No Useless Mouth

During a July 1791 treaty negotiation, Timothy Pickering, a key figure in the development of early U.S. food policy, misremembered past instances of Native and non-Native hunger while giving a "history lesson."At this meeting on the Tioga River (which ran between present-day Pennsylvania and New York), Pickering met a group of Senecas, one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy."When the white people came to this Island, the Indians lived chiefly by hunting and fishing," he explained to Cornplanter, one of the Iroquois negotiators.On this "island" of North Amer i ca, "the white people immediately began to till the ground, to grow corn, wheat, and other grain . . .and to raise abundance of cattle, sheep and hogs."In the past, Pickering explained, "the Indians continued to follow hunting and fishing, growing only a little corn.They were often in want of food," and "exposed to great hardships." 1 Pickering met Cornplanter and the other Senecas in the midst of a fight against hunger that began before colonists arrived in North Amer i ca and ended in the 1810s.In 1791 Pickering was a newcomer to Iroquois diplomacy.He had only been working as a negotiator for a year, and the learning curve had been steep.2 He started his job during a momentous shift in relations between Natives and non-Natives, when the United States, after a de cade of weakness and uncertainty, was trying to gain the upper hand in its dealings with Indians.As a result, his speech to Cornplanter conveyed an inaccurate historical picture. IntroduCtIonCornplanter, for his part, likely knew that Pickering was misinterpreting the actions of seventeenth-century En glish colonists, who had taken a while to become farmers.Their domesticated animals had died on the ships that traveled to North Amer i ca.They had spent their first months in Virginia searching for inedible commodities, and in Virginia and New England they had turned into useless mouths dependent on Indians for farmed vegetables, gathered berries, and hunted venison.Contrary to Pickering's claims, it was the En glish colonists, not the Indians, who had strug gled to overcome hunger.It was odd for Pickering to make this speech to Native treaty participants, especially to one named Cornplanter, because the Iroquois had grown corn in abundance long before encountering non-Natives.3 The Seneca negotiator sitting across from Pickering was known by several names.To Indians he was Gyantwahia or Kayéthwahkeh, which translates approximately to "where it is planted."To non-Natives he was Cornplanter, John O'Bail, John Abeel, or John Abiel. 4 He had a reputation for effective speechmaking and would have been familiar with his tribe's spoken history.These con temporary creation stories described the fall of Sky Woman onto the back of a turtle and told of how, with the help of other animals, she had constructed an island on the turtle's back.Sky Woman had a daughter.Some Iroquois said the daughter's son, Thaluhyawaku, learned to plant corn.Others said that, while still in the womb, Thaluhyawaku's twin brother, Tawiskalu, maliciously de cided to leave his mother's body through her side.This birth killed Sky Woman's daughter, but her early death yielded unexpected bounty in the corn, beans, and squash that sprang forth from the grave.5 Corn production was intrinsic to the Iroquois past and pre sent.Yet Pickering's account minimized the history of Iroquois farming and thus erased systematic Indian hunger prevention.Pickering shared his tale because the U.S. government wanted the Iroquois to become farmers.Cornplanter, as his name suggests, could already farm, but he listened to this lesson on the benefits of agriculture because he was trying to maneuver to retain land in his dealings with the new United States.Hunger's impor tant role in Pickering's false history should be unsurprising, considering that people had long reckoned with it for vari ous environmental and man-made reasons.In the early modern period, cities under siege could expect to be starved out, and they suffered more quickly during times of crop failure or unanticipated changes in the weather.Famine resulted from extended periods of hunger and was evident in instances of actual deaths, food riots, high prices, property crime, and rising migration.6 During the eigh teenth century most British people suffered from hunger, but not famine.In North Amer i ca, some Eu ro pean observers perceived Native Americans as ravenous,

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