During a discussion of California's current drought and how the modern water-intensive agriculture is affecting water supplies, I wandered onto the topic of Native American agriculture and realized I had no idea if Native Californians practiced agriculture. I'm mostly interested in native Californians and Oregonians, but any information about tribes west of the Rockies and the sorts of agriculture they practiced would be great. Thanks!
This article suggests that the ancestral Tolowa of far Northern California were using and perhaps cultivating tobacco as early as around a thousand years ago. The problem in this case is determining if the Northern California Indians cultivated or traded for the tobacco. The author's suggest that it was likely cultivated in the region, but it is yet far from certain.
Acorns were a huge food staple in California for Native Americans.
Acorns were a traditional food of many indigenous peoples of North America, but served an especially important role for Californian Native Americans, where the ranges of several species of oaks overlap, increasing the reliability of the resource.
Native North Americans took an active and sophisticated role in managing acorn resources by using fire, which increased the production of acorns and made them easier to collect.
The indigenous people practiced various forms of forest gardening in the forests, grasslands, mixed woodlands, and wetlands to ensure availability of food and medicine plants.
I know it's wikipedia, but I have no books personally to cite right now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_California#Foods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn#Use_and_management_by_Native_Americans
For the most part, Indigenous peoples of Oregon and California didn't need agriculture, since food—especially salmon, shellfish, and acorns—was already abundant. Colorado River tribes living on what is now the California-Arizona border practiced floodplain agriculture—growing corn, beans, and pumpkins.