Three Sisters
The Three Sisters are corn, beans and squash grown together in the same hills, the Indigenous farming system of much of North America. The name comes from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), for whom the three crops are sisters, given to the people when they sprouted from the body of Sky Woman’s daughter.
Meaning
In the hill planting the Carnegie Museum of Natural History describes (quoted by the U.S. National Agricultural Library), Haudenosaunee women planted several kernels of corn in a hole and mounded soil around the seedlings until each hill was about a foot high and two feet wide. Two or three weeks later they planted beans in the same hills, and squash or pumpkins grew between the rows. The beans put nitrogen into the soil, the bean vines climb the cornstalks, and the broad squash leaves shade the ground, keeping it moist and holding back weeds. The Seneca name is Diohe’ko, “these sustain us”. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) describes the same system: the three crops were planted together by the women of the tribe, “and for that reason called ‘the three sisters’”.
Origin and history
No one knows who first planted the three together. A 2021 study quoted by the National Agricultural Library says the origins of the Three Sisters complex are unknown, and that it appears in the earliest European accounts of North America; archaeology dates its adoption in North America to about 1070 AD, while each crop goes back millennia in Central and South America. The Library notes that the Iroquois and the Cherokee both call the crops the three sisters, and quotes a 2022 thesis naming the Lenni Lenape as potentially among the originators of the practice. Among the Seneca, Lewandowski wrote in 1987, the Three Sisters had been grown for at least five hundred years before contact, planted in hills and cultivated and harvested by work parties of women.
In 1910 Arthur C. Parker recorded from members of the Seneca Nation that the squash and bean seeds were sown in every seventh hill of corn because the spirits of the three plants were thought to be inseparable. At the Green Corn Thanksgiving, he wrote, the leader rises and says “Diettino’nio dioke’ko”, “we give thanks to our sustainers”.
The sisters in Haudenosaunee story
In the Haudenosaunee account quoted by the National Agricultural Library, the three crops sprouted from the body of Sky Woman’s daughter, the gift of farming to the Iroquois nations; the three sisters are “the physical and spiritual sustainers of life”. Some versions of the story, the New York Botanical Garden notes, tell of three women who separate from one another and then find they are stronger together.
Knowledge that is still practised
The Three Sisters are often presented today as a way to improve a small garden; the National Agricultural Library says their historical value lay in feeding whole communities, and calls them a significant cultural and spiritual construct that “was, and is” one, and points out that most of what has been written about them is by scholars from outside the communities that developed and kept the tradition. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy describes the three crops as a large part of the Haudenosaunee diet, grown in communal fields planted and tended by women. Cornell Cooperative Extension, whose garden guide follows the Iroquois hill method, recommends dent, flint and flour corns as the kinds that suit it. Plimoth Patuxet Museums, at Plymouth, says Wampanoag women tended gardens of one to three acres of corn, beans and squash.
See also
Flint corn (multicoloured corn), Pumpkin and pumpkin pie, Turkey, Cornucopia, Pumpkin and pumpkin pie, Flint corn (multicoloured corn).
Sources
- The Three Sisters of Indigenous American Agriculture, Collections story, quoting Parker (1910), Lewandowski (1987), the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and others, National Agricultural Library, U.S. Department of Agriculture
- Ancient Ways, Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)
- Food and Hunting, Historical life as a Haudenosaunee, Haudenosaunee Confederacy
- Creating a Three Sisters Garden, Warren County Master Gardener articles, Cornell Cooperative Extension
- Unit 3: Growing Corn in Plymouth and Patuxet, You Are the Historian, teacher toolkit, Plimoth Patuxet Museums
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research