American “history” is riddled with bits of myth and folklore. Some of the fictions are obvious, like the old tale, “George Washington never told a lie”. The reality or fallacy of others, however, remains shrouded. Take, for example, the story of the Pilgrims. The legend goes something like this: In 1620, the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, and in 1621, the Pilgrims were met by a local native named Squanto. This native, who spoke English, taught the settlers to plant corn and to fertilize it with fish.
This paper will focus on the validity of that last assertion: the Native communities of New England were in the practice of using fish fertilizer. This assertion was largely accepted as fact until Lynn Ceci, then a graduate student in Anthropology, published a paper in 1975 debunking the idea. Her paper, “Fish Fertilizer: A Native North American Practice”, claimed to gather new historical and anthropological evidence arguing that the use of fertilizer was originally a European practice, not in “the manner of the Indians”. While the academic community largely celebrated this new “truth”, Ceci’s paper also inspired a number of rebuttals, notably Nanepashmet’s, “It Smells Fishy to Me: An Argument Supporting the Use of Fish Fertilizer by the Native People of Southern New England”. In this paper, I will not only examine the merits and limitations of both Ceci’s paper and Nanepashmet’s rebuttal, but I will also assess the role of cultural and academic values in each interpretation.
Lynn Ceci’s argument is based on three main points. First, she tries to establish a credible basis for the existence of using fish as fertilizer in Europe prior to 1621. From this evidence, she then infers that Squanto could have and was probably exposed to these manuring techniques from his previous contact with Europeans. Ceci argues that both England and Newfoundland present two likely locations for points of information exchange (27). Note that she does not prove where Squanto learned this technique, from Europeans or otherwise, but only that he could have learned it in the Old World.
Nanepashemet also sheds some doubt on this first argument. He asks, “why a Patuxet Wampanoag would have been so presumptuous as to teach English people an English practices… [and] why did no one in the colony know anything about it?” (45). While these questions do not refute Ceci’s point, I do agree with Nanepashemet that without the answers, it is hard to imagine why a Wampanoag man who only had brief encounters with Europeans would have gleaned this technique, while the Puritan farmers who had lived their entire lives in Europe had not. However, neither scholar provides enough evidence to definitively say where Squanto learned to use fish. Ceci, at best, provides speculation as to where it could have been learned. Neither provides any reason why it could or could not have been learned from native people.
Ceci’s second argument rests on the idea that there is no evidence in the records kept by early settlers that fertilizers were ever used by Native Americans, the only credible sources being that from Plymouth Colony (27). On this point, Nanepashemet provides several sources to the contrary. He cites accounts from William Bradford, William Wood, and Thomas Morton that all point to the use of fish fertilizer among “the Natives” (46-48).
Still, neither author provides a satisfactory contextualization of these narratives. Neither do the authors use a source derived from a member of the Native population, perhaps because no such written record exists. If that is the case, the credibility of the settler’s sources must first be established by examining the relationships between the narrators and native populations. What were their motives? How would their past experiences have colored their observation of Native horticultural practices? Nanepashemet at least qualifies William Wood’s quote with a demographic context, citing an epidemic which may have drastically altered native horticultural practices (47). What other historic events may have influenced these accounts?
Ceci’s final point argues that Native Americans’ preferred method of dealing with depleted soil was shifting cultivation to different sites (28). There are two implicit arguments here. First, Ceci suggests that Native Americans did not understand the value of fertilization. Secondly, the women who tended to Indian plots would not have preferred the “burdensome series of chores” associated with fish fertilization over “the far easier task of shifting her corn plots to other fertile, and available, areas” (29). The Indian men, Ceci elaborates, “may have recognized the improved productivity of European methods, yet would not have easily changed their traditional roles” (29).
The assumptions here are astounding. Ceci’s basic argument is that this method required too much labor capable of Indian communities. Where is the discussion of the Settler’s predisposition for labor? She credits the availability of domestic animals to the success of the Pilgrims, but Nanepashemet shrewdly notes that no draft animals existed in the first few years of the Pilgrims’ settlement (45). Because Ceci asserts that fertilization would require too much labor for Indian farmers, we are only to assume that the Pilgrims had a stronger work ethic, were more able to withstand hard labor given comparable amounts of labor and tools. Without a parallel discussion of the “industrious” or “laziness” of the European Settler’s, Ceci’s argument about labor relies on too many assumptions.
There are holes in both Lynn Ceci’s and Nanepashemet’s arguments. However, I think Nanepashemet rebuttals are successful enough to shed doubt on Ceci’s claim. The only fact that I can deduce is that the Pilgrims learned to fertilize corn with fish from Squanto. Ceci provides enough evidence to challenge the claim that it was Native technology, but enough to disprove it outright. Until it can be disproven outright, I see no reason why it should not be believed that Squanto learned it from his Native community.