Three Sisters

First time growing berries.

Beans, I've tried the three sisters garden method.

It didn't work out very good this year.

Really only got beans to be successful.

How can I change what I'm doing in order to have a successful three sister garden next year?

Okay, well, it depends on your soil.

So the Three Sisters Garden, if people don't know, is when you grow corn, beans, like a runner bean.

Pull bean.

Yeah, I'm not.

What are the three plants included in the three sisters trio? What three plants do you include in the three sisters trio? And I guess, yeah, three sisters.

We won't do the four sisters or anything like that.

No. Oh, dang.

The beans that they raised were not soybeans per se, they were edible beans.

So anyhow, the colonists learned how to grow the squash from the Native Americans, which, the pumpkin, who was considered one of the three sisters, along with corn and beans.

They would grow the squash along riverbanks next to the maize and beans, a planting technique they called the three sisters method, which would allow three crops to sustain each other.

Corn served as the trellis upon which the beans could climb, and beans were nourished by the sunlight and kept the corn stalk stable on windy days while also nourishing their soil, and the pumpkins sheltered the corn's shallow roots and prevented weeds from taking a hold.

While the settlers were initially somewhat slow to embrace pumpkins, they soon discovered that when other crops failed, pumpkins remained the reliable food source.

So basically, in the summer and the warmer months of the year, they would encamp near the seacoasts in small round wooden buildings called wetus, similar to what in other places is called wigwams.

And there they gathered fish and shellfish and raised crops, mainly maize, beans, and squash, the so-called Three Sisters.

In the colder months of the year, they moved inland into semi-permanent villages and hunted and gathered in the forests.

As of the beginning of the 1600s, it seems that the whole Wampanoag Confederation had a total population of about 21,000 to 24,000 people.

And it goes a little bit like this.

There are three sisters, three sustainers of life, corn, beans, and squash.

Corn ends up asking the Great Spirit if there's more that she can do for the people.

She's pleased that people like corn so much.

She is a SUNY, State University of New York, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, where she also founded and is the Director Emeritus of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

In this conversation, we discuss her journey of learning through plants, from the three sisters of corn, beans, and squash, to mosses in boreal forests.

She also shares some of the foundational Potawatomi worldview that shaped her research and scientific career.

Most of all, Robin and I discuss how these ideas move beyond philosophy and actually influence how we live, uh, or are going to live, uh, and could even shape the systems around us if humanity chooses that path.

And I was hoping you could share about, uh, one story about one plant and how, uh, knowing about plants can influence things about ourselves and human society.

Yeah, you know, both as, as a plant scientist and as a Potawatomi scientist, plants in my culture are understood as our elders, as our teachers, and as a Western-trained plant ecologist, they are my teachers, and as an Indigenous woman trying to figure out how it is that we live well here, they are my teachers.

And I think that I would want to invoke the contemporary science of biomimicry that says, "Oh, given the evolution and problem-solving by, by plants throughout evolutionary time, how might we take lessons from them? How might we have the humility to view them as, as, as teachers and models?" So hard to choose which plants to talk about, but I think I would choose the embodiment of traditional ecological knowledge as it regards plants and choose corn, beans, and squash growing together in the Indigenous polyculture that we know of as the Three Sisters.

Because as we know, in contrast to contemporary monoculture agriculture, by growing corn, beans, and squash together in a polyculture, it's better for the soil.

And squash became extremely important to agricultural systems in the Americas.

So this is something we've talked about before, but one of the best known indigenous examples in the growing system, commonly called the Three Sisters, is something that actually incorporates squash and pumpkins really well.

So the Three Sisters is a growing system whereby maize, beans and squash are grown together.

So the idea is maize grows upwards.

The beans can then use the maize for support and as legumes form relationships with nitrogen fixing bacteria.

it later in the show, but I mean, I have recipes galore for pumpkin.

i'm sure you do too well i know probably not as much as you would think because i've never used them as much a ton but yes for sure so actually native american tribes cultivated pumpkins using the three sisters method which we've actually talked about on this show before you invited me to learn about it alongside corn and beans i do love the three sisters yes well can you talk about it or no

yeah absolutely it's a it's a okay i think it was the iroquois uh native americans that uh taught the pilgrims when they came, you know, like the whole Thanksgiving story, and they taught them how to, like, farm, and they were like, hey, look, the three sisters, they all grow together, so it's like the corn grows tall, so the beans have something that they can cling to to grow up on, and then the squash grows around it, and the big leaves, like, protect the ground and keep the ground moist, and, you know, and they all, like, feed each other, like, on a... on a molecular level or whatever, like, you know, there's like nitrogen coming from corn that goes into the pumpkin, and the pumpkin gives the,

you know, whatever.

The corn provided stock, the nitrogen came from the beans, and the pumpkin's broad leaves kind of shade the ground, helping to hold moisture and keeping weeds away.

So the idea of companion planting was derived from civilizations like this.

Like everybody in here has probably heard of the three sisters, right? which is the combination of corn, squash, beans.

Some people do, like if you go to the arid Southwest, they did four sisters, which they included sunflowers and stuff like that.

But the three sisters minimum, that was built out of necessity.

They needed ground cover to shade the soil.

They needed the corn, obviously, for food.