I always wondered why we don’t do more polyculture ag
Profit margins and prioritising short term gains. :(
That’s not a correction, that’s an added detail.
Now that’s a correction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
The Three Sisters […] are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous people of Central and North America: squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans […]. […] In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds […]; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.
I don’t get the joke? Aren’t the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false? Also, I thought the Iroquois used it too
Edit: yes, the Haudenosaunee are the Iroquois. Til
Aren’t the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false?
The original statement implies the technique was widespread across Native American groups. It’s almost certainly false for the ones here in South America; there’s a lot on terrace farming and slash-and-burn, but AFAIK nothing that resembles the companion system of the three sisters. (I wonder if it’s due to the prominence of subterranean crops. Taters, yucca, sweet potatoes.)
The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and the Cherokee/Tsalagi being related hints me it was something they developed.
The Iroquois are the Haudenosaunee. The latter is the more respectful and culturally appropriate term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois
Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse”) is the autonym by which the Six Nations refer to themselves.[23] While its exact etymology is debated, the term Iroquois is of colonial origin. Some scholars of Native American history consider “Iroquois” a derogatory name adopted from the traditional enemies of the Haudenosaunee.[24] A less common, older autonym for the confederation is Ongweh’onweh, meaning “original people”.[25][26][27]
Don’t culturally appropriate please
Edit: come on, it’s just a word joke from a none native speaker. Culturally appropriate and cultural appropriation is pretty close no? I never realized until now and thought it was funny.
Having worked directly with these communities and their material culture, this is what I was taught, but I am happy to be corrected if there is another better perspective.
EDIT: I checked, since I am old and sometimes out of date. The Smithsonian and Library of Congress have switched terms since about 2022 to Haudenosaunee. https://americanindian.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/education/haudenosauneeguide.pdf
Edit, Edit: I get the joke now, but you’re all trapped in here with me now, so here’s an info-dump: I used “Iroquois” interchangeably until about 2022, which is right around when the American Anthropological Association and the Smithsonian made the formal switch. While “Iroquoian” is still used as a technical linguistic category, “Iroquois” is being phased out as a name for the people because of its colonial origins and its potential interpretation as a slur. I remember hmming and hawing about it back then, but ultimately, as I’ve learned more about Indigenous sovereignty, “Iroquois” just feels increasingly dated now in any context.
While “Iroquoian” is still used as a technical linguistic category
I’m guessing this won’t last for long, given some people already call the language family “Ogwehoweh” instead of “Iroquoian”. Example here.
I agree with you, it was just a word joke
aaaaa lmfao sorry autistic moment
No worries, it was not the most clear joke (it went over people’s head I think, seeing the downvotes).
All jokes aside though, coincidentally I just finished reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass”, which has reinvigorated my respect for the Haudenosaunee and the Three Sister’s. Such a great read! I’m a student of ecology at the moment, and I studied Social Anthropology years ago so it was double interesting.
I prefer her book on Moss. Check it out if you have not!!!
It’s a joke based on the different definitions/pronunciations of the word
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/appropriate
culturally appropriate term
don’t culturally appropriate
Don’t speak please
Don’t speak please
How am I going to phrase requests then?
sudo make me a sandwichstyle?
I did not know this before. Thank you!
I believe it’s the verb tenses. Instead of it being a historical fact, it’s an ongoing practice of an ongoing group of people
Is it an ongoing practice? Are there any Cherokee that currently engage in subsistence agriculture?
Or, if hobby gardening counts, is it not necessary to list every racial or ethnic group in the United States with members utilizing the practice?
Furthermore, is any of that relevant to what is presumably a historical discussion? If someone were discussing methods of 13th century French castle construction in the past tense, is it a useful correction to insist on a present tense because of the Guédelon Castle project?
There is a huge community of indigenous agriculture in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few Cherokee operations going. From what I see on IG it is going through a bit of a renaissance, but it is not my field.
I have no knowledge on the topic so I can’t answer the first couple questions.
However, I will say its a useful correction to say there are ongoing efforts to maintain historical practices if it makes the correctee happy to hear that (as is the case in the meme). It’s also useful to remember that indigenous peoples still exist and aren’t just historical (something a lot of US folks aren’t taught in school)
I did a little research, check it out above. :)
I looked it up:
According to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, there are ~78k producers, ~58k farms, on ~63 million acres.1
Specifically in this case, the Cherokee Nation has its own Secretary of Natural Resources and a dedicated Seed Bank program that distributes traditional heirloom seeds (like Cherokee White Eagle Corn) to thousands of tribal citizens every year to maintain food sovereignty.2,3 However, Native American agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry.
It’s not “subsistence” in the 1700s sense; it’s a mix of large-scale ranching, commercial cropping, and traditional community gardens.
Regarding the renaissance I mentioned: There is a massive “Food Sovereignty” movement right now where tribes are reclaiming their health and economies by growing their own traditional foods to combat issues like diabetes and food deserts.4 So these traditional methods are very much ongoing and evolving.
Many of these operations work with researchers using traditional methods. There is a lot of experimenting right now.5,6
1: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_AmericanIndianANProducers.pdf
2: https://naturalresources.cherokee.org/ethnobiology/seed-bank/
3: https://www.cherokee.gov/our-government/secretary-of-natural-resources-office/
4: https://indigenousfoodandag.com/
5: https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/view/1325
I’m aware that there are many indigenous farmers, but my understanding is that they use the same monoculture practices as anyone else, for efficiency and commercial viability. Whereas the Three Sisters technique, a form of companion planting, which is not a unique development of indigenous Americans, has been relegated to hobby gardening, as it’s much more labor intensive.
That’s a common misconception. Three Sisters polyculture can be more “efficient” than monoculture when you measure “efficiency” by nutritional yield and soil health rather than just ease of machine-harvesting.
And while many operations utilize modern machinery, the “efficiency” of monoculture is actively being re-evaluated in the face of climate change. It can produc more protein per acre than corn grown alone, while significantly reducing the need for synthetic nitrogen and irrigation.7,8
Large-scale tribal operations are exerimenting using “strip intercropping,” which is alternating rows of corn/beans and squash, to allow for modern mechanized harvesting while maintaining the soil-health benefits of the traditional system.9
This is resilience-based commercial farming that utilizes what is called Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to survive droughts that kill monocultures.10,11
8: A framework to guide future farming research with Indigenous communities (2025)
9: https://eap.mcgill.ca/CSI_1.htm; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397936106_Agricultural_Mechanization_for_Regenerative_Agriculture
10: Why Indigenous Seed Keepers Hold the Future of Agriculture (2026)
11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_ecological_knowledge
Citation 9 is hallucinated.
I fixed it, the AI I used to organise fucked up my link and I am cooking right now lol, sorry about that. Missed it on my edit. I think it tried to grab from the 2025 report below, anyway I added a second link as well and a better source.
My partner and I were looking to try to make an educational game about the Three Sisters a year or two ago, so I was looking into this… Like, we wanted to make a kind of chess board that reacts when you plant things for mobile using the plant databases I have. It ended getting a bit too close to modelling, though, so we set it aside for now.
TEK in general is really cool, and worth looking into and this is new stuff that is not well publicised imo. It’s like permaculture but actually more grounded in science. It is quickly becoming a minor special interest of mine, it has a lot of promise.
For contrast, my PhD thesis is basically about how the British carved everything up, so there’s no longer really connections between people and place and the ecology suffers for it, while modern western conservation can be more akin to gardening. Here is another book about it that just came out with the same idea. I was a bit jealous when it came out as they beat me to my conclusions. :')
Here is the most recent report: https://indigenousfoodandag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Annual_Report_Web.pdf
A bit more on TEK, though slightly dated. This is a new field and rapidly evolving: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534721001063
(PS: I know you guys hate AI, but this stuff is worth learning about and I edited everything myself.)
REDRAFTING; had to correct something lol.
I think that’s why there’s a smile in the last square.
Well, “Native Americans” means everything from whoever lived on the tip of today’s Argentina all the way to the Inuit. So saying “native Americans” when it’s actually just two tribes is wrong.
Edit: Wikipedia says the technique was used by ‘various’ people.
So if you say like “people farm beans” that’s wrong because not all people farm beans? Presumably not all of the people in those two groups, it even every community within them, use the three sisters method, so is it still wrong?
Or is it just that it’s ok to say “<plural> does <x>” without meaning “all <plural> do <x>”?
It’s not wrong.
We all learned how categories like this work in school - squares are rhombuses but rhombuses aren’t necessarily squares. It’s weird that some people would argue like against that.
It is true that Native Americans used the 3 Sisters. Which ones? Those specific tribes, apparently.
First nations?
I believe that term is reserved for (some of) the indigenous peoples of modern-day Canada.
Indigenous peoples in Canada comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples#North_America
