A friend recently asked me if American Indians really had a second harvest. I had no idea what she meant by ����second harvest���� when I heard the question, but assumed it had something to do with seasonal agriculture. Boy was I wrong. When I asked my friend why she wanted to know about crops, she dropped a bombshell. Apparently, her elementary school teacher had taught that a ����second harvest���� was when American Indians ate food, defecated, and then consumed all or part of their own fecal matter for nutrition. In other words, my friend was asking, ����did some American Indians eat their own shit?����
Ah… a nice question about Indian agriculture. Wait, what!?
I����d never run across anyone eating their own fecal matter in my ten years of studying American Indians. The idea seemed farfetched. In addition to having questionable nutritional value, feces carries disease and parasites, so any tribe that started eating their waste would die out before the practice could proliferate.
Unfortunately, I couldn����t immediately tell my friend that there was no such thing as a second harvest, as I����d seen that in times of scarcity, some tribes would consume food tainted with animal feces. If Indians were willing to risk consuming animal dung, would a diet that included human fecal matter be that much of a stretch?
I was familiar with a particularly nauseating tale of of animal excrement eating from the Lewis and Clark Expedition. When Lewis and Clark were traveling in Idaho in 1805, a member of their party shot and flayed a deer. Regarding the animal����s heart, gall bladder, and other internal organs as unappetizing, the explorer discarded them. A group of hungry Shoshones who����d been observing the hunter snatched up the refuse and in a blood-soaked orgy of consumption began to eat the giblets raw.
Look at what that guy’s about to do.
One poor Indian was the last to the pile and ended up with the deer����s small intestines. Beginning at one end of the raw, rope-like organ, the Shoshone started chewing, squeezing encased feces down the length of the intestines between bites. Before long, goo emerged out of the other end of the intestine like Hell����s version of Go-gurt. The Indian continued this bite, squeeze routine until nothing was left but a spiraled pile of deer dung.
Who wants Gogurt?
Although less elaborate than Lewis and Clark, Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca described an equally repulsive practice of the Coahuiltecan Indians of South Texas. Living in an inhospitable environment with little to sustain human life, the Coahuiltecans had to resort to harsh measures in order to survive. To keep their tribes small enough to live off the land, they����d smash female newborns against rocks. In times of scarcity, they����d eat mice, lizards, and spiders. As Cabeza de Vaca noted with disgust, they����d also eat deer dung, probably hoping it contained undigested berries or corn.
Bear Grylls has eaten animal poop. Click here if you don’t believe me.
Unfortunately, deer feces isn����t human feces (I never thought I����d type that sentence), and I was unable to find any accounts of human feces consumption among the Coahuiltecans and Shoshones, so I still didn’t have an answer for my friend. Unable to find anything on the internet beyond an Urban Dictionary reference, I asked my coworker Dr. F. Todd Smith����who����s published four books on Indians����if he was aware of any excrement-eating tribes. Visibly disgusted by my silly inquiry, Dr. Smith admitted that he����d never heard of the second harvest, either.
However, he didn����t dismiss the possibility of the practice occurring somewhere and suggested that I look at 17th and 18th century missionary accounts from the American Southwest and northern Mexico, places where drought would foster unusual eating practices. If a second harvest existed, Spanish missionaries would write about it. They were always eager to prove the superiority of Christianity and European lifestyle by highlighting unseemly Indian practices.
Spanish missionaries passing judgement… and teaching Christianity.
It doesn����t get more unseemly than shit eating. Using Dr. Smith����s suggestion, I managed to find two missionary descriptions of human excrement eating Indian tribes in Mexico. The first comes from Father Adamo Gilg, who proselytized to the Seri Indians of northern Sonora. Reporting on the Indian����s dietary habits, Gilg, says, ����they eat with pleasure wild rats, marmots, grasshoppers, yellow rain worms, their own s.v.���� Too embarrassed to even write the Spanish word for feces, Gilg didn����t elaborate on the Seri����s unusual dietary practice, leaving readers to assume that the Indians ate their scat ����with pleasure���� as if it were a candy bar.
Insert poop joke.
Thankfully(?) I found a more detailed written account of feces consumption from missionary Johann Jakob Baegert. Although still unpleasant to modern readers, Baegert����s description shows the practice wasn����t as repulsive as Gilg����s omission made it seem. The following is from Baegert����s account of his time with desert tribes of Baja California:
“At this point I ask permission of the patient reader to mention something of an exceedingly inhuman and repulsive nature, the like of which has probably never been told of any other people in the world. It discloses better than anything else the poverty of the California Indians, their voracity and uncleanliness. In Part One of this book, I mentioned that the pitahayas contain a great many small seeds, resembling grains of powder, which for reasons unknown to me are not consumed in the stomach but passed in an undigested state. In order to use these small grains, the Indians collect all excrement during the season of the pitahayas, pick out these seeds from it, roast, grind, and eat them with much joking. This procedure is called by the Spaniards the after or second harvest! Whether all this happens because of want, voracity, or out of love for the pitahayas, I leave undecided. All three surmises are plausible and any one of them might cause them to indulge in such filthiness. It was difficult for me, indeed, to give credit to such a report until I had repeatedly witnessed this procedure. It is useless to try to persuade them to abandon this old practice. They will not give it up.”
Baegert was not only kind enough to describe the second harvest, but he may have been the first person to use the term ����second harvest���� in print. The missionary����s relation makes clear that Indians didn����t eat excrement like frozen yogurt, but instead used a sanitary process that extracted extra calories from their food. Because cactus fruit seeds have indigestible husks surrounding their nutritious interior, when Indians ate a cactus fruit, they passed its seeds without absorbing their caloric insides. So the Indians of the American Southwest and northern Mexico figured out that they could pick out the seeds from their excrement, wash them, cook them, and then grind them into a flour for consumption. This allowed them to derive more calories from each cactus fruit. Gross, but smart.
Two course meal.
So yes, there was a second harvest, but the only Indians who practiced it were a few poor tribes in the deserts of northwestern Mexico. I don����t know why my friend����s elementary school teacher would choose to teach this particular fact, instead of talking about Incan sailing ships, Mayan writing, or other Indian advances���� Well, okay, yes I do. Poop is funny.
Brad Folsom
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Sources:
Pictures from wikimediacommons unless otherwise noted.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40167112
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5r29n9xv;chunk.id=0;doc.view=print
http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.ronda.01.06.xml&_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q97hBJ7alKI
