Understanding Variation in Prehistoric Agricultural Productivity: The Importance of Distinguishing among Potential, Available, and Consumptive Yields

2001 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sissel Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Yield Data ◽  
Maize Productivity ◽  
Productivity Data ◽  
Maize Yields ◽  
Agricultural Yield ◽  
Maize Kernels

Based on a model derived from an analysis of contemporary maize yields in Tennessee, Baden and Beekman claim that Mississippian yields would have ranged between 8 bu/acre (501.7 kg/ha) and 30 bu/acre (1,881.3 kg/ha). Using nineteenth-century observations of Native American farmers, I noted in 1999 that available maize yields ranged between 3.7 and 42.67 bu/acre (232.1 to 2,676.3 kg/ha), with a mean of 18.9 bu/acre (1,185.4 kg/ha) for groups that did not have plows. Consumptive yields would have been lower, probably closer to an average of 10 bu/acre (627.2 kg/ha). In this paper, I clarify the differences between potential yields, available yields to illustrate the advantages of my approach. I discuss some factors that affect maize plants prior to harvest, leading to available yields that may be lower than potential yields, and conditions that reduce the quantity of maize kernels available for consumption after the harvest. Baden and Beekman argue that modern agricultural technology provides a more reasonable baseline analog for modeling ancient maize productivity than nineteenth-century Native American technologies. In contrast, I explore agricultural yield data for Native Americans and Euroamericans from a number of tribes and states for 1850, 1867, and 1878. A comparison of these data shows that, overall, yields obtained by Native American farmers tend to be lower than yields for contemporaneous Euroamerican farmers. My approach using agricultural productivity data from nineteenth-century Native Americans, coupled with a consideration of potential, available, and consumptive yields, provides a plausible foundation for the evaluation of late prehistoric yields.

Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America

1999 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sissel Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Eastern Woodlands ◽  
Resource Productivity ◽  
Maize Productivity ◽  
Mean Size ◽  
The Mean

Archaeologists and ethnohistorians have long been interested in quantifying potential maize productivity for late prehistoric and early historic Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands. Maize yields obtained by Native Americans using traditional farming techniques in the nineteenth century are compared to yields obtained by nineteenth-century Native Americans using plows, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century farmers in Illinois and Missouri. The result is a notion of average resource productivity for maize that is more reasonable and modest than previous estimates. In this study, the mean yield of maize for nineteenth-century Native American groups who did not use plows was 18.9 bu/acre (stdev=4.1) (1,185.4 kg/ha [stdev=254.1]). Yields on the order of 10 bu/acre (627.2 kg/ha) probably are closer to the average prehistoric yields that were available for subsistence purposes. The mean size of gardens cultivated by nineteenth-century Native American families without plows was .59 acre (stdev=.45) (.24 ha [stdev=.18]). These newly compiled data are used to generate a model of nuclear family household economy and minimal and maximal garden sizes given different levels of maize productivity and consumption. Population estimates made on the basis of previous assessments of high rates of resource productivity will need to be reevaluated.

Kenrick and the Paulists: A Conflict of Structures and Personalities

1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
John P. Marschall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Religious Congregation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Catholic Church

In spite of the nativism that agitated the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church experienced a noticeable drift of native American converts from other denominations. Between 1841 and 1857 the increased number of converts included a significant sprinkling of Protestant ministers. The history of this movement, which had its paradigm in the Oxford Movement, will be treated more in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this essay is simply to recount the attempt by several converts to establish a religious congregation of men dedicated to the Catholic apostolate among native Americans.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

Indians Illustrated

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of “buckskinned braves” and “Indian princesses” proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. This book charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations—romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise—in the heyday of the American pictorial press. These woodblock engravings and ink drawings placed Native Americans into categories that drew from venerable “good” Indian and “bad” Indian stereotypes already threaded through the culture. The book's examples show how the genre cemented white ideas about how Indians should look and behave—ideas that diminished Native Americans' cultural values and political influence. The book's powerful analysis of themes and visual tropes unlock the racial codes and visual cues that whites used to represent, and marginalize, native cultures already engaged in a twilight struggle against inexorable westward expansion.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Mark Walczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
River Channels ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Frontier Settlers

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Starved Rock in Illinois. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. Although the Rock itself was not an occupied Native American site per se, like a semi-permanent village, it was a place where, for millennia, Native Americans camped, sojourned, and in a few instances had their earthly remains interred. West and north of Starved Rock, along the ancient river channels that once crisscrossed the Illinois Valley, aboriginal people hunted, fished, and farmed. Oblivious to the movement of Europeans from the Old World to the New, the Indians in the Starved Rock area established a village named Kaskaskia. European trade goods that made the chores of killing, cleaning, and cooking easier reached the Kaskaskia a decade or so before French missionaries and traders made their debut at Starved Rock. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. Their attitudes concerning the use of lands and waterways, and their exploitation of natural resources, embodied values that would have seemed utterly foreign to the Indians who proceeded them.

Figuring America

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Kate Flint
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
Shock Resistance ◽  
New Nation

This chapter discusses the place of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the time of American independence up to the early decades of the twentieth century. The iconic image of the Indian is not only inseparable from the expansion and the internal policies of the new nation during the nineteenth century, and from the country's reflections concerning its history and its national identity, but is also central to Britain's conceptualization of the whole American continent. Additionally, the Indian is a figure charged with significance when it comes to Britain's interpretation of her whole imperial role and her responsibility toward indigenous peoples. In other words, the Indian is a touchstone for a whole range of British perceptions concerning America during the long nineteenth century and plays a pivotal role in the understanding and imagining of cultural difference. But transatlantic crossings were not limited to visual and textual representations. A significant number of Native Americans visited Britain in the long nineteenth century, and this book explores their engagement with that country, its people and institutions, and these visitors' perceptions of the development of modern, urban, industrialized life. Their reactions—whether curiosity, shock, resistance, or enthusiasm—show them to have been far from the declining and often degenerate race that popular culture frequently made them out to be.

Native American sports mascots activate negative stereotypes about contemporary Native Americans

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Focella ◽  
Jessica Whitehead ◽  
Jeff Stone ◽  
Stephanie Fryberg ◽  
Rebecca Covarrubias
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Negative Stereotypes

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Native Americans and the Third World Strike at UC Berkeley

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
LaNada War Jack
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Third World ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The University

The author reflects on her personal experience as a Native American at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as well as on her activism and important leadership roles in the 1969 Third World Liberation Front student strike, which had as its goal the creation of an interdisciplinary Third World College at the university.

Indian Genocide – A Study Through The Works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Poonam Chourey
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
South Dakota ◽  
Native People ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
Purpose Of Business ◽  
Wounded Knee ◽  
Shed Light

The research expounded the turmoil, uproar, anguish, pain, and agony faced by native Indians and Native Americans in the South Dakota region.  To explain the grief, pain and lamentation, this research studies the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lyn.  She laments for the people who died and also survived in the Wounded Knee Massacre.  The people at that time went through huge exploitation and tolerated the cruelty of American Federal government. This research brings out the unchangeable scenario of the Native Americans and Native Indians.  Mr. Padmanaban shed light on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who was activist.  Mr. Padmanaban is very influenced with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s thoughts and works. She hails from Sioux Community, a Native American.  She was an outstanding and exceptional scholar.  She experienced the agony and pain faced by the native people.  The researcher, Mr. Padmanaban is concerned the sufferings, agony, pain faced by the South Dakota people at that time.  The researcher also is acknowledging the Indian freedom fighters who got India independence after over 200 years of sufferings.  The foreign nationals entered our country with the sole purpose of business.  Slowly and steadily the took over the reign of the country and ruled us for years, made all of us suffer a lot.

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