Indian Farm Circa 1945

This may seem a simple picture, yet, we can gather from it a lot of implied information regarding traditional Indigenous agricultural techniques, including crop rotations, inter-cropping, and polyculture. We can assume these methods are being used based on the time-period and the fact that this was a Cherokee farm.

For most of Native American history until the 19th century, Cherokee women were the ones to do most of the farming, harvesting primarily corn as corn was a major part of Cherokee life- as subsistence and weaving into spiritual beliefs. Members of the Cherokee tribes' diets primarily consisted of what we know now as the “The Three Sisters” corn, squash, and beans.