The Three Sisters

I'd never really planted a large garden—over my lifetime I'd grown flowers in the ground and tomatoes in patio pots and such—but in the spring of 2014, I decided to plant a Cherokee garden, the traditional three sisters: corn, beans, and squash.

Cherokee women were the providers for their people. As Sarah Ridge says in Book One of A Woman of Marked Character (page 5): "We, the Cherokee—the Real People—we claimed our mothers' blood. Women owned the lineage. We owned the lodges. We owned the crops. We planted, we harvested. We were the traders—until European merchants refused to accept women as trading partners."

The Cherokee historically lived in the southern Appalachian mountains, and research shows that their ancestors grew corn from about A.D. 1000, given to them, they believed, by their ancestral mother, Selu. Selu provided a system of balance: as summer balanced winter, plants balanced animals, and women farmers balanced the men who hunted. Neither men nor women dominated, for men were the providers of meat and they maintained the safety of the tribe as warriors. This belief system held true until contact with Europeans.

Here are some other legends about the three sisters.

Men helped clear space in the woods for planting, but the crops were cared for by women. When French and English traders first visited Cherokee settlements, they wrote of seeing large fields tended by women. Naturally, with their male-dominated gender system, they assumed that women were forced to work in the fields while the lazy men sat around smoking their pipes and chipping arrowheads, or went off hunting and into battles.

Anyway, as a child I remembered hearing of the three sisters and knew of the Cherokee planting method from research. I watched YouTube videos, bought some seeds, got tools out of my shed, and embarked on a fun—but very big, I would learn—backyard project.

I dug holes and mounded them up with loose soil and potting mix. I made a large dam around them to plant—first—the corn kernels in the center, then later the beans to climb up the corn. On the sides of the dams, I planted squash, pumpkins, and gourd seeds so they could spread out.

Here is an alternative, contemporary way to layout a three sisters garden.

(I'm getting my historical information from Chapter One of Cherokee Women by Theda Perdue. This is a wonderfully instructive and intensely researched book on Cherokee women's lives. Sally/Sarah Ridge is mentioned several times in the book.)

Although I could have sprinkled the mounds with a garden hose, I chose instead to water with watering cans as the plants would have been cared for. While I didn't have to walk to a stream and back carrying a large pottery container or a sewn deer hide dripping with water, I enjoyed filling each mound and watching it absorb the moisture. I planted seven kernels of corn in each (as has been passed down in lore), and I think the most mature stalks I got from a mound was three.

Pests and wildlife competed with the Cherokee for their harvest. Older women would be posted day and night near the large fields in raised scaffolding to chase off crows, ravens, and raccoons—and deer. For smaller gardens, the women would build fences of hickory and oak saplings tied to stakes. I improvised by pounding metal posts into the ground and stretching thin mesh fencing to protect it from our many local deer.

I loved the symmetry of the mounds—Selu's balance.

The Cherokee raised three types of corn, two in their fields and one in their cabin gardens, it being a smaller type and ripening in only two months. I planted the multicolored "hominy corn"—more like traditional maize—rather than the other native staple, white-grain "flour corn."

On various mounds, I poked in yellow squash, pumpkins, and a variety of gourd seeds. After the leaves on the corn stalks reached two feet high, I planted purple climbing beans (not traditional but because they looked pretty on the package) in the base of the circle. Then I watered, watched, and waited.

The Cherokee used ash for fertilizer, and someone mentioned that the Wampanoag bands of my area of Rhode Island buried a dead fish before planting their corn so it would rot and give off nutrients. I didn't try that, although my potting mix had fertilizer in it.

Over that summer, the whole process was a joy to watch grow as the corn served as a trellis for the beans to climb and wrap around. Beans, acting as a natural fertilizer, added nitrogen to the soil, which benefits the growth of the corn and squash. Squash with its large leaves served as a sun-shield, blocking heat, retaining soil moisture and suppressing weed growth. Again, Selu and her balance.

I didn't have many weeds, but the women would have hoed with sharpened sticks or cumbersome stone mattocks. It was recorded that they often let weeds grow high in the fields, then pulled them out.

The vines in my garden spread out and bore their amazing fruit. After contact with Europeans, Cherokee women would have planted watermelons, sweet potatoes, and peas.

I don't remember how long it was until my harvest time, and unfortunately, I didn't have a celebration. The Cherokee Green Corn Dance is a traditional ritual, and in Sarah's era it was celebrated over four days. This was a time of fasting and feasting—a tribal gathering for spiritual renewal. Young men played stick-ball and the elders smoked tobacco and drank the traditional "black drink." It is still celebrated in July or early August, according to when corn will ripen.

Purple beans developed while the ear of corn (growing beneath the bean) continued to ripen.

A white gourd. Not large enough to dry for a dipper, but it would have made a nice drinking cup.

Cherokee women are said to have had a variety of corn dishes that tasted amazing. While they ate some ears fresh, they allowed most of their corn and beans to dry in the fields. They stored the corn in cribs, later soaking it and the beans, then boiling them for meals when winter came.

They soaked dried corn in lye made from wood ashes, which removed the husk. Then they ground it in a mortar and pestle or on a flat stone. For bread, they made a dough, often adding pumpkin seeds or hickory nuts, ground acorns or black walnuts, and baked it on stones near a fire.

Sarah's mother Susanna would have grown up planting in this manner, but by the time Sarah matured, her life was influenced by the manner of white acculturation. Her father oversaw a plantation in northwest Georgia; slaves worked the fields and plowed in straight rows, and cooked and served the Ridge family daily meals in their New England-style house.

~~~

I wouldn't have survived that summer living off my garden, but I enjoyed additions to my meals. It was for me, though, in many ways a spiritual experience. Not only did I undertake a traditional female role, I rekindled mystical skills passed down to me over millennia, tucked away somewhere in my genetic starstuff.

Nancy Stanfield Webb

Final Print Proof of Book One

Black Powder Mountain Woman