Native American Foods: Before and after Contact: Seventeenth Century

The first pockets of permanent European settlements increased contacts and accelerated change, although in relatively small areas of North America. With contact came population decimation due to disease (at times as much as 90 percent of a tribe), colonial policies of dispersal, and aggravated frontier and intertribal warfare. In the course of the seventeenth century, the early European outposts expanded, increasing problems and tensions.

As the seventeenth century drew on, trade increased. Agreements between the French and the Huron in the Northeast, the Iroquois and the Dutch in early New Netherland and Albany (later replaced by the English), and the French and Choctaw in Louisiana provided Indian staples for Europeans. Some tribes grew extra corn to trade, and Europe manufactured trade items targeted for the Indian market. European foods began to make their way into some Native American communities. For example, the agricultural Algonquian Mohegans in Connecticut began to keep pigs, beef cattle, and sheep during the 1660s and 1670s, and the Iroquois planted orchards of European fruits, among them apples and pears.