Translating Maize into Corn: The Transformation of America's Native Grain

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Betty Fussell

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If the staple grain of the Americas was constantly mistranslated by English colonists as a foodstuff, even more so was the land on which it grew. Because the English identified farming with husbandry, they misunderstood completely what they encountered on native grounds. In the East, planting crops appeared to be woman's work, the work of "lazie squaes," while their men went off hunting and fishing. In England these were the pleasurable sports of country squires, not the work of honest ploughmen wresting food from the earth by the sweat of their brows. Amerindians neither plowed nor fertilized. Fertilizing with fish was a method Squanto had learned in England. When Thomas Harlot expostulated in 1585 that the natives in Roanoke "never enrich the soil with refuse, dung, or any other thing, nor do they plough or dig it as we do in England," his was a moral complaint that the natives got prodigous crops without having to work for them.(12)

To Europeans, "land" meant "use," and "use" meant European agriculture (see Figure 3). They were blind to the ecological balance Amerindians had achieved by burning the undergrowth of their forests once or twice a year to improve the habitat for wildlife, like small game and wild edible plants, which also kept down insects and weeds and disease. In Vestal Fire, Stephen Pyne has revealed in global detail what a difference a fire makes in the meaning that different cultures attribute to it.(13) The Amerindians' use of "cultivated fire" was in fact a form of "husbandry" that turned forests into parks in order to sustain the wild game they harvested as a foodstuff. Europeans misunderstood these methods because their own template of planting fields with crops to feed flocks to supply fields with manure for more crops was a closed and fixed system. While Amerindians followed their food across the land in the rhythm of the seasons, colonists could only imagine food and land in terms of a fixed place, with fences to divide pasture from non-pasture.(14)

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For colonists and conquistadors alike, to use land meant to subdue, improve, bring under control, have dominion over it. They cited Genesis 1:28 to justify their claim to land that Indians had automatically forfeited by their failure to use it. "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Amerindian land use did not fit European notions of dominion, property, and ownership, for Amerindian property rights shifted with ecological use. No tribe owned the land but families, communities, or confederacies might use what was on the land at different times of the year. What was traded or sold were usufruct rights, the rights of "use," and these were a matter of trade and negotiation between groups whose political structures were based on kinship rather than on the relatively fixed and institutionalized power structures of the Europeans. In "deeding" lands to the colonists, the Indians thought they were making political deals, not economic ones.