Correction: The three sisters is an agricultural technique that is used by me in my garden. And I'm neither a Cherokee nor a Haudenosaunee.
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
The Three Sisters […] are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous people of Central and North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans […]. […] In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds […]; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.
That's not a correction, that's an added detail.
Now that's a correction.
"was" vs. "is"
As Mitch Hedberg would say
They used to use it
they still do.
But they used to, too!
Ok, so it wasn't even an added detail. It was changing the topic to present day instead of the past. That's even further from a correction imo
Being pedantic it is added detail. As native Americans did it, even if they still do it, they could have originally/historically not done so.
And also are there tribes/larger groups of native americans that did stop doing it? Then that statement is even stronger
It specifies the cultural application but broadens the temporal.
(To be more direct: not every first nation practiced that technique.)
And thus is not a correction. It's an added detail at best, or at least a change of topic. It's not a corretion
Changing the past tense to present tense (these people and practices are still very real, they are not just part of “the past”) is a correction.
No it is not.
One person is talking about the past. The other person is talking about the present
That is incorrect, like incorrectly referring to the agricultural practices only in the past tense, or incorrectly lumping all peoples who lived in the Americas prior to European colonization into one generic group. The fact that both viewpoints are not equally correct is what makes it a correction.
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I don't get the joke? Aren't the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false? Also, I thought the Iroquois used it too
Edit: yes, the Haudenosaunee are the Iroquois. Til
The Iroquois are the Haudenosaunee. The latter is the more respectful and culturally appropriate term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois
Haudenosaunee ("People of the Longhouse") is the autonym by which the Six Nations refer to themselves.[23] While its exact etymology is debated, the term Iroquois is of colonial origin. Some scholars of Native American history consider "Iroquois" a derogatory name adopted from the traditional enemies of the Haudenosaunee.[24] A less common, older autonym for the confederation is Ongweh’onweh, meaning "original people".[25][26][27]
I did not know this before. Thank you!
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Aren’t the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false?
The original statement implies the technique was widespread across Native American groups. It's almost certainly false for the ones here in South America; there's a lot on terrace farming and slash-and-burn, but AFAIK nothing that resembles the companion system of the three sisters. (I wonder if it's due to the prominence of subterranean crops. Taters, yucca, sweet potatoes.)
The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and the Cherokee/Tsalagi being related hints me it was something they developed.
That's what I was thinking. Native Groups in many parts of North America didn't practice agriculture at all or used rudimentary agriculture.
I believe it's the verb tenses. Instead of it being a historical fact, it's an ongoing practice of an ongoing group of people
I read it as criticising reductionist views of the many diverse nations that existed in North America before Europeans showed up and decided that the whole continent was Terra Nullius.
To this day a significant number of US high school American History textbooks only discuss the tribes in terms of their interactions with European invaders, and shy away from anything that might make them look like they were ever legitimate nations. Referring to them as 'Native Americans' instead of by name also has this effect.
Well, “Native Americans” means everything from whoever lived on the tip of today’s Argentina all the way to the Inuit. So saying “native Americans” when it’s actually just two tribes is wrong.
Edit: Wikipedia says the technique was used by ‘various’ people.
So if you say like "people farm beans" that's wrong because not all people farm beans? Presumably not all of the people in those two groups, it even every community within them, use the three sisters method, so is it still wrong?
Or is it just that it's ok to say " does " without meaning "all do "?
It's not wrong.
We all learned how categories like this work in school - squares are rhombuses but rhombuses aren't necessarily squares. It's weird that some people would argue like against that.
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First nations?
I believe that term is reserved for (some of) the indigenous peoples of modern-day Canada.
Indigenous peoples in Canada comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples#North_America
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I think that's why there's a smile in the last square.
There is a tense change. The second person is saying the technique is still used by those tribes today.
I always wondered why we don't do more polyculture ag
Profit margins and prioritising short term gains. :(
It's more the fact that you can really only do handwork on a polyculture field, so it's completely unsuited for anything but subsistence farming.
I like it when food is cheap and I don't like it when poor people starve to death, shoot me.
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I thought it was a rock formation in Australia?
I think that's more than three sisters
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