I continue to enjoy the book I bought last week at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, titled Native American Gardening, by Gilbert L. Wilson.
It features an oral history given by Maxi’diwiac, or Buffalobird-woman, in 1912. She described the efforts of the white government agent who tried to get the Hidatsa people of North Dakota to cultivate and eat potatoes in the early 1870’s.
At first we Hidatsas did not like potatoes, because they smelled so strongly! Sometimes we dug them up and took them into our lodges, but in winter they froze and spoiled.
The government was eager to teach the Indians to raise potatoes; and to get us women to cultivate them, paid as much as two dollars and a half a day for planting them in the plowed field. I remember I was paid that much for planting them.
After three or four years, finding the Indians did not have much taste for potatoes and rather seldom ate them, our agent made a big cache pit—root cellar, you say it was—and bought our potato crop of us.
After this he would issue seed potatoes to us in the spring, and in the fall we would sell our crop to him. Thus, handling potatoes each year, we learned little by little to eat them.
I love this story, appearing on page 119 of the book. It gives a wonderful account of how to change prejudices and traditional practices, slowly but surely. By creating a market for the unwanted potatoes, he eventually managed to invest them with a sense of value in the minds of the Hidatsas.
The lesson I take from this story is that you have to afford people both time and opportunity to get used to a new idea if you want truly to obtain their acceptance. Cannot rush it. Middle managers of the modern world, take note!
What I got from this was that farm subsidies started pretty early.