Hi,

Hi. Hi everybody. Welcome to Erkoy History and Legends. I'm Caleb and I'm Andrew.

Now, Andrew, this week we are going to be talking about agriculture and how the Native Americans grew their crops, how they gathered and forged, and all of the

surprisingly unique and interesting techniques they had to be very successful at it.

Now, obviously, this is going to be Iroquoian focused, because based on different parts

of North America, different people farmed different ways, but there's a lot of similarities

across the board. We've

titled this episode The Three Sisters. I think we need to start with basics, Caleb, and explain

what the three sisters are to the northeastern Native Americans. Now, the three sisters are basically

the cornerstone of the food pyramid in your average Aroquois town. They're broken down

into three families. You have the Mays family, which we know is corn. They had various types of

corn, and then they also had beans and squash. And again, many varieties of all of those as well.

Why do they call them the three sisters? Why not just call

them the three foods? It really goes back and plays into the Iroquois creation story. And it's a big

long story, and we're not going to get into it right now. But when Sky Woman descends from the sky

world into this earth, and after she passes away, her body begins to decompose and from it springs

corn, beans and squash from her head. The Iroquois and the other northeastern peoples that called

them the three sisters thought of it as they sustain us and work with us so they're just like a part of

our family. That's exactly right.

They were basically born from her body.

It may have been in a little different way,

but they still looked at them like they came from the same person.

...