1 THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF THE ST. JOHN RIVER, THE MALISEET, successfully cultivated maize in northeastern North America during one of the coldest eras in the past several thousand years. This article places Maliseet maize cultivation squarely within the long tradition of Indigenous agriculture in North America that includes the domestication and diffusion of maize within the Americas. Maize cultivation in the St. John River Valley began as part of a broad pattern of Native agricultural innovation and adaptation that saw Maliseets extend and maintain maize cultivation to the Wəlastəkw – the Maliseet name for the St. John River – by the 1680s, if not sooner. Scholarship that has cast maize cultivation on the Wəlastəkw as a development inspired by the arrival of Europeans is grounded in a misinterpretation of early records and a failure to adequately situate maize cultivation within Maliseet culture. Maize cultivation was part of a broad spectrum of Maliseet plant management. Maliseet success in cultivating maize during the Little Ice Age was the product, in part, of their ability to use a knowledge of local microclimates and early harvesting strategies to cope with a period of cold weather and short growing seasons. Considering where and how Maliseets grew and consumed maize helps scholars refine their understandings of the historic range of cultivation, and Indigenous peoples’ responses to climatic change across North America and beyond.  As well, it indicates that Maliseet cultivation created a foundation for European agriculture on parts of the Wəlastəkw in the years that followed.

2 The vegetation along the banks of the St. John River has altered significantly since sunlight began to reach bare land at the end of the last ice age approximately 13,000 years ago. Climate fluctuations, the erosive power of the river itself, the slow rebound of the Earth’s crust, and the arrival of new species – humans included – have been among the forces shaping changes. When humans first arrived on the banks of the St. John River, circa 11,500 years ago, the surrounding landscape was shrubby tundra. Small bands of mobile hunter-gatherers hunted caribou and other animals with a unique style of long, fluted spear points known as Clovis points. When climate change altered the vegetation and distribution of animals in this region, people stopped manufacturing Clovis points.1

3 As temperatures warmed in the Northeast, birch, spruce, pine, maple, beech, and hemlock began to dominate a varied landscape and new cultures developed along the waterway. These human cultures appear to have responded to the shifting climate and smaller sizes of animals by reducing the size of their projectile points and developing more diverse and distinct cultural traditions that were adapted to the changing regional circumstances of North America. The people who lived in the river valley in the years that followed adapted to the new microenvironments that were emerging by developing sophisticated ecological knowledge, as well as seasonal patterns of food production and acquisition that mixed hunting and fishing with plant gathering. This mix of inhabitable niches and subsistence strategies provided humans with a broader array of foods than had been the case in earlier periods. Indigenous peoples harvested the increasing diversity of trees and plants along the river’s bank, using them for food, tools, medicines, shelter, and tinder. Birch bark served to make canoes, shelters, and maps. Humans cut and burned forests, spread seeds, and created garbage heaps; as they did so, they altered the distribution of the existing vegetation. In time, humans would also add new plant species to the mix of vegetation and animals living in the watershed.2

4 The climate of North America continued to fluctuate in ways that affected later humans and the vegetation along the Wəlastəkw in the years that followed. One of the most significant of these fluctuations within the past 5,000 years has come to be known as the Little Ice Age. This epoch, which lasted from approximately 1,300 to 1850 CE, was characterized by periods of extreme cold and fluctuating climate patterns. These conditions posed challenges for Native North Americans and for other peoples across the Northern Hemisphere.3

5 Native peoples living within the region now called New Brunswick maintained regional and long-distance linkages with peoples living elsewhere. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of plant material, stone tools, architecture, and burial traditions that demonstrate inter-cultural contact among the Indigenous peoples of this region and those living in Labrador, southern New England, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi valley dating back more than 3,000 years. The early inhabitants of the St. John River Valley shared belief systems, foods, clothing, and knowledge within an exchange network that connected a large portion of the continent’s biomes and human communities.4

6 One of the most important historical developments within this broader Indigenous population was the domestication of maize. The crucial early developments in domestication occurred in South-Central Mexico more than 6,000 years ago. Native peoples there developed the plant into a high-yielding grain that became the basis of large populations and civilizations. From Mexico, maize cultivation spread throughout North and South America as people adapted the crop to meet new climatic conditions. By 800 to 1,000 years ago Indigenous peoples were successfully raising maize in southern Maine, within easy reach of Maliseet trade networks. The question of when and how maize moved further north and east to become part of the vegetation of the St. John River Valley has been a matter of debate.5

7 Most late 19th- and early 20th-century scholars thought Maliseet maize cultivation had pre-contact origins. More recently, however, scholars have suggested that Maliseets started cultivating maize in the late 17th century when European influence caused them to begin growing maize and other crops. Historical geographer David Demeritt, for instance, suggests that “the arrival of European colonists, fishermen, fur-traders, and their diseases on the shores of North America . . . transformed the human geography of the Northeast” and encouraged Maliseets and other Native peoples to adopt maize cultivation. Using regional climatic zoning and maize’s heat requirements as his guide, Demeritt argues that Native peoples north of the Kennebec River did not cultivate maize prior to 1689, as cool weather during the Little Ice Age made that an unattractive option. His analysis builds on earlier claims that Maliseets and Mi’kmaq avoided growing crops before European contact because they found hunting a more reliable subsistence strategy given their homelands’ marginal soils and climate. Conceptualizing Maliseet maize cultivation as a response to European missionaries, traders, soldiers, and pathogens casts Europeans as the central players in a key shift in human ecology. There are two problems with this conceptualization: it is historically inaccurate and it obscures the profile of Native peoples in a centuries-long process of adapting plants and cultivation and harvesting practices to the diverse soils and climate of the region. There is considerable evidence that maize cultivation in the Wəlastəkw watershed began as part of a broad pattern of Native horticultural innovation and adaptation before Europeans visited the region.6

8 Our knowledge of human adaptation to the possibilities of northeastern North America is, in large part, reliant on accounts of European visitors. The earliest records of trans-Atlantic human contact are from the 11th century, when Norse colonists encountered Indigenous hunter-traders they called Skraelings in northeastern North America. Norse records of these fleeting contacts do not comment on Native plant consumption in North America aside from noting a wooden grain container explorers found on an unnamed island west of their overwintering camp, Leifsbuðir. When the cool era known as the Little Ice Age froze sea routes and impaired Norse colonies and trading during the 14th century, European records of North America ended and did not resume until the late 15th- century voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot. Although Europeans met the inhabitants of the St. John River in 1603, whom they described as Etchemins (and later Maliseets), European knowledge of the river and its people remained piecemeal until later in the century.7

9 Initial European observations of Native societies and vegetation were limited in many ways. The explorers and colonists who came to Acadia initially focused on the coasts and estuaries, as these were places they could easily explore and supply with sailing ships. They had little opportunity to observe the biomes and labour practices that Indigenous peoples used to survive in interior regions, such as the St. John River Valley. Although Champlain visited the St. John River several times in the early 17th century and wrote some of the most important descriptions of the region, he never sailed far above the rapids at the mouth of the river known as the Reversing Falls. His accounts of the St. John River Valley above the Reversing Falls are brief and second hand. Lawyer-poet Marc Lescarbot’s description of Ouïgoudi, the Etchemin “town” at the river’s mouth, is based on observations across a few days. The Jesuit priest Pierre Biard described a short trip to the lower St. John and provided a brief account of fellow Jesuit Énemond Massé’s overwintering with Native peoples there. The scattered records from Charles de la Tour’s trading post at the river’s mouth say little of interior flora or Native plant use. The French merchant Nicolas Denys wrote about the river in 1672, but his descriptions were mostly concerned with the stretch of waterway near the coast. Vicar General Saint-Vallier canoed down the St. John in the spring of 1686. He spent one night at the largest Native village on the river, Meductic, but did not comment on Maliseet subsistence or the vegetation near the village. A French officer, Antoine Laumet, sieur de Cadillac, briefly described this village during the 1692 growing season, and noted maize and other crops. Governor Joseph Robineau de Villebon’s writings also sporadically discuss this village in the 1690s. The first detailed record of Meductic, or any other Maliseet settlement, however, comes from the memoirs of John Gyles, a New England youth who lived, fished, and cultivated with Maliseets while held captive by them between 1689 and 1695.8

10 All of the major 17th-century accounts of the St. John River and its inhabitants were written by men. Not surprisingly, they primarily wrote about male activities. Modern scholars, thus, have few descriptions of Maliseet women’s labour to inform their understanding of the Maliseet economy. Given that in Maliseet society, and those of neighbouring Native peoples, men sometimes assisted women with maize planting but women directed most of the cultivation and harvesting work, observations concerning maize planting and harvesting are rare. Moreover, most European observers lacked the cultural and botanical knowledge necessary to understand Maliseet resource use and to recognize many of the plants they managed.9

11 The most documented Indigenous cultivation site along the Wəlastəkw was a field next to the large palisaded village of Meductic, on the river’s middle reaches. Maliseets petitioned the New Brunswick government to provide them with property rights to their ancestral cultivation lands in 1807. They claimed “their Ancestors upward of two hundred years ago cleared and cultivated a point of land called Meductic Point.”10 In August 1689 John Gyles noted “a large Interval-Corn-Field” near the Meductic fort, at the end of the portage route linking the Kennebec River to the Wəlastəkw. This intervale was a mile long and up to 800 feet wide. Gyles was the son of a prosperous farmer. Prior to his captivity he had worked in farmed fields near Pemaquid Falls (near present-day Bristol, ME), a Native fishing site that had been colonized by English settlers. His characterization of the cultivated land outside of Meductic as a “large” field suggests that it was a sizable, established cultivation site and not a haphazard experiment.11 Cadillac has provided us with a description of cultivation at Meductic as well. Writing three years after Gyles first saw Meductic, Cadillac noted that its inhabitants “clear the land and every year make fine fields of Indian corn, beans, kidney beans and pumpkins (citrouilles).” He described its inhabitants as “pretty warlike . . . well built and good hunters” as well. Cadillac’s use of the plural “fields” suggests Maliseets cultivated more than one site. In 1745, William Pote, who like Gyles wrote from the perspective of a European held captive by Native peoples, noted that the residents of the Wəlastəkw cultivated crops on multiple stretches of the riverbank. While paddling to Meductic from Aukapaque, a village just above present-day Fredericton, Pote – who was a trained surveyor – noted “Several Small Spots Clear[ed] land, where the Indians had Improved and planted Corn and beans &c.”12

12 The choice of planting sites reflected Maliseet awareness of the risk of raids along the river as well as their understanding of soil fertility. They planted nutrient- rich interior intervales and islands along the Wəlastəkw that were isolated from coastal invasions. When, for example, English soldiers destroyed French farms and maize fields along the Bay of Fundy in 1696 and 1704, Meductic’s residents and crops remained secure. The closest fields to the Wəlastəkw known to Europeans during the early 17th century were far up the Kennebec River. These fields were spatially and climatically close to Meductic. They were also removed from the coast and estuaries frequented by European fishermen, traders, and mapmakers as well as distant from coastal fog. After noting that the Kennebec’s rocky and fogbound mouth was dangerous to navigate, Samuel de Champlain also observed that there was

It appears that Native cultivators relocated their crops from the coast to the interior to protect an important and exposed food source.14

13 Europeans’ coastal focus limited their early knowledge of interior settings such as that of the Wəlastəkw. They might well have found fields on the Wəlastəkw similar to those on the Kennebec had they spent more time on the river’s middle reaches. Lescarbot and Champlain produced the first written descriptions of the waterway above the Reversing Falls. Their second-hand accounts briefly described how pilot Pierre Angibaut and Jean Ralluau, the secretary of the lieutenant general of Acadia Pierre Du Gua de Monts, travelled 55 leagues upstream and traced the Wəlastəkw close to its headwaters in the summer of 1608. These records do not mention the presence (or absence) of crops or people. The lack of description of physical features such as Grand Falls in these accounts, coupled with a lack of clarity concerning what they meant by a “league” makes it difficult to discern if the explorers followed the mainstream of the upper St. John or one of its long tributaries such as the Tobique or Aroostook. Colonists did not describe the interior reaches of the Wəlastəkw in detail until the 1680s.15

14 The seasonality of European observations of Meductic and the crops Maliseets raised impaired the observers’ ability to discern cultivation. Champlain wrote that the planting season began in mid-May on rivers to the south of the Wəlastəkw. Maliseets typically planted a little later at Meductic, where hard frosts and snow sometimes blanketed the ground as late as May 25th. Maliseet and Kennebec warriors waited for this date before leaving their fields for raids. Given the timing of planting, the earliest recorded European visitors to Meductic arrived too early to see crops.16

15 Scholars have overlooked the seasonality of European visits to the Wəlastəkw interior and misinterpreted details of the historic record in their appraisals of pre- 1689 Maliseet human ecology. Anthropologist Harald Prins, for instance, cited the failure of New France’s Intendant, Jacques de Meulles, and Vicar General Saint- Vallier to see crops at Meductic in 1686 as proof Maliseets did not yet practice maize agriculture. However, a misinterpretation of the intendant’s itinerary informed this argument. De Meulles likely never travelled far above the Reversing Falls during his three-day visit to the Wəlastəkw in early May. He certainly did not have time to make a return trip to Meductic during freshet season. Prins confused de Meulles with a courier whom the intendant dispatched to Quebec via the Wəlastəkw in the fall of 1685. Stormy weather forced the courier to winter with French settlers on the Wəlastəkw. The messenger continued his trip in late April and passed Meductic before planting began. Prins, however, used the lack of reference to Maliseet crops in the intendant’s account of his visit to the river to claim that Maliseets had not adopted maize cultivation as one of their means of survival. However, even if the intendant had travelled to Meductic in early May, he would have arrived before planting season. Saint-Vallier met the courier near Grand Falls before arriving at Meductic on May 18th. As this date also usually predated planting season, it is not surprising that the vicar general did not comment on crops during a cool spring. Moreover, while Saint-Vallier described Meductic as an established settlement, he did not discuss the local landscape or Maliseet subsistence activities. When the village entered the historic record during cultivation season in 1689, Gyles noted a developed cultivation complex. The seasonality of rivers and crops, as well as the timing and duration of European visits has limited our understanding of Maliseet interior human ecology before 1689.17

16 Maliseet practices altered the ecology of the St. John River Valley. They modified the Wəlastəkw’s banks, making it a food-yielding and medicinal landscape before colonists’ axes and plows arrived. Maliseets killed animals, managed ground nuts and tobacco, and collected, hewed, and burnt wood. As well, they harvested sweet grass, wild rice, fruits, fiddleheads, and medicinal plants in some of the same meadows and intervales that later nourished colonial farming. Cadillac wrote that Maliseets “cleared the land” and Gyles observed many stumps around Meductic’s field, suggesting that villagers removed numerous trees from the site. Maliseets and their captives carefully weeded the Meductic field, favouring annual crops over wild flora. Their labour changed the riverbank’s appearance and affected erosion patterns and habitat at planting sites. The hoeing and mounding that characterized Maliseet cultivation practices, however, only lightly disturbed the soil.

17 While maize, beans, and pumpkin cultivation only reshaped small portions of the mainstream’s bank, these crops were not the only plants Maliseets tended on the Wəlastəkw.18 Maliseets cultivated plants that were not typically noticed by Europeans. These included the large numbers of Jerusalem artichokes they introduced and tended along the Wəlastəkw. Offspring of this small sunflower plant that had been part of Maliseet riverside gardens are still growing near former campsites and villages. Botanists such as Janet Seabrook and Leo Dionne also believe that Maliseets and Mi’kmaq introduced ground nuts along the Wəlastəkw and other travel routes. Ground nuts throughout the Maritimes are sexually sterile. Moreover, human harvesting helps them become established by loosening and aerating soil. As this strain of the plant is reliant on people and river freshets to spread its tubers and was widespread by the time Europeans arrived, it would seem that Native peoples introduced them to the watershed and throughout the region. The decision of Indigenous peoples to introduce sterile ground nuts rather than fertile ones raises the possibility that Mi’kmaq and Maliseets may have begun to alter the physiology of this plant in ways that made it dependent on humans. Gyles’s experiences in the autumn of 1689 highlight the significance of these plants to Native diets. Gyles noted that he moved upriver with his captors to the mouth of the Meduxnekeag River so that they might live “upon Fish, Wild-Grapes, Roots &c. which was hard Living to me.” Pote confirmed that Native travellers on the Wəlastəkw continued to rely on these roots in 1745. Both ground nuts and Jerusalem artichokes grow well in cool climates, and frost improves their taste.19

18 The presence of Native root and fruit gardens at former village sites further suggests that Maliseets altered the places they frequented with an array of plants. Abandoned settlement locations such as the Shiketehawk site in Bristol contain a remarkable diversity of edible and medicinal plants such as wild ginger, black raspberry, bloodroot, and ground nut. Such a rich density of edible and healing plants do not typically grow together on the river’s middle reaches outside of former Maliseet gardens. Moreover, the 5,500-year-old presence of cucurbits (squash and pumpkins) in Maine, the compatibility of beans with short growing seasons, and evidence of plum and tuber management suggest forms of agriculture were possible and probable on the Wəlastəkw without maize, European colonists, or warmer temperatures. Maliseets’ diverse and creative pre-European plant use fits patterns noted by ethnobotanists in locales such as British Columbia and Amazonia.20

19 Maliseets’ experience managing many different species of plants highlights their detailed botanical knowledge and their understanding of flooding patterns, soil conditions, and plant growth. Some scholars have claimed that Maliseets and their neighbours did not think “much about soil types, frost frequency, or the other settlement criteria required for successful cultivation” prior to the colonial era.21 The

20 diverse plant management traditions of the Indigenous peoples of the region, and the long Maliseet tenure at Meductic and other cultivation sites, suggest otherwise. Maliseet moon calendars on the middle reaches of the Wəlastəkw, for instance, named the eighth moon after winter solstice “Accihtewi-kisohs Eighth Moon, Ripening Moon,” an indication Maliseets closely observed the growth cycle of edible plants. Gyles noted they also correlated Atlantic salmon fishing with changes in seasonal flora such as the fall of autumn leaves: “When the Leaf falls they have done Spawning and return to the sea.” Maliseets accumulated ecological knowledge useful for growing maize over centuries of living along the Wəlastəkw and using other plants. William Doolittle and other scholars of Indigenous cultivation place benign plant management activities such as creating shelter habits for useful species through clearing village sites on a continuum with more labour-intensive forms of management, such as introducing edible plants to new areas and cultivating them and growing maize and other crops that require human labour to reproduce. As suggested by anthropologist Kevin Leonard, who drew upon the continuum approach to Indigenous plant use in his study of Mi’kmaw culture, Meductic’s maize fields and other cultivation sites are an extension of the knowledge base and skills required to tend Jerusalem artichokes and other plants; they were not the product of a sudden revolution in human ecology.22

21 Maliseets likely learned about maize cultivation when the plant spread into the greater Northeast through Native trade networks early in the second millennium if not sooner. Maliseets also have an oral tradition on the origin of maize. It highlights the kinship between Maliseets (especially Maliseet women) and that plant. The oral tradition explains that a dying Maliseet woman, Sakəmaskwehsis, instructed her husband to cut the second growth forest around their wigwam and

22 Like other Native peoples, Maliseets understood and related to the living entities of their homeland as kin. Similar Maliseet oral traditions speak of kinship ties with medicinal roots such as Kiwhosuwasq (Sweet Flag) and useful trees. In addition, many Maliseet individuals shared the name of local animals. Maliseets clearly had close relationships with the living beings they harvested, hunted, and, in some cases, avoided killing. Anthropologists such as Nancy Turner label the close relationships between Indigenous peoples and plants and animals “kin-centric ecology.” To the Maliseet, maize was the most recently adopted sibling of a group of three companion plants. Native peoples usually intermixed maize, beans, and squash in the same fields as these plants grew better together than apart. Some Native peoples in North America referred to these plants as the “Three Sisters.” Maliseets’ integration of maize with other plants in their kin-centric ecology differs from European ecological perceptions that classified cultivated species as “domesticated” and uncultivated plants as “wild.” As well, although not definite, it provides yet more evidence suggesting that maize entered Maliseet foodways as part of the spread of Indigenous plant management traditions.24

23 Europeans often misread the naturalness of the Acadian landscape they observed. While Maliseets considered the Wəlastəkw a familiar and managed environment, colonists perceived the woodlands and meadows outside Native village sites and maize fields as underdeveloped wilderness. For the most part, the Europeans who visited the Wəlastəkw understood cultivation in terms of deforested fields, farmed animals, and year-round-tenure on agrarian lands. People whose views were rooted in French and English ecologies and land use systems could recognize maize fields as human landscapes, but they were less able to see other environments that were also the product of Native management or to understand the practices that Maliseets used to create them. European settlers on the St. John, for instance, assumed that when Maliseets set large fires these were the result of wasteful ignorance, rather than considering them a means of creating edible landscapes of berry fields and deer fodder.25

24 The food plants that Europeans noted and documented were limited by the preconceptions of the observers, the scope of their botanical knowledge, Native secrecy, and the barriers separating male recorders from Native women’s knowledge. Moreover, as Naomi Griffiths and John Reid’s analysis of New Scotland reveals, amateur European botanists used generalized categories and focused on describing plants that were found in their homelands and known to be useful. After arriving at Port Royal in late August, Scottish colonist Richard Guthry, for instance, remarked that the nearby meadows were full of “Tuleps of diverse kinds.” While it is possible that earlier settlers had introduced tulips throughout the meadows, it is more likely that Guthry misidentified a local flower that bloomed in early fall and mistook it for the more familiar tulip that bloomed during spring in Nova Scotia.26 The limitations of historic records, in turn, have narrowed scholarly discussions of Native cultivation to maize and other crops that interested Europeans. Although a few early colonists noted ground nut and Jerusalem artichoke (and adopted the latter), these plants were exceptions amongst the many species excluded from colonial diets, commodity networks, and descriptions. While the French surgeon and botanist Dièreville praised the richness of Maliseet and Mi’kmaw plant knowledge in his 1699-1700 survey of Acadia, he only recorded small portions of it and understood even less. For instance, the botanist recounted a story of a Maliseet woman who cured a soldier of epileptic seizures with a root, but failed to identify the plant or healer. Less botanically inclined colonists faced even greater obstacles in learning about Native ecologies.27

25 Maliseets had lived at Meductic and other riverside locations for thousands of years and their deep knowledge of riverine environments informed their agriculture. They were intimately familiar with the Wəlastəkw’s flood regimes and soil conditions. The intervale land at Meductic was the product of centuries of upstream erosion and soil accumulation. Freshets spread nutrient-rich soil and plant remains across the lowland at Meductic and other intervales each spring. While maize growers in Huronia and elsewhere had to relocate and clear new fields every several years to ensure their crops had fertile soil, Maliseets saved time and labour by cultivating the same intervale for generations. Although scholars such as Elizabeth S. Chilton have applied the term “mobile farmers” to Native peoples who combined cultivation with hunting and gathering, Maliseet fields were more firmly rooted in place than the planting sites of their more sedentary counterparts. Rainfall along the Wəlastəkw was sufficient to permit maize cultivation without modifying the watershed for irrigation. Careful site selection, chosen with good knowledge of spring freshet patterns, allowed Maliseets to maintain crops, homes, and fortifications at the same site for decades with little or no manipulation of river water.28

26 Meductic was an outstanding rather than a marginal maize cultivation site. Meductic’s fields were on an elevated ridge surrounded by lower intervale land. This topography helped mitigate frost by channeling cold air downslope away from crops. The fields’ southern aspect also increased the sunshine plants received. Moreover, the slope enabled Maliseets to establish fields that periodically received fertilizing floodwaters in close proximity to a more elevated village that remained dry. As the evidence from the Wəlastəkw demonstrates, scholarly claims that poor soils, bad drainage, and a difficult climate dissuaded Maliseets from cultivating maize fail to discern the opportunities that were available to those capable of combining intimate local knowledge of soils and topography with the Wəlastəkw’s diverse microclimates.

27 The fields at Meductic were more than 150 kilometres inland from the cool foggy climate and rocky coast. Between Grand Lake and a point a few dozen kilometres above Meductic, a distance of about 100 kilometres, the Wəlastəkw itself still warms the adjacent land by functioning as a heat sink that stores solar heat during hot summer days. This locally stored heat moderates the effects of cool night time temperatures and insulates riverside crops from the onset of fall frosts for a few weeks and sometimes longer. The warm, riparian microclimate is crucial for the survival of heat-loving crops such as maize, in a context where summers are short and the risk of late spring and early autumn frosts are high. P. A Dzikowski and the Atlantic Advisory Committee on Agrometeorology’s climate mapping study indicates that Maliseets chose to raise maize along the stretch of the Wəlastəkw that has the most growing degree days in present-day New Brunswick. Indeed, it is one of the few locations in the Maritimes with a proper mix of soil and heat for maize cultivation. During the Little Ice Age when Maliseet grew maize at Meductic, the merits of the site and microclimate were of particular value.29

28 The Mi’kmaq appear to have responded to the Little Ice Age by abandoning maize cultivation. According to anthropologist Kevin Leonard, cool and variable weather conditions influenced the Mi’kmaq to stop cultivating and focus more on trade, fishing, gathering, and hunting. Leonard drew upon documentation of Mi’kmaw maize and beans cultivation to develop his theory. After living in Acadia from 1606-1607, Lescarbot noted that “in the time of Jacques Cartier” (1534-1542 CE) the Mi’kmaq had “tilled the ground” and eaten “beans, corn, squashes” as their Native neighbours to the south still did in 1607. He claimed they gave up cultivating these plants when European trade became common. Leonard noted that the onset of dense trans-Atlantic trade coincided with the Little Ice Age and suggested that cool weather helped influence the Mi’kmaq’s decision to stop growing maize. Similarly, Recollet priest Chrestien Le Clercq noted that the Mi’kmaq had once cultivated maize. Le Clercq lived with Mi’kmaq on the Gaspé Peninsula in the 1670s, and recorded an oral tradition of Mi’kmaq adopting and then abandoning maize cultivation. Mi’kmaw adaptation fits a pattern researchers have noted elsewhere in northern latitudes. Neutral Iroquois in present-day southern Ontario responded to colder growing conditions by eating less maize and beans and hunting more deer. In present-day Manitoba, Natives stopped planting but retained knowledge of cultivation and their place on the land. The Norse failure to adapt agricultural practices to a changing climate appears to have been a major factor in the demise of their Greenland settlements. Maliseet maize cultivation followed a different pattern during the Little Ice Age; Maliseets adapted maize cultivation to their niche and needs. European accounts of maize cultivation at Meductic first appeared during the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715 CE), one of the coldest periods within the Little Ice Age. Obviously, if Maliseets could raise maize successfully in this period of extreme cold, they could have done so, and more easily, in earlier (warmer) periods.30

29 Meductic residents understood the labour suited to each stage of maize’s growth cycle. Gyles recalled helping the Maliseet with planting, weeding, and “hilling” throughout the summer. These activities amplified growth and yield by giving plants more light and stronger root systems. Mounding also created a warmer microclimate by elevating plants above frost hollows and increasing the surface area of soil reached by sunlight. On chilly spring nights, this provided a degree of protection from frost, while during the summer it amplified the heat roots received and enhanced plant growth. The fact that at Meductic the Maliseet kept planting maize in the 1690s and into the early 18th century without experiencing crop losses suggests killing frosts were uncommon. Maliseet cultivation and harvesting tactics were important factors in the success of their maize agriculture in the midst of the Little Ice Age.31

30 One of the keys to Maliseet success in maize cultivation was their use of types of maize that they could harvest before the crop ripened. Maize does not need to come to maturity to be nutritious or delicious. In northern North America, Indigenous peoples developed maize with features adapted to thrive in cool weather and short growing seasons. These included maize with small stalks and cobs that ripened early. Maliseets and other northern Indigenous peoples cultivated strains such as those now known as Canadian White Flint Corn, Tuscarora Corn, White Flint Corn, and Early Sweet Corn – all of which could be used before they ripened. Settlers’ failure to adopt many of these varieties until the late 18th century may account for Gyles’s differentiation of Meductic’s “Indian corn” from his father’s “English Corn.” Authors of recent studies of Meductic cultivation have assumed that Maliseets needed maize to mature in order for it to be useful, and in so doing have missed a critical component of Native harvesting practices and climatic adaption on the Wəlastəkw.32

31 When Maliseets harvested some of the maize early as “Green Corn” or “Milk Corn,” they feasted immediately on part of this early harvest and stored the rest after stripping it from cobs with clamshells. Meductic residents harvested their remaining maize as it matured. Gyles kept a rough count of the days between his capture and arrival at Meductic. He noted that Maliseets “champ’d [chewed] corn stalks” when he arrived on 22 August 1689. Moreover, he recorded that his master’s family “laid down a Bag of Corn” when he was presented to the village to ensure his protection from abuse. These observations suggest Maliseets had gathered at least a portion of their maize by then. In addition, they reveal that the Maliseet obtained nutrition from maize stalks as well as seeds. Gyles worked in Maliseet fields in later years, observing that harvesting began when “Corn was fill’d with the Milk: Some of which we dried then, and other as it ripened. And when we had gathered our Corn and dried it, we put some into Indian Barns, i.e. in Holes in the Ground lip’d & cover’d with Bark, and then with Dirt.” The multiple harvests Gyles described diffused labour demands, maximized the time maize was useful, increased its nutritional value, and reduced crop losses to early frosts.33

32 Maliseets’ careful selection of short-season maize strains, excellent planting sites, and staggered harvesting at Meductic fit with broader patterns of maize use in the Americas and elsewhere. Maliseet choices reflect the creativity and adaptation that characterized Indigenous peoples’ role in adapting maize to diverse climates. In 1591 a Spanish doctor, Juan de Cárdenas, observed early green corn harvesting in Mexico and claimed that it gave maize an advantage over other cultivated grains. In Huronia the Recollet lay brother Gabriel Sagard wrote in 1632 that Hurons consumed maize at several points in its lifecycle, including while it was green. English naturalist John Josselyn observed that in New England during the mid-17th century Natives ate parched immature maize and made a beverage from its green corn stalks as other peoples did with sugar cane. Joseph Lafitau commented in 1724 that immature milk corn, mature corn, and rotten “stinking corn” were distinct Native dishes in Canada. He found milk corn “agreeable to the taste.” Moreover, people adopted early maize harvesting and processing in parts of the world such as Thailand, Indonesia, and Africa to embed a new food into local climates and cultures. Maliseet early harvesting is a local example of the wide range of adaptations that characterized the global diffusion of maize and Native peoples’ resilience in the face of climate change.34

33 Maliseet maize harvesting and storage practices reflected Indigenous traditions. Meductic maize growers used clamshells rather than iron knives to cut the maize from cobs, and “Indian barns” insulated with birch bark to store it. As Kevin Leonard notes, these practices closely resembled Native agriculture further south but bore little similarity to the clergy-controlled maize storage and distribution model Louis-Pierre Thury instituted on the Miramichi during the 1680s. Thury had Mi’kmaw villagers keep their maize in a community storehouse from which he doled out rations at intervals. Saint-Vallier noted:

34 These maize consumption practices represented a departure from traditional Mi’kmaw use of tree caches to store surplus food for use in times of dire need. Like many Europeans, Thury thought that Native peoples’ seasonal rounds, involving what William Cronon labeled “Seasons of Want and Plenty,” were unhealthy and were an unproductive use of land and labour. Thury used the stored maize to encourage Miramichi Mi’kmaq to stay in their village during winter and supplement it with what fish and game they could find close by.36

35 The food distribution system Thury developed stands in stark contrast to the Maliseet system of maize storage and consumption. At Meductic, Maliseet controlled the storage, distribution, and consumption of maize. No record links Maliseet cultivation to Meductic’s missionary, Father Simon-Gérard de la Place, although some Maliseet did visit missions where priests encouraged farming. Gyles commented that maize harvests were a time of frequent feasting, where youths served men a maize, bean, and fish soup, or “hasty-pudden made of pounded Corn.” The village gave each male head of a family a serving proportionate to the size of his family. However, unlike in Thury’s system, Maliseet women and children did not eat until the men had finished eating as much of that portion as they chose. Maliseets used dried maize as a transportable food source to supplement winter hunting rather than year-round residency at Meductic. They continued their traditional pattern of feasting and fasting. A male member of the feast always sang a Maliseet “feast- song,” not Christian prayers, after the men had finished their soup.37

36 Europeans sometimes obscured or overlooked the Maliseet role in reshaping the land when they began keeping census records of agricultural improvements along the interior river. The census taken by the clerk Gargas in 1688 was the most detailed description of the Wəlastəkw in that decade. While it located five arpents of cleared upland between Jemseg and Meductic, it did not specify if this included Maliseet fields. A 1695 census tallied fifteen arpents of cultivated land at “Medoctec, the seigneury of René D’Amours.” It did not mention Maliseet fields, dwellings, or individuals, although they were the only people who grew crops at Meductic. The census credited Maliseet cultivation work to the local seigneur, whom French officials most often criticised for not developing agriculture. In a tragic twist of fate, d’Amours, whose liquor trading may have introduced a disease that caused Maliseets to flee Meductic earlier that year, benefited from their cultivation work and abandonment of the village. Not only did recorders classify Maliseet agricultural improvements on similar terms as settlers’ fields, but they credited a colonist with the cultivation labour of Natives.38

37 Meductic was not the only location where colonists overlooked Native contributions to Acadian agriculture. In 1610-1611, starving Port Royal settlers survived by gathering ground nuts from a field Mi’kmaq had already harvested. Mi’kmaq had established and tended this field before colonists founded Port Royal. Colonists, thinking the rich broken soil left after their harvest was an ideal place to plant, sowed the ground nut field with Eurasian grains in the spring. The initial success of the Acadian grain cultivation that followed came at the expense of both the ground nuts and the Mi’kmaq, who lost an important food supply after sharing it with desperate colonists. Settlers, however, praised God for their salvation rather than Mi’kmaw plant management and generosity. Moreover, as William Wicken observed, Acadian surveyors such as Monsieur de Bonaventure continued to note that Mi’kmaw ground nut fields were “tres bien marque de bonne terre dans cetter provinces” in the early 18th century. Thus, the Maliseet and Mi’kmaq helped create some of the first fields credited to pioneering colonists on both the Annapolis River and the Wəlastəkw. Prospective colonists used the presence of Native-cultivated plants to locate good farmland. This suggests that Native plant sites may have provided a foundation for settler agriculture throughout Acadia.39

38 Maps and surveys of the St. John River in the mid-18th century reveal that Acadians and Maliseet cultivated the same stretches of intervale land. The first detailed British map of the watershed, which was drawn by Joseph Peach in 1762, depicted several miles of cultivated fields, gardens, and houses on the south shore of the river above St. Anne’s Point (present-day Fredericton) (see Figure 1). The fields extended upstream to within a half-mile of Aukapaque, a large Maliseet village where maize was grown. The French fields were a patchwork of irregular trapezoids extending back from the river two and three fields deep, and many, quite unlike the long narrow fields along the St. Lawrence, were without river frontage. In contrast, the Maliseet fields adjacent to Aukapaque directly bordered the river, and had more rounded edges that followed the contours of the intervales. The presence of small stream valleys between the Maliseet fields suggests that they continued to favour cultivating raised intervales that channelled frost into surrounding hollows. Unlike at Meductic in the 1690s, Maliseets and their French neighbours cultivated the same stretch of land here in the mid-18th century and perhaps even worked some fields together, or at least were on hand to share their cultivation knowledge. Major Gilfred Studholme’s 1783 survey of settlements on the St. John River revealed that in Burton Township Israel Kinney’s “15 acres of cleared land . . . was chiefly done by the French and Indians.” When Scottish traveller Patrick Campbell visited Fredericton in 1791, he noted that Lt. Governor Thomas Carleton’s potato fields and the rest of the infrequently flooded soil of the town was poor and had “been long cultivated by French and Indians.” Raymond claimed Maliseets had traditionally camped at the site that became Fredericton, which they “tilled in very early times,” but he did not substantiate his claim.40

39 Not all British colonists and travellers acknowledged that Maliseets played an important role clearing some of the land that British settlers first farmed along the river. Hannah Ingraham, who narrated one of the most widely read accounts of early Loyalist Fredericton, based in part on her childhood memories, recalled that Scottish settlers had cleared the original town site “but the Indians had killed them all and burned up their houses.” While Jerusalem artichokes still grow in abundance on the islands and riverbanks near Fredericton, the city is usually not considered a former Maliseet cultivation site. Moreover, while Campbell noted that Fredericton Loyalists layered their fields on top of earlier Maliseet cultivation sites, he overlooked changes Maliseet had made to the landscape further upstream. When he visited Captain Atwood’s farm at Meductic, where Maliseets had temporarily abandoned their village and fields, Campbell thought that the ruined fort there, and the clearing that Atwood farmed, were made by earlier French colonists and soldiers. He seems not to have realized that they were the product of Maliseet labour. Not surprisingly, agricultural historian Karl Rasmussen subsequently overlooked Maliseet cultivation when he sought to understand the origins of provincial agriculture.41

40 The broad range of Native cultivation in Acadia suggests that the land use patterns of Natives and settlers were not always as separate as scholars have previously argued. Settlers and Natives sometimes used the same microenvironments for cultivation on the Wəlastəkw and elsewhere in Acadia. French and British colonists gravitated to the rich soils and clearings that characterized Mi’kmaw and Maliseet cultivation sites; thus, pioneering settlers sometimes displaced Natives from important food production niches. In other cases, colonists peacefully shared the same fertile microenvironments as Indigenous peoples.42

41 The starting point for understanding the fit between Native land use and settler land use on the Wəlastəkw lies with a better understanding of Native plant cultivation. Maliseets managed to grow maize successfully during the height of the Little Ice Age by combining intimate understanding of local environments with plant management knowledge that they had gleaned from centuries of experience tending edible and medicinal plants, such as Jerusalem artichoke and ground nut. This knowledge made it possible for the Maliseet to add maize to the array of flora that they tended and cultivated and, in doing so, to extend Indigenous maize traditions northeastward to the Wəlastəkw, despite the challenges posed by cool weather and a short growing season. Maliseet success was grounded in part in their use of the warmest microclimates of the Wəlastəkw to cultivate maize, but as well in their selection of good soils, their use of cold hardy maize varieties, and their strategies for harvesting maize before it reached maturity. Although climatic change may have tipped the scales against maize cultivation in the Maritimes during the Little Ice Age, Maliseets’ extensive cultivation skills and nuanced local environmental knowledge tipped them back. Their achievements with maize, and with other crops, set the stage – and prepared the fields – for the European agriculture that followed.