potatoes, are planted casually throughout the mound and the low tolerant sweet potatoes are planted in the best position to avoid the frost. Peas, beans, and cabbage which are all highly tolerant to frost will be planted outside the circle of sweet potatoes and lower on the mound placing them closer to the cold temperatures of the ground.[6] The Enga practice fallow rotation where a garden will in crop for about four years followed by about four years of fallow grassland to let the soil replenish.[7]
Garden size for an average Enga garden is about 0.21 hectare or about 2,100 square meters and can contain a few hundred mounds.[8] Another gardening strategy the Enga have implemented is the use of kin lands that are usually within one to two days walk from the farmers normal planting grounds.[9] The uses of multiple gardens at differing elevation and the ability access clan lands in different areas for gardening have allowed the Enga to adapt to their environment and survive under harsh conditions.
Lowland Swidden cultivation
For the Bine-speaking peoples of the New Guinea
There are two planting years for a single swidden for the Bine farmers. In the first year the Bine plant primary taro root with a few subsidiary crops like bananas and sweet potatoes. In the second year taro root makes up about 50 percent of the swidden and the rest of the swidden is mixed with about 15 other plants. After the second year the Bine farmers move on to an adjacent swidden and allow the previous swidden to lay fallow or unplanted for a period of 5 to 10 years in order to repopulate the vegetation.[14] The number of years that a swidden will lay fallow is determined by the plants demand for the nitrogen in the soil. Some plants will leach the soil of nitrogen in a few years and require four or five times that fallow; while other plants can be planted for many years and lay fallow only one or two times the planting period.[15] Swidden cultivation requires a lot of land in order to feed only a few people, but the Bine, whose numbers are low, make good uses of their land through swidden farming.
Island horticulture
For most South Pacific Island cultures the main subsistence techniques are
Gardening for the Tabalu is a very long and in depth magical process; with special magicians and magical ingredients which have been handed down from family member to family member over time. Garden fields which are called Kwabila are fenced in on all sides to keep out the
South America
South America consists of modern-day
South America can be seen as cultural regions inhabited by marginal tribes, tropical forest tribes, and the circum-Caribbean tribes each with its own distinct way of agricultural cultivation. Each of these regions has adapted not only their own cultural identity and agricultural style,
The Eastern region of South America is known as the Para area in what is now Brazil, and has for millennia been home to the tropical forest Kayapớ tribe. The Kayapớ lived in sedentary villages and were proficient in pottery and loom-weaving, yet they did not domesticate animals or poses knowledge on metallurgy. These Tropical forest Tribes can be characterized through their farming, dugout canoes, woven baskets, loom weaving, and pole and thatch houses.[21]
In the Para area the Kayapớ like most tribes of this region practiced intensive agriculture or clearing cultivation. Beginning their agricultural year with a low water season intensifies fishing. The low water season is then followed by the high water season or harvest season. It is during this
It has often been thought that the slash-burn plots are abandoned after one or two years because of un productive soil, but this is a common misconception. The Kayapớ revisit abandoned fields because plants can offer direct and indirect benefits. One direct benefit would be the ability to eat that which has been produced and an indirect benefit would be that open fields allow attract game for hunting and can produce long after they have been tended.[24]
The Southern region of South America is known as the Fuegian area and is occupied by the Chono,
North America
Farming methods developed by
Corn, squash, and beans were staple crops for Native Americans and were grown throughout much of the North American continent. This trio is known as the
Native American farmers also employed
In the Northeast Woodlands and the
Native Americans also developed storage systems such as storage containers which allowed them to store seeds to plant during the next planting season. They also stored food in dug-out pits or holes in hillsides. Native Americans developed corn cribs. These were storage bins that were elevated off the ground. This technique prevented moisture and animal intrusion.[36]
Selective crop breeding was also employed. Corn is a domestic plant and cannot grow on its own. The first corn grown by Native Americans had small ears, and only produced a few kernels per ear. By 2,000 years ago, single stalks with large ears were being produced.[37] Native Americans created over 700 varieties of corn by 1500 AD.[citation needed]
"Hands-off" hunter and gatherer misconception
Anderson breaks down common misconceptions surrounding the way in which Native Americans lived among nature and shows that their true impact was often one that attracted and invited others to the land they inhabited. Native Americans, regardless of location, were privy to wildlife management such as, "
Overall, the Native's practices were nature conserving and sustaining due to the specificity of their environmental knowledge which was learned through more than twelve-thousand years of trial and error. Anderson also establishes that the Native's practices were most likely not always beneficial or environmentally friendly. Though he asserts that there is no real evidence of their destruction available, it is possible that the Indigenous peoples in California may have been responsible for the extinction of early regional species.[40]
In discussing California Native's "tempered" land tenure practices, Anderson deconstructs the idea of Native Americans as hunter-gatherers whose sparse population and nomadic ways left little to no mark on the land they traveled.[41] When European and Asian farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs established themselves in that same land, the concept of their surroundings that they perpetuated was one of an uninhabited wilderness, untouched by man. Though as Anderson points out, this was never the case. This "wilderness" was carefully tended to by the Natives for hundreds of years who had both negative and positive impacts on its conservation. It is theorized by Anderson that without the Natives' calculated intervention, real wilderness in the form of thickets, dense understory, and wildfire would have deemed the land uninhabitable.[42] In establishing this belief, the foreign settlers not only erased the Native's long history of masterful cultivation from the land, but they pushed their people out of the land as well, establishing a new, Eurocentric construction of the American's continent. This constructed history has not only diminished Native ancestry and culture, but also the land, which is no longer maintained or protected by strategic resource management. The European way of mitigating resource and land depletion follows a "hands off" model, which comes from the misconceptions of "leave no trace" mentioned previously.[43]
See also
References
- ^ Adams 1993
- ^ Dove and Carpenter 2008
- ^ Wohlt 2004
- ^ Dove and Carpenter 2008
- ^ Wohlt 2004
- ^ Dove and Carpenter 2008
- ^ Wohlt 2004
- ^ Wohlt 2004
- ^ Dove and Carpenter 2008
- ^ Hyde 2010
- ^ Eden 1993
- ^ Hyde 2010
- ^ Eden 1993
- ^ Eden 1993
- ^ Hyde 2010
- ^ Malinowski 1965
- ^ Malinowski 1987
- ^ Malinowski 1965
- ^ Lyon 1974, 6
- ^ Lyon 1974, 24
- ^ Posey 2002
- ^ Posey 2002
- ^ Posey 2002
- ^ Posey 2002
- ^ Keoke and Porterfield 2005, 56
- ^ Sandor, Gersper and Hawley 1990, 71
- ^ Keoke and Porterfield 2005, 58
- ^ Kowtko 2006, 54
- ^ Kowtko 2006, 54
- ^ Kowtko 2006, 55
- ^ Berzok 2005, 9
- ^ Berzok 2005, 51
- ^ Keoke and Porterfield 2005, 55
- ^ Keoke and Porterfield 2005, 60
- ^ Berzok 2005, 13
- ^ Berzok 2005, 122–123
- ^ Keoke and Porterfield 2005, 55
- ^ Natcher 2006
- ^ Natcher 2006
- ^ Natcher 2006
- ^ Natcher 2006
- ^ Natcher 2006
- ^ Natcher 2006
Africa
- Adams, W. "Indigenous Use of Wetlands and Sustainable Development in West Africa." The Geographical Journal 159. 2 (1993): 209–218.
- Chabatama, Chewe Mebbiens. 1999. "Peasant Farming, the State, and Food Security in the North-Western Province of Zambia, 1902--1964." Diss. University of Toronto, 1999.
- Dorward, David. 1987. "The Impact of Colonialism on a Nigerian Hill-Farming Society: A Case Study of Innovation among the Eggon." International Journal of African Historical Studies 20.2: 201–24.
- Dove, Michael, and Carol Carpenter. 2008. Environmental Anthropology: a Historical Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
- Kent, Susan. 2002. Ethnicity, Hunter-gatherers, and the "other": Association or Assimilation in Africa. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
- Simon Heck. 1998. "In the Presence of Neighbors: Land, Property, and Community in Ankole, Uganda." Diss. Boston University.
South Pacific
- Boyd, David J. 2001. Life without Pigs: Recent Subsistence Changes among the Irakia Awa, Papua New Guinea. Human Ecology 29(3):259-282.
- Dove, Michael R., and Carol Carpenter, eds. 2008. Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader: Blackwell Publishing.
- Eden, Michael J. 1993. Swidden Cultivation in Forest and Savanna in Lowland Southwest Papua New Guinea. Human Ecology 21(2):145-166.
- Hogbin, Ian, ed. 1973. Anthropology in Papua New Guinea. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
- interKnowledgeCorp. 2006. PAPUA NEW GUINEA: For the Serious Adventure Traveller. Pp. Papua New Guinea Tourism, Vol. 2010: interKnowledge Corp
- Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1961. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
- — 1965. Soil-Tilling and Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- — 1987. The sexual life of savages in North-western Melanesia : an ethnographic account of courtship, marriage, and family life among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Wohlt, Paul B. Descent Group Composition and Population Pressure in a Fringe Enga Clan, Papua New Guinea. Human Ecology 32(2):137-162.
South America
- Europa. 1926. The Eurpopa year book 1982 A World Survey. Volume (I-II). Europa Publications.
- Cooper, M. John. 1967. Analyitical and Critical Bibliography of the Tribes of the Tierra Del Fuego and the Adjacent Territory. Netherlands: Anthropological Publications.
- Lyon, Patricia. 1974. Native South Americans Ethnology of the Least Known Continent. Boston: Little Brown and Company.
- Osborne, Harold. 1952. Indians of the Andes Aymaras and Quechuas. London and New York: Routledge.
- Posey, A. Darrell. 2002. Kayapo Ethnoecology and Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
- Williams, A. Caroline. 2004. Between Resistance and Adaption: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonisation of the Choco, 1510-1753. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.
North America
- Berzok, Linda Murray. American Indian Food. Greenwood Press, 2005.
- Carlson, Leonard A. Indians, Bureaucrats and Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming. Greenwood Press, 1981.
- Duer, Douglas, Nancy J. Turner. Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. University of Washington Press, 2005.
- Keoke, Emory Dean, Kay Marie Porterfield. Food, Farming, and Hunting. Facts on File, 2005.
- Kowtko, Stacy. Nature and the Environment in Pre-Columbian American Life. Greenwoods Press, 2006.
- Natcher, David C. (2006-12-05). "M. Kat Anderson: Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources". Human Ecology. 35 (3): 381–382. S2CID 153245215.
- Sandor, J.A., P.L. Gersper, and J.W. Hawley. 1990. "Prehistoric Agriculture Terraces and Soils in the Mimbres Area, New Mexico". World Archaeology 22, no.5 (June, 1990).