The Agricultural Facets Of Appalachia Essay

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in the United States and the most photographed area was the Appalachia region. Many of the photographs intentional or not, became a visual definition of the Appalachia region. The images have drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the war on poverty, but came to represent the entirety of the region. The point of the Looking at Appalachia project is to explore the diversity of Appalachia and to establish a visual counter point. (Home - Looking at Appalachia.) The three images I am going to analyze are challenge some of the stereotypes put on the Appalachia region. I believe my images challenge the stereotype that all Appalachian people do is work hard, go to church, and don’t have time for anything besides those two things.

In comparison to the Europeans, depending on the region, a lot of Native Americans were largely migrant people who followed resources as needed. Tribes would stay in one area for as long as they could utilize whatever was in season and then moved forward once the land’s resources had nothing left to offer. Hunting and gathering forced tribes to relocate quite often due to the different seasons’ impact on game and plants. Even though agriculture was not a reliable source of sustainability for these people, Indians often found ways to make use of whatever herbs and plants grew around them. Low environmental impact and zero waste are two very important values to Indians as they have a very spiritual connected to the earth. In other parts of the country, Indians used agriculture quite a lot and even found ways to make their crops last through the winter. Some tribes established themselves fairly prominently in one area, but a key difference between their establishment and the English’s was their inherent view that no matter what they yielded from the land, it was not their property to claim forever. The Native Americans really

The Native Americans of the southeast live in a variety of environments. The environments range from the southern Appalachian Mountains, to the Mississippi River valley, to the Louisiana and Alabama swamps, and the Florida wetlands. These environments were bountiful with various species of plant and animal life, enabling the Native American peoples to flourish. “Most of the Native Americans adopted large-scale agriculture after 900 A.D, and some also developed large towns and highly centralized social and political structures.” In the first half of the 1600s Europeans encountered these native peoples. Both cultures encountered new plants, animals, and diseases. However, the Indians received more diseases compared to the few new diseases

Southern Appalachia alone includes three hundred counties covering most of West Virginia and the Southern Highlands or Upland South. The mountains form a natural barrier between the eastern Coastal Plain and the vast Interior Lowlands of North America. As a result, they have “played a vital role in the settlement and development of the entire continent.”

With the introduction of new resources found desirable in the new environment by the colonists and new products imported from Europe, Native Americans were launched into a brand new world of commerce to keep up with the quick pace of the developments. The Europeans valued the fur of buffaloes while Native Americans soon “became dependent on the manufactured goods the fur trade brought them, and hunted to the meet the demands...rather than the needs of their families” (Page 15). Moreover, Native Americans previously used animals in religious rituals, but after European contact, animals became “regarded as a form of property” and “crucial components of Navajo and Pueblo economy” (Page 13). Accordingly, Native Americans engaged in trade with Europeans way more than they had with each other before the arrival, boosting the rate of economic activity in the New World. Adding on, many colonists emigrated to America in order to gain economic freedom which came with owning property. However, “Indian peoples generally regarded land as something to be shared and utilized...They soon learned that

Farming is a common agriculture source of Native Americans. They farmed maize, beans and wheat. To improve their farming, both areas, created an elaborate irrigation system. Aztecs, Incas, Hohokams were remarkable for their irrigation system.

The native tribes of the Great Plains and the Eastern Woodlands have surprisingly different adaptions and responses to their expansions by settlers; not only in their cultures, but in their subsistence, warfare, peacemaking, and gender roles as well. Both tribes were forced to adapt and change due to the overtaking on the European settlers, but both managed to do it in different ways.

     Many people have different views on what Appalachia is, I grew up thinking that Appalachia meant people were dirty, poor, illiterate, inbreed and we also called them mountain people. As I grew up I realized that most of the things they went through and had a hard time with, I was dealing with the same problems. So what exactly is Appalachia? Well you will find out as you read on.

Conquest and disease are often the primary negative factors analyzed when discussing European interaction with Native Americans in the Americas. However, with the use of bioarcheology, Historians particularly Clark Spencer Larsen, have been able to learn more about the lifestyle and diet of mission Native Americans in Florida from remains which paint a broader picture than traditional European sources. The mass introduction of corn and hard labor into the diets and lives of Plains Native Americans had a detrimental effect upon the wellbeing and health of those living under Spanish rule. These effects become much more pronounced when compared to the distant ancestors of the Native Americans.

Agriculture, especially corn growing, was important for the size and sophistication of the Native Americans.

This paper tries to explain Jack Weatherford's Indian Givers by examining the history of the Native American connection to many agricultural products would not have been produced without the knowledge that Indians gave. Weatherford further stipulates that it is through these advances in agriculture that the United States has remained a strong contender in the global market, that without the influences of the Native Americans on the early settlers those early immigrants to America would not have survived. Through his work, "Indian Givers: How Indians of the Americas Transformed the World", Weatherford brings an insight to a people that most

As the population of the young United States increased more and more people hungry mouths were asking for food. Farmers had to keep up with new technology but there were also many setbacks in government policy and economic conditions. In the period of 1865-1900, there were many ways in which technology, government policy, and economic conditions changed early American agriculture.

In Uneven Ground, the author Ronald D. Eller narrates the economic, political, and social change of Appalachia after World War II. He writes “persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.”(pp.2) Some of the structural problems stated by Eller include problems of land abuse, political corruption, economic shortsightedness, and the loss of community and culture; personally view the economic myopia as being the most daunting.

When describing the role of Native Americans in the earlier relationship with the Plains, he describes the Apaches who hunted buffalo which was their main form of agriculture. With a horse, it became easier to hunt buffalo, but “these Indians did not drastically alter the ecological order” (76-77). This description of Native Americans and their presence in the grasslands makes it a reliable secondary source because it proves unbiased. Although Worster does not have first-hand experience of the earliest relationship between humans and land, he incorporates the significant role Native Americans played in the formation of agriculture. As Worster discusses how women shaped the Great Plains culture, he states, “Mothers and daughters together prepared food and made children’s garments.” He also explains how a well-knit families could encourage each other to work hard to survive on the land and that the family was mostly the women’s concern (171). With this information, the reader is provided an illustration of the role of women during the 1930s, even though it was not written at the time. The past tense use of the words such as “prepared” clearly indicates that he did not write in the present. Furthermore, Worster explains the role of Mexican cowboys who worked hard on

In modern America, we often take for granted the natural world that surrounds us and the American culture which is built upon it. For many of us, we give little thought to the food sources that sustain and natural habitats that surround us because when viewed for what they are, most people assume that they have “simply existed” since the country was founded. However, the documentary ‘America Before Columbus’ provided this writer an extremely interesting record of how the America we know came to exist. In the documentary, one of the most interesting discussions centered on the fact that it was not merely the arrival of conquistadors and colonists that irrevocably changed the landscape of the Americas, but that it was also the coined term known as the “Columbian Exchange” that afforded these travelers the ability to proliferate so successfully. The basic definition of the Columbian exchange is one that defines the importation of European flora and fauna. It could also loosely represent other imports, both intended and unintended, such as tools, implements, and even disease. Armed with this definition, it takes little imagination to envision how differently the Americas might have developed had any significant amount of the native European flora, fauna, or other unintended import not been conveyed to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Beyond the arrival of explorers, settlers, and colonists to the New World, the breadth of what the Columbian Exchange represented to