What, Exactly, is a Farm?

A colleague with whom I share both anthropological and genealogical interests pointed me toward this webpage of Washington history. I didn't find much specifically about our ancestors, but this post about the origins of Oak Harbor in January, 1851 was interesting. It hits both my family history interests and my anthropological research on land use and historical ecology. Note this section:

Norwegian shoemaker Zakarias Martin Taftezon (also spelled Toftezen and Taftsen, among other variants) (1821-1901), Swiss Ulrich Freund, and New Englander Clement W. "Charlie" Sumner met each other at New Orleans while en route to the 1849 California gold rush. They did not strike it rich in the gold fields and headed north to the Oregon Country. In late 1850, they landed in Olympia and with the help of Samuel Hancock, took an Indian canoe north down Puget Sound to find available land....

According to pioneer Jerome Ely, Taftezon cut steps into the steep bluff at the mouth of the inlet the Skagits called Kla-tole-tsche to climb up and view the area to the north. He spied the Oak Harbor prairie free of the dense stands of trees that covered so much of the region....Much of Puget Sound was covered by dense stands of timber, but the grass-covered prairies where the Indians dug their camas roots offered good prospects for farming.

I love "the grass-covered prairies where the Indians dug their camas roots offered good prospects for farming." Yes, they did. Because they were farms! You will generally see these roots classified as "wild" foods but the boundary between "wild" and "domesticate" or between "prairie" and "farm" is a lot fuzzier than most people realize. Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest created fields of camas and manipulated soil and roots to make camas more productive. These prairies were created and managed ecosystems for growing camas. Sounds kinda like a farm, doesn't it?

Other crops grown by the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest include various fruit-bearing trees, berries, and (my personal favorite) shellfish in aquaculture beds.

So why didn't the Euro-American settlers arriving on Whidbey Island mention that it was covered in farms? Partly because they did not recognize them. These Indigenous fields didn't look like European farms, with fences and plow furrows and red-pained barns. The settlers' ethnocentrism only allowed them to see Europe-style farms as "true" farms. 

But also, settlers often refused to recognize the farms right in front of their faces because that would mean recognizing that they had stolen someone's land. Land grabs in this time period were based on the idea that Euro-Americans were hard-working people who improved and built upon land while Indigenous people were not. As "proof" of this, Euro-Americans pointed to the fact that much of North America was made up of unsettled or unimproved land. And where that wasn't true (which it mostly wasn't) they pretended it was true.

Now for the genealogical connection: note the reference to Samuel Hancock and the implication that he's working with Indigenous people to transport settlers to Whidbey island. Some thirty years later Mr. Hancock helped his great-nephew, E.J. Hancock, to move to Whidbey island, where E.J. married Julia Kinney, the daughter of a local ship captain. They became my great-great-grandparents.