Chapter 1: The Good Berry
Volume 1: The Good Berry
Chapter 1: The Good Berry
Chapter 1: The Good Berry
Scientists estimate that more than half of all plants are edible in some form. A scant dozen account for more than 80% of calories eaten by the billions of people alive today. Wheat, rice, maize, bede, barley, and others have been changed by thousands of years of planting, harvesting, and experimentation into plants which are much easier for humans to plant, harvest, and eat. The process by which plants and animals are selectively bred for traits beneficial to humans is called domestication.
Domestication is not a singular event. It is an iterative process that may take hundreds or even thousands of generations. Every generation, those plants with the traits most desirable to humans are nurtured while those with undesirable traits are discarded. It is, in a sense, evolution by unnatural selection.
It should be noted that domestication, at least at the start, is not a conscious process. It was not started by some genius hunter gatherer who saw the potential to change plants. Ants have domesticated fungus and no one considers them geniuses. Plant domestication began as the unintentional result of the natural behaviors of both plants and humans.
Let us take a look at the domestication of black rice or manoomin[2].
From now on, we will use the name manoomin, meaning “Good Berry” in Anishinaabe, rather than the more common name of black rice. This is so that it is not confused with Asian rice, which it is only distantly related to.
We will use the term Menominee[3], meaning “people of manoomin” in Anishinaabe, to refer to the people who first domesticated manoomin. This is because the scholarly consensus is that they were Algonquian speakers. While this is an imperfect solution, it is better than using terms that suggest Siouan ancestry like psinomani, which means “people of manoomin” in Dakota, or terms like “proto-Anishinaabe” that suggest more continuity with the present than can be justified from the current evidence.
In the Mishigami[4] manoomin is an abundant food source that has been harvested for thousands of years. For most of that time, manoomin was a secondary food source, only eaten when other, easier foods were not available. This is hardly the recipe for domestication.
But something changed. That something was a fungus. Around the year 4000 BCE, a mutation in this fungus allowed it to grow unchecked on hickory trees. Within a few decades, the hickory population was devastated.[5]
Hickory nuts had long been an important food. They were tasty, nutritious and stored well for the long winters. With their (almost) complete disappearance, many people starved or migrated to other areas. However, some stayed and began harvesting another food that was tasty, nutritious, and could be stored easily even if it was harder to process. That food was manoomin.
As more hickory trees died, these people, the Menominee, started to spread manoomin to new lakes and rivers in order to ensure they always had a source of food. By doing so, they were unknowingly selecting for traits beneficial to people.
They would collect seeds around the same time every year. This selected for seeds that would germinate and ripen at the same time.
They would only transplant seeds if they had collected more than they needed. This selected for plants that made more and larger seeds.
At first, the Menominee would knock off the seeds with wooden sticks, or knockers. As they became increasingly dependent on manoomin, they began tying the plants to ensure no seeds fell off before harvesting, then cutting each stalk and knocking it thoroughly so that every seed fell off. This selected for seeds with a thick rachis, ensuring that the seed would not fall off until it was harvested by humans.
Once transplanted, these new plants would be isolated, preserving these traits. Then the process would begin again. None of these processes requires humans to consciously breed the plants for beneficial traits or even to notice the changes as they happened. It is possible that some traits, such as taste, were consciously selected for but it is by no means certain.
By the beginning of the pre-classical period, roughly 3000 BCE, manoomin was entirely dependent on humans for propagation. There was now no other way for their seeds to spread but to be planted by humans.
In some areas, fluctuations in water levels would lead to inconsistent harvests year to year. The Menominee began using damns and weirs to control water flow and thereby ensure high, consistent harvests.
As the population of the Mishigami grew, more and more manoomin needed to be grown to keep up with demand. More and more labor, fed by manoomin, was available to solve this problem. Fields that had once been dry were flooded to create rice bogs[7]. This allowed for the creation of large communal farms that could sustain large, sedentary populations. The first evidence for irrigation canals to flood manoomin fields comes from Mishi-zaaga’igan [Lake Mille Lacs, MN]
Manoomin was the staple crop of Minisian [North American] civilization. A majority of the total calories consumed by the Menominee were from manoomin. Of course, a majority does not mean all and the rest needs to be discussed. Other plants and animals were domesticated as part of the Mishigami Agricultural Package. We’ll discuss some of them next time.
[1] Taken from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Maize-teosinte.jpg
[2] What we would call Wild Rice, Zizania Palustris and Zizania Aquatica
[3] Not the federally recognized tribe of Menominee. That is actually an exonym; they call themselves Mameceqtaw.
[4] The area around the Great Lakes. Literally, “Large Water”
[5] This is the Point of Divergence.
[6] Taken from: http://arcadianabe.blogspot.com/2013/10/wild-rice-cascadian-style.html it actually just shows the natural variation in size of wild rice.
[7] The word paddy comes from Malay. ITTL, paddy fields will be introduced to the English long before Malay is. They will need a word for a rice paddy. Bog, as in cranberry bog, has been used in similar contexts so I chose it for this purpose.
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). In the Upper Midwest, it was also common for natives to collect acorns, roast them, and grind it into a flour. So, perhaps we see domesticated oak groves as well (time intensive to start - but once you have a grove going, it's much harder for an enemy to utterly destroy it, meaning you have a good fallback crop if nothing else. The second is an idea I've had for years - should the wheel get developed, perhaps dogs could be used as beasts of burden. Similar to Alaskan dog team but, well, with wheeled vehicles. And yes, this does mean you could see Dog Chariots become a thing: which kind of gives a whole new meaning to "Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!) 
