The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

You Are What You Eat:
The Relationship between Cherokee Foodways
and “Civilization” at Brainerd Mission

Izumi ISHII*The Cherokees are frequently referred to as the most “civilized” Indian
tribe in the United States. Words of praise for the Cherokees ﬁrst
appeared in print when the United States government launched its Indian“civilization” policy soon after the nation’s establishment. Correspondence between the Cherokee agency and Washington, reports to Congressby Indian agents and superintendents, missionary journals and records,
and newspaper articles aired the Cherokees’ progress in “civilization”:“They are improving in the arts of civilized life,” “their improvement isastonishing,” and “the Cherokees . . . are in advance of all other tribes”
and “to be greatly instrumental in civilizing the other tribes.”1 To mostAmericans, “civilization” had a deﬁnite meaning. To be “civilized”
meant that one could think, act, dress, speak, work, and worship just as
American citizens did, and advocates of the “civilization” program
believed that the introduction of commercial farming would greatly
enhance the Indians’ acculturation process.2 In this essay I focus on the
Cherokee Indians, who, under the guidance of United States agents andmissionaries, adopted various aspects of the Anglo-American lifestyle
and Christianity in the early nineteenth-century Southeast and examine
the ways in which the federal government and missionaries introduced
European-style agriculture into Indian societies.
Copyright © 2010 Izumi Ishii. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Doshisha University

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IZUMI ISHIII.
Cherokees had been farming for centuries before Europeans arrived.
The primary responsibility for farming in Cherokee society rested withwomen, and they worked the soil together. Women began cultivating the
ground in early May when “the wild fruit is so ripe, as to draw off thebirds from picking up the grain,” and men assisted them in clearing ﬁelds
and planting crops with hoes and hatchets. The women hilled corn andbeans rather than plowing rows, and they planted squash and othervegetables around these crops and let the weeds “out-grow the corn.”3
The Cherokees, therefore, depended for subsistence on vegetables thatwomen cultivated in summer and on wild game that men hunted in winter.
The staple in the Cherokee diet was corn, and when it ﬁrst ripened, theCherokees held the Green Corn Ceremony, the most important religious
ritual of the year. They fasted, prayed, and puriﬁed themselves for the
ceremony, which made them ready to taste the new corn. The Cherokees
destroyed the previous year’s crop except seven ears of corn “in order
to attract the corn until the new crop was ripened.”4 Meanwhile, sins of
the previous year except murder were forgiven, and disputes were all settled. The Green Corn Ceremony marked the dawn of a new year sociallyas well as religiously. It was the time for forgiveness, harmony, and reconciliation.5
From the colonial period onward, travelers and observers depicted
Indian “savagery” in their writings, in part by ignoring or demeaning the
agricultural base of the Indian societies. The Cherokees were no exception. Visiting the Cherokee country in the 1760s, Lt. Henry Timberlake
noted that “the sole occupations of an Indian life, are hunting, and warring abroad, and lazying at home.” Deploring the fact that “the womenalone do all the laborious tasks of agriculture,” Lieutenant Timberlake
criticized the Cherokees by saying, “who would seek to live by labour,
who can live by amusement.”6 Most Americans considered idleness asin, Indian warfare savage, and hunting a mere pastime.7 Although men
as hunters and women as farmers had long provided food for the Indian
tribes east of the Mississippi, President George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox ignored this Native subsistence system andproposed the “civilization” program. Its ultimate goal was to transform
Native hunters into yeoman farmers and to peacefully obtain the cessionof their “surplus” hunting grounds. Once they became sedentary farm-

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ers, federal policymakers reasoned, Indian “hunter-warriors” would
willingly part with their lands. The mechanism of this federal policy waswell illustrated in an address by President Thomas Jefferson, an ardentadvocate of the “civilization” program, to Congress in January 1803:
To encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture, and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that lessland and labor will maintain them in this better than in their former mode ofliving. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become
useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means ofimproving their farms and of increasing their domestic comforts.8

Just as Jefferson hastily added that “I trust and believe we are acting
for their greatest good,” federal policymakers assured Native people thatthey would beneﬁt enormously from tilling the soil.9 The cultivation of
the land would not only provide Indians with a dependable means of subsistence, but it also would instruct them in the Christian ethic of hard
work, the idea of patriarchy, and the value of private property, all ofwhich were essential for them to become responsible citizens of theUnited States. Agriculture was the focal point of the “civilization” program, and who was to cultivate the land with what implements and whatcrops became an important part of this policy.10
II.
The federal government’s attempt to “civilize” the Cherokees beganwith the conclusion of the Treaty of Holston in July 1791. It stipulated
that “the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization,and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a stateof hunters, the United States will from time to time furnish gratuitously
the said nation with useful implements of husbandry.”11 Two years later,
the Trade and Intercourse Act called for providing Indian tribes with
agricultural implements, domestic animals, and other useful goods andfor appointing agents to promote “civilization.”12
In the winter of 1796–97, Benjamin Hawkins, an appointed agent of
the United States among the Creeks and general superintendent of thetribes south of the Ohio River, stayed in Cherokee villages on his way
to the Creek country. Hawkins read signs of both “civilization” and“backwardness” among the Cherokees. He found “the ﬁeld of 4 acres for174

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corn fenced” and “a number of fowls, hogs and some cattle” to be encouraging, but in every town he visited, it was Cherokee women who received
him because “the men were all in the woods hunting.”13 In their husbands’ absence, Cherokee women hosted Hawkins. They explained how
the division of labor functioned among the Cherokees: men “hunted in
the proper season,” and women, in charge of farmland, “performed almost all the labour, the men assisted but little and that in the corn.”14
Unlike Anglo-Americans who assigned solely to men the role of headof household, both men and women were responsible for providing foodamong the Cherokees. The Cherokees’ spiritual beliefs reinforced thisgendered system of food production: the ﬁrst man, Kana’ti, provided
game, and the ﬁrst woman, Selu, rubbing her stomach and armpits, provided corn and beans. Cherokee men identiﬁed themselves as hunters,
and women considered themselves to be cultivators of the land.15 Menhunted in winter while women began to farm in spring, and they balanced and complemented each other.16 During his stay, the Cherokee
women pleased Hawkins by expressing their willingness to “follow theadvise [sic] of their great father General Washington” and, in addition
to their daily routine of tending corn and beans, to “plant cotton and be
prepared for spin[n]ing as soon as they could make it.” They also wished
to “get some wheels and cards as soon as they should be ready for them”
and “promised . . . to take care of their pigs and cattle.”17 Hawkins had
no chance to discuss the matter with Cherokee men, the foremost targetsof federal Indian policy.
In the late 1790s, Silas Dinsmoor, the United States agent to theCherokees, took charge of converting Cherokee hunters into sedentary
farmers, who he hoped would soon agree to perform their duties ashousehold heads. Agent Dinsmoor did not fail to escape the Cherokees’
ridicule from the start, and “he was unanimously laughed at by theCouncil for attempting [to] introduce white peoples’ habits among theIndians, who were created to pursue the chase.” A Cherokee chief
warned agent Dinsmoor: “I don’t want you to recommend these things
to my people. They may suit white people, but will do [nothing] for the
Indians. I am now going to hunt & shall be gone six moons & when I
return, I shall expect to hear nothing of your talks made in [my] absence
to induce my people to take hold of your plan.” Still, during his absence,Dinsmoor persuaded the wife and daughters of the chief to try spinningand weaving and to make cloth. When he returned home after six months,

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the chief was astounded, and he told the agent “with a smile” that he had
made “his wife & daughters better hunters than he & requested to be furnished a plough & went to work on his farm.”18
Agent Dinsmoor might have succeeded in transforming one of theinﬂuential members of the tribe into a cultivator of the land, but Cherokee
men were slow in accepting the roles traditionally assigned to women.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the men continued to hunt andstayed away from home even longer than before because, due to a severe
scarcity of game, it was increasingly difﬁcult for them to fulﬁll theirduties as providers of meat.19 Federal policymakers were aware of thiscircumstance, and they recognized that it would furnish an excellent
opportunity for them to promote “civilization” among the Indians. In his“farewell” letter of 1796 to the Cherokees, President Washington statedthat “the game with which your woods once abounded, are growing
scarce; and you know when you cannot meet a deer or other game tokill . . . you must remain hungry.” The president urged Cherokee men to
replace women as farmers and Cherokee women to spin and weave as
wives of yeoman farmers so that the men, as the sole breadwinners intheir households, could protect their families from suffering starvation.
Washington sought to instill in the Cherokees what Anglo-Americans
thought proper for men and women to do. Promising that he would do
the same when “I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm,” Mount
Vernon in Virginia, Washington encouraged Cherokee men to raise morecattle, hogs, and sheep instead of hunting wild game and to cultivate“wheat, (which makes the best of bread),” cotton, and ﬂax as well as
Native corn for their families. He suggested the use of plows, which “canvastly increase your crops,” and not hoes, a farm tool the Cherokees traditionally used that yielded “only scanty crops of corn.” The president
recommended that women adopt spinning and weaving to make clothand reminded the Cherokees that the outcome of their efforts “may determine the lot of many nations”: “If it succeeds, the beloved men of theUnited States will be encouraged to give the same assistance to all the
Indian tribes within their boundaries. But if it should fail they may thinkit vain to make any further attempts to better the condition of any Indian
tribe.” Although it was still an “experiment,” the “civilization” program,by challenging the subsistence system of Indian people, threatened toundermine the traditional roles of men and women in Native societies.20

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III.
Under the “civilization” program, the federal government sent agentsto assist Indian tribes in the process of acculturation, but it was missionaries who became the most inﬂuential in “civilizing” the Indians. The
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, an interdenominational organization in Boston, was particularly eager to “civilize” the Cherokees. The missionaries, with great zeal, intended toeducate Cherokee children “before their habits are formed.”21 Establishing its ﬁrst station named Brainerd in Chickamauga in present-day
Tennessee in 1817 “by consent of the Cherokees,” the American Board
set the stage for Indian “civilization.”22
The chief objective of the American Board was, of course, to preachthe gospel among the Cherokees, but missionaries devoted a great portion of their time and energy to teaching Cherokee children reading, writing, arithmetic, and the manners and customs, including farming, of
Anglo-American society. They contended that adoption of these practices would eventually lead the Cherokees to embrace Christianity. The
missionaries maintained that “the religious instruction of the Indians”
should “be preceded or accompanied by . . . civilization” and that agriculture had inseparable links with the Christian doctrine.23 The corresponding secretary of the American Board Samuel Worcester articulated
this point in 1821:
Husbandry is a secular business in common life. But here husbandry is to beconsidered in a different light. The missionary farm should be regarded as
the farm of the Lord; and those, who labor here, are to labor as for him, every
day, and every hour. All, who are thus employed, are as really his servants,
as the missionary. And they should shew cheerfulness in this labor; as forhim, every day, and every hour.24

Immediately after he arrived in Chickamauga in January 1817, theReverend Cyrus Kingsbury “commenced making preparation to cultivate the land” and planned successively to build a mill. A work farmwould provide an arena for male students to learn the habit of industry
and a means for missionaries to sustain themselves. Kingsbury triumphantly stated that the mission’s “great resources will be from the cultivation of the land, and by raising stock.”25 Missionaries Moody Hall,
Loring S. Williams, and their wives soon joined the station, and theBrainerd School started with twenty-six students in the ﬁrst year.26

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In May 1817, well before they celebrated a harvest of their ﬁrst year’s
crops at Brainerd, thirty-four Cherokee families visited the station at one
time, imploring the missionaries for aid. Because of a poor yield in theprevious year, they ran short of corn. The missionaries found it “painful
to see this people thus distressed for bread in this fertile land,” but they
contended that it was because the Cherokees were not yet well versed infarming and criticized them:
If they knew how, they might raise an abundance with half the labor they
now take to get this scanty pittance from us, it was highly pleasing to haveit in our power to deal out to their present supplies, & at the same time tohope that we may be instrumental of putting them in a way to obtain an abundance of bread, & all other necessaries of life, by teaching them & their children to cultivate the earth.27

The missionaries never doubted that their agricultural techniques were
decidedly superior to those of the Cherokees, but they soon realized thatattaining food self-sufﬁciency was far more difﬁcult than they thought.
At the end of the ﬁrst year, Kingsbury had to report to Boston that “theadvantage to be derived from these [agricultural] sources for one or two
years must be small.”28 A harvest for 1818 looked promising; as one missionary noted, “Crops every where look ﬁnely. We have about 7 acresof rye & oats (which we are now gathering) something more than 30
acres of corn, about 3 acres of Irish & 2 of sweet potatoes, and a small
patch of cotton. All these promise well, except the cotton.” But the missionaries, having decided to accept as many as sixty students, continued
to struggle to procure an orderly supply of food at Brainerd.29 The missionaries purchased corn and pork from the Cherokees, some of whom
willingly donated what they could spare.30 They also made contracts with
farmers in neighboring towns. Yet the Tennessee River was frequently
too high or too low for a boat to deliver corn to the station, which
aggravated a chronic shortage of food. The ﬁrst three months of 1819
were extremely severe. Corn did not arrive as the missionaries expected.
By the time they heard that corn boats were coming down on the
Tennessee, “the boats had all passed without calling.”31 The corn they
managed to obtain turned out to be wet and damaged.32 The missionaries reported to the board’s Prudential Committee: “A single disappointment the last winter, in the failure of a contract for corn, occasioned partly
by the state of the river, was a detriment to the mission of several hundred dollars.”33

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IZUMI ISHIIAs the missionaries admitted, “the cultivation of land” turned out tobe “of more use by affording the means of training the boys to habits ofindustry, than by yielding any considerable proﬁt to the mission.”34 If
they often faced the exhaustion of their food supplies and could notentirely sustain the school and mission station by themselves, theAmerican Board missionaries remained ﬁrm in their belief that “thecultivation of the farm” was “an object of high importance.”35 The day
at Brainerd opened with the horn blown half an hour before sunrise.
Students as well as missionaries and their families gathered together inthe hall and raised prayers. “The boys,” then, “ﬁle off to the right . . . thegirls to the left” and engaged themselves in “their morning labor.” Thefemale students began spinning and carding, sewing and knitting, andmending their clothes as well as those of the boys, and their male counterparts hoed in the garden, pounded corn, milked the cows, and dressed
the ﬁsh. The male supervisor took “about ten active lads” to the ﬁeld,and “they planted an acre of corn” on one morning before breakfast and“on another . . . planted six or seven bushels of potatoes.” When the horn
blew to announce time for breakfast, the Cherokee students reassembled
in the hall and, along with the missionaries and their families, sat at twolong tables. The Cherokee students no longer “ate whenever they were
hungry,” and “till the blessing is concluded, not one touches his knife
and fork, or plate; nor is the slightest impatience discovered, as is common among children in civilized society.”36 After breakfast, they
resumed their morning labor which “amounts to two hours and a half,”
and at nine o’clock, the school began with a prayer and hymns. The students learned reading, writing, English grammar, and arithmetic, andafter school before dinner, they again were assigned to “an hour’s labor”
to master the arts of “civilized” life and to help run the mission station.37
From dawn to dusk, Cherokee children were coached on what AngloAmerican society considered appropriate roles for “civilized” men andwomen. Male students cultivated the land, and female students learned
to keep house. In traditional Cherokee society, however, women cultivated the communal land as well as their kitchen gardens, and with thehelp of men to clear the ﬁelds, they planted corn, beans, squash, andmany other vegetables. Farmland was where women were trained to be
women, whereas the forest was where men learned to be men. Many
male students at Brainerd, therefore, “evinced, at ﬁrst, an indisposition
to labor in the ﬁeld.” Deeply offended at what the missionaries required
young men to do, a Cherokee chief “offered to ﬁnd a slave who should

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work all day, if the missionaries would excuse his son from agriculturallabor between school hours.”38 The missionaries gently corrected him.
Although they “entirely exempted” female students “from the task” ofworking the ﬁelds, the missionaries continued to instruct Cherokee boysin the importance of “labor[ing] with their hands”: “Indian young men
should be accustomed to some kind of agricultural or mechanical labor,
in order to prepare them for a course of hardy industry, when their education shall have been completed.”39
The progress of Cherokee students did not fail to capture the attentionof Americans who visited Brainerd. A “gentleman of great respectability” from North Carolina who traveled in the Cherokee and Chickasaw
nations in 1818 commented on Brainerd that “I never saw a better regulated school, or scholars of more promising dispositions and talents.—
They were quick of apprehension, retentive in memory, docile andaffectionate.” He did not miss an opportunity to mention that “they aretaught practical farming, and are initiated into habits of industry—an art
and virtue unknown among savages,” and he looked forward to the time
when “they are made practical farmers under the direction of an excellent manager, by which means they give direct support to the institution,and procure important advantages to themselves.”40
The reports the missionaries sent to Boston and Washington also
depicted the Cherokee students’ advancement. Corresponding secretary
Jeremiah Evarts had been visiting Brainerd periodically since its opening. Evarts noted in 1822: “It is very evident, that the Cherokees are
improving more rapidly at present, than at any previous time. There are
more instances of laborious industry among them every returning year.”
For more than half a month staying among the Cherokee students, Evarts
refuted an idea prevalent in the United States that “Indians can neveracquire the habit of labor” and argued: “Facts abundantly disprove thisopinion. There are numerous instances, among the Cherokees, of very
laborious and long continued industry.” Evarts, moreover, pointed outthat Cherokee people outside of Brainerd procured “an abundant supplyof food for their families, by the labor of their own hands, but have a surplus of several hundred bushels of corn, with which they procure clothing, furniture, and foreign articles of luxury, particularly sugar andcoffee, of which they are immoderately fond.” Thus Evarts concluded:“The current is now setting very strongly in favor of agriculture, andother laborious pursuits.”41 The missionaries at Brainerd agreed with
Evarts that their inﬂuence over the Cherokees went well beyond the180

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mission station. In their 1824 report to the Committee of Congress on
Indian Affairs, the missionaries contended that the students “have already had no small inﬂuence in inducing their parents to become lessfond of an erratic life, and more inclined to have ﬁxed residence, andrely for their support on the cultivation of the ground.”42
IV.
Although they experienced many different types of difﬁculty inpromoting “civilization” among the Cherokees, what challenged theAmerican Board missionaries most, particularly in early years among
the tribe, was a shortage of hands. Journal entries were peppered withthe missionaries’ desperate requests for “at least two or three who would
gladly come out to assist in this business.” As one missionary wrote, it
was “quite too much for any one man to teach the school, and labor with,and instruct, such a number of boys out of school” in Anglo-American
farming practices.43
The missionaries at Brainerd thought that obtaining a couple of assistant missionaries would help solve the problems they faced, the mostserious of which was a food deﬁciency. Feeling frustrated at a continuous shortage of supplies, one missionary wrote in 1819: “There is plentyof good land around us, & we have full liberty to improve as much as
may be necessary for the support of the school. Every thing we get from
Tennessee might be raised here as little labor as there if the land wasonce cleared & fenced. The expense of get[t]ing on our supplies this year
would have opened & fenced a very large ﬁeld, if it had been applied forthat purpose.” He continued his ardent appeal: “If we had a small company of our brethren from the north to assist in clearing a farm here, wemight hope soon to be able to live without this great expense and trouble of get[t]ing our bread & meat from abroad.”44
The American Board headquarters in Boston, however, remained
unable to render assistance to the Brainerd Mission. In the summer of1821, the missionaries were very disappointed “to hear from the Treasurer that the funds of the society are too low to admit of sending more
help at present.” The missionaries contended that inadequate assistancefrom Boston caused much trouble and prevented them from giving
Cherokee students proper instruction “out of school”: “Unless we canhave more help as assistant missionaries we despair of ever extending
the agricultural business to much proﬁt, any farther than labor can be

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performed by the children of the school. These do exceedingly well forboys of their age and opportunities, but we greatly need one or two pious
men to labor with them and direct this important branch of their education.” The missionaries expressed much concern over their plight particularly because “we are often obliged to send this large company ofboys out with their hoes or their axes, without any one to teach or direct
them.”45 By early 1822, their request was ﬁnally granted, and two assistant missionaries, one from Vermont and the other from Ohio, arrived atBrainerd.46
The struggle to obtain assistance made the missionaries consider theirreasons for continuing the agricultural program. It was because agriculture “render[s] a most essential service in training these children to habitsof industry and good management” and “because we think it would tend
to the more rapid improvement of the children and ultimately, with thedivine blessing.”47 Soon after the two assistants joined them, however,a crisis erupted at Brainerd. The missionaries were divided among themselves over the issue of what to do with the work farm in a weekly business meeting in May 1822. A majority thought that the work at Brainerd
was still burdensome, and they concluded that “they had nobody toattend to” the ﬁeld. Though he was well aware that “the season of planting to the best advantage was past,” one missionary reminded the rest
that “as [a] means to promote the improvement of these people, theschool stood the ﬁrst & agriculture the second.” In observing the ground,however, they found a part of it to be totally worn out and “baked sohard, that it could not be ploughed without difﬁculty.” Wheat might growon the ground, but corn would not. After much debate, the missionaries
decided that “it would be best to plough only as part of the ﬁeld, say 10
acres, & leave the poorest part, say 15 acres, for wheat or rye” and thateach one of them “should plough a part of each day.”48
The missionaries would have been able to handle the situation if they
had tried the traditional style of farming that the Cherokees practiced.
An American Board missionary once commented: “When they haveexhausted a ﬁeld by planting it with corn, they know nothing of recruiting it, by sowing other grains & laying it down to grass, & for lack ofthis knowledge, they are either working their old ﬁelds to very little
proﬁt, or forsaking them to open new ones.”49 The missionaries weretotally perplexed at such sights, but Cherokee farming would not haveexhausted the soil as much as the missionaries had experienced in 1822.
Cherokee women knew exactly how they could maintain soil fertility

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without applying fertilizer. They intercropped corn and beans. The beanvines twined around the corn stalks as they grew up, and with beans
replacing nitrogen that corn removed from the soil, they complemented
each other and helped prevent the soil from becoming exhausted.50 The
fertility of the soil in the Cherokee country was indeed remarkable, andHenry Timberlake noted that the soil “requir[ed] only a little stirring witha hoe, to produce whatever is required of it.”51 Missionaries and federal
agents attempted to introduce plows and horses into Cherokee society,but traditional farm tools such as hoes and digging sticks might havebeen sufﬁcient for many Cherokee women.52
Other farm tools that the missionaries considered outdated were themortars and pestles that Cherokee women used to process corn. The missionaries anticipated that “whenever . . . a Cherokee begins to enjoy theadvantage of a grist mill, he abandons the practice of pounding his corn”
with a mortar and a pestle. The missionaries thought that the introduction of agriculture and the erection of mills would function in similarmanners among the Cherokees because they both “save much expense,
and tend much to introduce civilization.”53 Cyrus Kingsbury, therefore,
expected to have a mill constructed soon after he arrived at Brainerd inJanuary 1817, but it took a full ﬁve months to furnish it to the station:“The mill which has been erected with much trouble & frequent disappointments in consequence of the inexperience and unfaithfulness of theworkmen, was this day [June 11, 1818] put in operation.” A life withouta mill seemed to have been quite troublesome to the missionaries because“we had been obliged to pound corn for our bread.”54 The missionaries
hoped that “its advantage to the institution & the neighborhood, will soon
repay the great trouble & expense of building,” but just a week after its
operation, the mill collapsed, and they had to repair it by reinforcing itwith planking.55
Just as the missionaries hoped, a gristmill helped reinforce “civilized”
ways of living among the Cherokees. On a Sabbath day of 1818,
American Board missionaries witnessed three Cherokees attempting to
go to the mill after public worship. They stopped the Cherokees andexplained that it was not an appropriate way to observe the Sabbath. The
Cherokees apologized instantly, and they “very cheerfully turned out
their horses, & did not go after their meal untill monday.” The missionaries later discussed the issue with a miller. He agreed not to grind grainson the Sabbath nor to receive grains or deliver meal on that day, thereby
relieving the missionaries. The mill, therefore, would “assist in establishing a sabbath in this place.”56

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Still, the missionaries could not easily ﬁnd a miller reliable enough tokeep a mill in good order. In September 1819, the missionaries found amiller who had been working for them for a short time to be rather“unfaithful if out of our sight,” and they resolved to ﬁre him in a business meeting.57 Three months later, they sold the mill for three hundred
dollars to a “responsible neighbor” who “was willing to buy the mill, &engage to keep it in repair & grind for the mission family as long as we
chose to have our grinding done there.”58 The missionaries soon began
looking into the possibility of having a mill of their own once again, andthey built a sawmill as well as a gristmill by early 1821. Both mills, however, were often out of repair. The difﬁculties in spreading AngloAmerican agricultural practices among the Cherokees, along with achronic shortage of hands at Brainerd, remained an annoyance to theAmerican Board missionaries.59
V.
As the missionaries at Brainerd continued their efforts to “civilize”
Cherokee youth, the American Board opened seven other schools among
the tribe in the 1820s. In 1828 an American Board agent who toured theCherokee mission stations requested that the missionaries write on
accomplishments at their stations and “the progress which the Indians in
the vicinity had made in the arts of civilized life.”60 It is notable that intheir responses, the missionaries all focused on farming—who cultivatedthe land, what they grew, and what implements they used. The American
Board missionaries wanted Cherokees to grow wheat, which they considered to be a “civilized” crop, rather than Native corn, but their presence of over ten years in the Cherokee Nation had not necessarily
accelerated the shift in food for subsistence.61 The farm at Brainerd continued to produce more corn than wheat. In the neighborhood, “somehave been successful in raising tolerable crops of wheat,” and a majorityof the Cherokees were “beginning to feel” that “the raising of corn . . .
belongs to” men and not women as they had traditionally thought.62
Evidence elsewhere suggested that the change was not quite so dramatic.
The missionary stationed at Willstown announced that “every family inthis settlement has a cornﬁeld, plough, and horse or horses to till it,” buthe pointed out that the way the Cherokees farmed had not changed: “Theseason of raising corn is a time of general industry with both men andwomen; and perhaps we may say that most of the women are industrious
the year round.” He continued: “The men have not a sufﬁcient stimulus

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to keep up their exertions after the season for laboring in the cornﬁelds
has passed.” He observed that “a very few lately raise[d] a little wheat,”but basically agriculture was still “extended only to raising of corn, potatoes, and cotton.”63 The missionary at Candy’s Creek concurred: “A greatpart of the people make it a duty to labor only during certain seasons.”64
The American Board missionaries continued to measure Indian “civilization” by the extent of farming. Some of the reports the American
Board missionaries sent to Boston and Washington were optimistic, butmore frequently, the reports were discouraging to those who promoted“civilization” among the Indian tribes in the early nineteenth-century
United States. Many Cherokees had adopted European agricultural practices selectively and fused them to traditional farming techniques. The
production of food, therefore, mirrored the broader process of culturechange in which Cherokees and other Indians took what was useful but
maintained much of their traditional way of life. By continuing traditional foodways—that is, with what they ate—Native peoples retained
an important aspect of their cultures and their very identity as Indians.
NOTES
1“Cherokees: Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 25 (February 1829): 58; “Progress ofcivilization among the Indians” in “Mission among the Cherokees: Extracts from a
Narrative Written by an Assistant Missionary,” Missionary Herald 18 (May 1822): 139;
Thos. L. McKenney to James Barbour, 13 December 1825, American State Papers:
Indian Affairs 2: 651; and “Cherokees: Carmel,” Missionary Herald 25 (February 1829):
58.
2
Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with
Documents, 2d ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 11; and Robert F. BerkhoferJr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian
Response, 1787–1862 ([Lexington]: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 70.
3James Adair, Adair’s History of the American Indians, ed. Samuel Cole Williams(New York: Promontory Press, 1930), 435–37, 438–39.
4
James Mooney, James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of theCherokees: Containing the Full Texts of “Myths of the Cherokee” (1900) and “TheSacred Formulas of the Cherokees” (1891) as Published by the Bureau of American
Ethnology. With a new biographical introduction, “James Mooney and the Eastern
Cherokees,” by George Ellison (Asheville, NC: Historical Images, 1992), 423 (italics
in the original).
5
Adair, Adair’s History, 105–15, 462; and Mooney, James Mooney’s History, 423.
6
Henry Timberlake, Lieut. Henry Timberlake’s Memoirs, 1756–1765, annot. SamuelCole Williams (Johnson City, TN: Watauga Press, 1927; Marietta, GA: Continental
Book Company, 1948), 68, 98–99. Citations are to the Continental edition.
7
Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage, 70.

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185

8Thomas Jefferson to Gentlemen of the Senate and of the House of Representatives,
18 January 1803, James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages andPapers of the Presidents: Prepared under the Direction of the Joint Committee on
Printing, of the House and Senate, Pursuant to an Act of the Fifty-Second Congress of
the United States. With Additions and Encyclopedic Index by Private Enterprise (NewYork: Bureau of National Literature, 1897) 1: 340.
9
Ibid.
10
For the federal government’s “civilization” program, see Francis Paul Prucha, The
Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 89–177; and American Indian Policy in
the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
11“Treaty with the Cherokee, 1791,” Charles J. Kappler, comp., Indian Affairs: Laws
and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties (Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1904), 31.
12
U.S. Statutes at Large 1: 331.
13
3 December [1796], Thomas Foster, ed., The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins,
1796–1810 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 23; and 30 November[1796], ibid., 20.
14
2 December [1796], ibid., 21–22.
15
For the Cherokee myth about Kana’ti and Selu, see Mooney, James Mooney’s
History, 242–49.
16
Theda Perdue eloquently develops a Cherokee world of complementarity andreciprocity in Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1998). See also Izumi Ishii, “Surviving Colonization:
Native American Women and Their Lives,” Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture
7, no. 4 (March 2005): 597–611.
17
1 December [1796], Foster, Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 21.
18John Ridge, “Letter to Albert Gallatin,” 27 February 1826, Perdue and Green,
Cherokee Removal, 43–44.
19
For drastic changes the Cherokees faced during the early republic period, see
William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1986).
20
Geo. Washington to Beloved Cherokees, 29 August 1796, “Washington and theCherokees,” Cherokee Phoenix, 20 March 1828.
21“Mission among the Cherokees of the Arkansaw [sic]: Annual Report to theSecretary of War,” Missionary Herald 18 (April 1822): 108.
22
Elias Cornelius to [Samuel] Worcester, 1 November 1817, “Mission to theCherokees,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 13 (December 1817): 566. For the effortsof the American Board to establish mission stations among the Cherokees and “civilize”
them, see Henry Thompson Malone, Cherokees of the Old South: A People in Transition(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956); and Robert Sparks Walker, Torchlights to
the Cherokees: The Brainerd Mission (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Meg Devlin
O’Sullivan focuses on conversion, a religious aspect of “civilization,” at Brainerd in “AFamily Affair: Cherokee Conversion to American Board Churches, 1817–1839,”
Tennessee Historical Quarterly 64 (Winter 2005): 264–83.
23
Adam Hodgson, “American Indians: Journey among the Choctaws, Chickasaws,
and Cherokees,” Missionary Herald 18 (May 1822): 150–51.
24[Samuel] Worcester, “Important suggestions on the organization of Education
Families,” 1821, Jedediah [Jedidiah] Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War of theUnited States on Indian Affairs 1822 ([Whiteﬁsh, MT]: Kessinger Publishing, [2007]),

186

IZUMI ISHII

164–65. Although he addressed it to the missionaries among the Choctaws, Morse notedthat Worcester’s statement was “applicable to all Education Families, established among
Indians.” Ibid., 165.
25
Cyrus Kingsbury to [?], 30 June 1817, Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 13 (August
1817): 384–86.
26“Report of the Prudential Committee of the A.B.C.F.M.,” Panoplist, and Missionary
Herald 14 (November 1818): 505.
27
1 May [1817], Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips, eds., The Brainerd Journal:
A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998),
33–34, 442–43n30.
28
Cyrus Kingsbury, Moody Hall, and Loring S. Williams to Samuel Worcester, 25
November 1817, Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14 (January 1818): 44.
29
13 [July 1818], Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 72; 19 [June 1818], ibid.,64; and Isaac Anderson, Matthew Donald, and William Eagleton to [Prudential Committee], 13 December 1819, “Mission and School at Brainerd,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 16 (March 1820): 132.
30
16 [January 1822], Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 253; and “Story with
Respect to Donations in Clothing, &c.,” Missionary Herald 17 (November 1821):
350–51.
31
27 [February 1819], Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 108
32
29 [December 1818], ibid., 98–99; and 12 June [1819], ibid., 119, 481–82n33. See
also ibid., 101–3, 107, 108, 109–11.
33“Report of the Prudential Committee: Cherokees,” Missionary Herald 15 (December 1819): 549.
34
“Report of the Prudential Committee: Station of Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 18(December 1822): 372.
35
“Report of the Prudential Committee: Cherokees,” Missionary Herald 15 (December 1819): 549.
36
Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1976), 309.
37
“Letter from the Treasurer of the American Board, &c.,” Panoplist, and Missionary
Herald 14 (July 1818): 341–43.
38
Southerners, just as missionaries did, affected the Cherokees’ acculturation process
in enormous ways. By having their slaves cultivate the lands for them, Cherokee men
found a way to avoid being farmers. For the process of the birth of Cherokee slaveholders, see Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979).
39[Adam] Hodgson, “American Indians: Journey among the Choctaws, Chickasaws,
and Cherokees,” Missionary Herald 18 (June 1822): 183; and “Missions: Choctaws,”
Missionary Herald 24 (January 1828): 9.
40“Mission and School at Brainerd,” Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14 (September
1818): 431–32.
41
Jeremiah Evarts to the Prudential Committee, 29 May 1822, Missionary Herald 18(July 1822): 233–34.
42“Indian Civilization: Report of the Committee of Congress on Indian Affairs,”
Missionary Herald 20 (May 1824): 151.
43
2 July [1821], Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 224.
44
23 [March 1819], ibid., 110–11.
45
2 July [1821], ibid., 224.

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187

46“Report of the Prudential Committee: Station of Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 18(January 1822): 2.
47
2 July [1821], Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 224.
48
Memoranda Relative to the Cherokee Mission, No. 1, 6 May 1822, 7 May 1822,
Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Houghton
Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, ABC 18.3.1 v. 2, microcopy, roll 737,
#0451–55. Hereafter documents from this archive will be cited by the notation thatbegins with ABC with date and volume, roll, and frame numbers.
49
Cyrus Kingsbury and others to Samuel Worcester, 18 March 1818, ABC 18.3.1 v.
2, roll 737, #0307.
50
Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 290–91, 293–94, 297. Corn and beans complement
each other nutritionally as well. See also Perdue, Cherokee Women, 19; and Thomas
Hatley, “Cherokee Women Farmers Hold Their Ground,” in Appalachian Frontiers:
Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. Robert D. Mitchell(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 40.
51
Timberlake, Lieut. Henry Timberlake’s Memoirs, 68.
52
Gary C. Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition: A Study of Changing Culture andEnvironment Prior to 1775, University of Chicago Department of Geography Research
Paper no. 181, 1977, 125–26.
53“Report of the Prudential Committee: Station of Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 18(December 1822): 372–73.
54
16 [April 1817], Phillips and Phillips, Brainerd Journal, 33.
55
11 June [1818], ibid., 63; and [18] June [1818], ibid., 64.
56
5 [July 1818], ibid., 69.
57
16 [September 1819], ibid., 131.
58
9 [January 1820], ibid., 149.
59
10 [April 1820], ibid., 163; “Report of the Prudential Committee: Station ofBrainerd,” Missionary Herald 18 (January 1822): 2; 1, 3 [September 1823], Phillips andPhillips, Brainerd Journal, 375; and 19, 20 [September 1823], ibid., 378.
60
“North American Indians: Progress in Civilization,” Missionary Herald 25 (February 1829): 57.
61
Perdue and Green, Cherokee Removal, 51–52.
62“Cherokees: Brainerd,” Missionary Herald 25 (February 1829): 58.
63“Cherokees: Willstown,” Missionary Herald 25 (February 1829): 59.
64“Cherokees: Candy’s Creek,” Missionary Herald 25 (February 1829): 59.