It’s a classic October day in the northeastern United States – sky as blue as heaven, maples blazing in the hills, a whiff of frost in the air. Wrapped up against the autumn wind, masked up against the coronavirus, a dozen teenaged boys and girls cut through a field of late-season maize. Gossiping among themselves, they snap off the ears, drop them into plastic sacks, and empty the sacks into a plastic tub. The tub is attached by ropes to a small tractor driven by an older boy. When the bin is full, he drives up a dirt track to a barn, the bin bouncing merrily behind, maize ears flying out. Laughing kids run after the tractor, tossing the ears back into the bin.
The harvest crew is made up of students from the Akwesasne Freedom School, run by and for Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (the Mohawk nation, in English), an indigenous society on the St Lawrence River, at the US-Canada border. Kanienʼkehá꞉ka is one of the six societies that make up the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois confederation), which has been stubbornly resisting foreign incursions since Henry Hudson sailed to New York for the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie in 1609. The students were working on a Kanienʼkehá꞉ka farm. The maize was a traditional Haudenosaunee variety called Iroquois shortnose.
“This is food for us,” said Kanatakeniate (Tom Cook), the elder who had taken me to the site. Unable to resist temptation, he had walked into the field and started pulling out maize. “It’s food that means home – I can’t explain it any better than that. It’s food that means we are in charge of our own lives.”
New life for traditional agriculture
A long-time native activist, Kanatakeniate had helped launch the farm, then mostly bare land, in 2015. The project had begun small, with Freedom School students raising chickens. Now they were harvesting more than five acres of maize. And they were just one of a hundred or more new indigenous farms in Haudenosaunee territory – and hundreds more across North America.
All of these farms are part of a growing drive to relaunch indigenous agriculture – not only in North America, but in places like Amazonia, Australia, and west Africa, too. The “food sovereignty” movement sees ancestral foods as essential to culture. Returning to traditional diets, Kanatakeniate told me, is essential to restoring indigenous peoples’ health, which has been ruined by “commods”: the cheap, government-provided commodity crops that have led to catastrophic levels of obesity and diabetes.
Conventional agriculture focuses on extracting the maximum number of calories from the minimum amount of land
If the food-sovereignty movement reaches its goals, it will affect the lives of the five million plus indigenous people in the Americas. But the increased attention to indigenous agriculture may have its greatest impact in a completely different arena: feeding tomorrow’s cities in a time of accelerating climate change.
Conventional agriculture focuses on extracting the maximum number of calories from the minimum amount of land. For the most part, this has meant growing concentrated monocultures of annual crops, especially cereals like wheat and rice, with heavy doses of industrial fertiliser and irrigation water. In many ways, this system has been spectacularly successful – global levels of malnourishment have fallen steadily for 50 years. Incredibly, this progress occurred even as the world’s population more than doubled and hundreds of millions of farmers left the countryside to live in cities.
But now this system is facing unprecedented ecological tests. Paradoxically, climate change is expected to give northern Europe both more intense storms and more intense droughts, each potentially devastating to harvests. (In 2018, for example, the Netherlands was hit by record drought and the worst hurricane in years.) At the same time, the environmental costs of conventional agriculture have led to pressure on farmers to control erosion, cut back on fertilisers, and reduce their use of pesticides and herbicides. The result is that farmers must stop using many of the tools of conventional agriculture at the same time that one of its preconditions – stable, predictable weather patterns – is vanishing.
Ancient agriculture can transform the modern world
At first glance, the notion that ancient forms of agriculture could help with this dilemma seems absurd. Iroquois shortnose maize, for instance, has such small ears that it is guaranteed to yield less per hectare than modern varieties. And its irregular growth – most plants are short, but some are tall, and the ears are not in uniform locations on the plant – means that it must be harvested by hand, a labour-intensive process.
But that misses the principles of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka agricultural system. Their homeland has a notoriously unpredictable climate, with frequent late spring snowfalls, early fall cold snaps, and sudden droughts and downpours. In the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka system, shortnose maize is a backup. Its small ears mature so rapidly that it can produce a crop in the brief period between an exceptionally late snowfall and an exceptionally early frost.
And because the plant has a short stalk, it needs less water than conventional maize, a boon in drought years. It is the kind of crop farmers grow when they both assume unstable weather will cause crop failures and need to minimise the use of water or chemical inputs – assumptions from the past that have striking resonance for the future.
Another way to put it is that American indigenous agriculture transformed European farming 400 years ago, when potatoes, tomatoes, maize, and chilis arrived from the Americas. Now it may happen again.
Originally posted in The Correspondent
Connect with Kanatakeniate (Tom Cook) and dozens of Indigenous speakers at the 7-Day The Eternal Song Gathering hosted live by SAND, June 3-9, 2025
