Amazon Indian agricultural wisdom
From Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, by Mark Plotkin:
As we looked out at the naked expanse, Kamainja snickered. “Pananakiri poy-deh-ken!” he said slowly. “White man dumb!”
Shafee poked him in the ribs to shush him, but giggled as he did so.
“What’s so funny?” I asked quietly.
“Look at that garden,” Kamainja whispered. “I’ve seen better-looking agriculture inside a leafcutter ant’s nest!”
To my untrained eye, the peasant garden did not look all that different from Indian agriculture. Once Kamainja stopped laughing, I asked him to explain.
“Look at that manioc! It is planted too far apart. You saw how we put ours close together; the leaves form a canopy like the forest’s, which keeps the sun and rain from directly hitting the soil. And they have only one kind, whereas in our gardens we have more than twenty. That plantation is an invitation for the bugs to move in.”
Kamainja was right. Since the manioc plants were all of one variety, insects that feed on that one variety might undergo a population explosion. I began to see what looked “primitive” to the two Indians.
“Look at the weeds!” Shafee chimed in.
“I don’t see any,” I said.
“Exactly! In our gardens, we always leave some behind because it binds the soil in the rainy season. That peasant’s garden is probably cleaner than his house!”
“And another thing,” said Kamainja. “You look at that plantation and you know the man doesn’t understand the forest. A well-planned garden should look like a hole in the forest opened up when a giant ku-mah-kah tree falls over. Small openings in the forest are filled in by fast-growing weedy plants that attract game animals. When you cut down too much forest, the little plants can’t seed in from the surrounding jungle and you don’t have any birds or peccaries coming in that you can hunt.”
“Besides,” said Shafee, “this man put up fences at the edge of his garden. What a bad idea! Sometimes a peccary will come out of the forest to steal a green banana or a bite of manioc from my plantation. When that happens, my children eat peccary meat for a week!”
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The upshot (Plotkin, quoting Edgar Anderson):
“It is frequently said by Europeans and European Americans that time means nothing to an American Indian. This garden seemed to me a good example of how the Indian, when we look more than superficially into his activities, is budgeting his time more efficiently than we do. The garden was in continuous production but was taking only a little effort at any one time….I suspect that if one were to make a careful stdy of such an American Indian garden, one would find it more productive than ours in terms of pounds of vegetables and fruit per man-hour per square foot of ground. Far from saying that time means nothing to an Indian, I would suggest that it means so much more to him that he does not wish to waste it in profitless effort as we do.”
