Hidden Roots
Hidden Roots: African and Native American Knowledge in the Soil of New England
By Sherri V. Cummings
Member, Bristol Middle Passage Port Marker Project Board of Directors
In New England’s agrarian past, much of the soil has yet to be turned. Beneath the dominant narrative of Puritan farms and colonial self-sufficiency lies a richer and more complex story— one shaped by the intertwined agricultural knowledge of African and Native American peoples. These early colonial agronomists may not be named in the archives, but their agricultural influences are all over the land.
This “hidden heritage,” a term coined by Geri Augusto at Brown University, references the ancestral, embodied, and often unsung wisdom carried by African diasporic peoples across the Atlantic. She argues that this knowledge wasn’t merely about survival; it was technological, botanical, and deeply innovative. It arrived not in books, but in memory. Not in institutional laboratories, but in gardens, kitchens, and healing practices.
In the colonial Northeast, enslaved and free Africans connected with Native peoples like the Pokanoket, Wampanoag, and Narragansett, whose own agricultural traditions had shaped the region’s landscape for thousands of years. These encounters were layered, relational, and, at times, quietly and resolutely revolutionary.
From these exchanges emerged hybrid forms of agronomy—new techniques adapted to the cold winters of New England, new planting rhythms, and new medicinal uses for local flora. African agricultural expertise found unexpected resonance with Indigenous practices like companion planting, seed-saving, and seasonal land stewardship. In some cases, these agricultural practices were more than just functional; they were spiritual. Among African-descended communities, particularly those with roots in West Central Africa, garden plots sometimes reflected cosmological beliefs. The Kongo cosmogram, a sacred symbol representing the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, was echoed in planting patterns: circular beds divided by cross-shaped paths, or quadrants oriented to the cardinal directions. These quiet designs were not just aesthetic; they embodied memory, reverence, and a sacred relationship to land. Some scholars suggest that similar symbolic arrangements may have informed how enslaved Africans, and their descendants organized home gardens, burial plots, and healing spaces, adapting Kongolese spiritual frameworks to the climate and constraints of the Northeast.
Scholars challenge us to recognize these interactions not as accidents of history, but as technologies of resistance. In small garden plots tucked behind homes or in stolen moments between labor demands, Black and Native women in particular cultivated knowledge that sustained their communities. They preserved seeds. They nurtured plant medicines. They created life where empire had only imagined extraction.
These practices were radical, not only because they defied the logic of settler colonialism and slavery, but because they insisted on continuity. The Pokanoket revered their ancestors who knew this land before they were displaced. They also knew how to make it nourish the community again.
The archival record tells little of this story. The names are often missing, and the plots of land are undocumented. To study this history, however, is to listen differently. It’s to ask what grows in the margins and who planted it there. It’s to see agronomy not just as a science of soil and seeds, but as a living tradition of care, resilience, and resistance.
In the shadow of settler histories, the roots of African and Native knowledge still run deep. Let’s not only study these histories, let’s learn from them, plant with them, and carry them forward.
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Source: Geri Augusto, “Plants of Bondage, Limbo Plants, and Liberation Flora: Diasporic
Reflections for STS in Africa and Africa in STS” in What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation
Mean from Africa? Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, editor. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2017
