Preamble: --January 2025: with the capitalist media covering the upcoming Trump circus and the ongoing Los Angeles fires, IIndigenous Ecosystems 101...
Preamble: --January 2025: with the capitalist media covering the upcoming Trump circus and the ongoing Los Angeles fires, I’m reminded of another book's title: We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope …Beyond survival, what can we learn from societies nurturing and living within their ecosystems? --Robin Wall Kimmerer has found success popularizing a synthesis of environmental sciences re-discovering indigenous knowledge in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013). Recently, Kimmerer has also touched on the social world (capitalism vs. gift economy) in The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (2024). --Nancy Turner (who taught at my alma mater) provides a more-structured (yet still accessible) overview of how indigenous science and culture nurture ecosystems, demonstrating how indigenous rights/knowledge are foundational to ecocultural restoration. …As our Mother Earth rapidly sickens amidst record quarterly profits, it’s time we rediscover common sense and rebuild our value system. As Kimmerer writes: “We restore the land, and the land restores us��
Highlights:
1) Humans within Nature: --Turner, an ethnobiologist, starts with her science lens to describe the material conditions of British Columbia (a laughably colonial name), Canada, to explain how this province’s natural environment is that of change/diversity due to forces of geology/geography/climate, esp. from glaciation. --Thus, the indigenous inhabitants have survived and thrived due to diverse adaptation; with Turner’s anthropology lens, we can start with the 3 “Culture Areas�: Northwest Coast, Plateau, and Subarctic. --Crucially, the following distinction is made: a) Untouched nature: --European colonizers viewed the environment as separate, thus assumed indigenous peoples provided no labour to co-create the ecosystems. --Note: we can dig deeper to John Locke’s (“father of liberalism�/Enlightenment) “labour theory of property� on how property originates from labour put into natural resources. Given the above assumptions, this conveniently justified colonial dispossession. b) Caretaker/Stewardship: �“Being keen and vigilant observers, scientists in the broadest sense of the word, indigenous peoples have not only used the resources around them but maintained and enhanced them in various ways.� �“Her people understood these ecological connections long before ecology was a recognized science.� --As active participants in the ecosystem, indigenous societies didn’t just develop skills but also sensitivity and value for the ecosystem’s interconnections. I really appreciate how Turner provides concrete structures/examples: i) Burning: --This is a dire topic as today’s uncontrolled fires increasingly threaten settler colonial countries. --Previously, indigenous stewardship leveraged the use of controlled burning from understanding nature’s cycles (which indeed includes fires, where destruction is controlled by diversity’s resilience, providing opportunities for regeneration: ex. seeds adapted to fires) to co-create a mosaic of diverse ecosystems (new growth/new pastures for grazing, etc.). --Since colonization, forest ecosystems are manufactured for monocrops (i.e. timber, lacking diversity’s natural firebreaks), with natural fires suppressed and indigenous burning banned; thus, colonization has manufactured a continental tinderbox (incredibly high fuel load). Fires are now prone to becoming uncontrollable, occurring during the hottest/driest times, destructively burning off organic material in the soil and jumping into tree crowns. ii) Harvesting: --Unlike crude assumptions of “hunting-gathering�, this involved much more care/labour than just picking berries. Indeed, science is rediscovering this with the field of agroecology, given our biodiversity crisis and destructive industrial agriculture. I’m eager to read Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty. Turner writes:
Anthropologist Eugene Anderson, in his book Ecologies of the Heart, points out that Northwest Coast peoples had the technologies, in the form of fish traps, nets and weirs, to completely eliminate the thousands of individual stocks of salmon in creeks and rivers up and down the coast. Yet when the Europeans arrived they found thriving populations of all of the different salmon species everywhere they looked. Not destroying the salmon populations was a conscious choice—borne out in careful observation and practice and sometimes encoded in ceremony and social sanctions—to ensure that enough salmon returned to spawn each year.
2) Rooted Cultures: --Despite modern science rediscovering indigenous knowledge, how do we encode this knowledge into our culture (i.e. value system)? Let’s contrast: a) Capitalism: --The environment has no value (market “exchange-value�) until it is commodified (privatized/sold) to create capitalist wealth. See: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World --Capitalism’s extreme division of labour has increasingly severed most of us from direct socioecological relations. This dislocation is also at the root of addiction: -The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture -The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit --Turner also mentions Western tales of pre-industrial Europe: “In fact, most of the fairy tales taught me that the woods and forests are scary and unfriendly places for people to be, that they are full of fierce, wild animals and dangerous witches …Note: to unpack this one-liner, we can start with materialist anthropology on how societies better harmonized with nature’s abundance have positive depictions of nature and vice versa. I’d be curious to unpack the stories of heretic/pagan movements, etc.: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation b) Reciprocal Socioecological Relations: --Active and direct observers/participants with ecosystems have increased sensitivity to interconnections and their part in Earth’s wealth. This is encoded in their culture’s value system through: i) Stories: --Rooted to local settings (rooted to place) and encoded with land ethics. --Kin-centric stories use personification (human traits) metaphors (elsewhere called animism) for all members of the eco-system (animals/plants/non-living). --Origins stories can feature no distinctions between humans/animals (indeed, transformations), where animals teach humans and sacrifices were made to provide nature’s gifts which need to be cared for. Every member of the “society of beings all around us� have unique talents to contribute. Mocking nature can lead to disasters. --Quoting James Teit, ethnographer who studied Nlaka’pmx:
Flowers are the valuables of the earth […] Flowers, plants & grass especially the latter are the covering or blanket of the earth. If too much plucked or ruthlessly destroyed [the] earth [is] sorry and weeps. It rains or is angry and makes rain, fog & bad weather.
ii) Ceremonies/Rituals/Protocols/Sanctions/Taboos: --These cultural practices (practicing recognition, respect, responsibilities, reciprocity) include potlatches, training for transitions to adulthood, sacred areas, first food ceremonies, protocols for gathering medicine, etc. --Turner highlights the importance of elders time with youth to pass on their experiences, the use of local languages, ownership of intact hereditary territories, etc. All of these have been directly attacked by colonization (ex. residential schools).
…see comments below for rest of the review�...more
Socio-ecological Relationships 101: An Indigenous Case Study�
Preamble: --This is my first “advanced reader copy� review; it made sense to make time foSocio-ecological Relationships 101: An Indigenous Case Study�
Preamble: --This is my first “advanced reader copy� review; it made sense to make time for this book as the timing was perfect. …I was in the middle of Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, about a settler ecologist investigating the diverse, cooperative ecological relationships within forests here in the Pacific Northwest. …My follow-up question: what is the range of possibilities for how humans fit in (socio-ecological relationships)? For urban/suburban folks (esp. settlers), such relations are obscured by manufactured abstraction, although the recent rise of forest fires are interrupting our illusions. …Simard has brief but striking passages connecting: i) recent scientific analysis applying systems-thinking (ex. tree/fungal cooperation, tree communication, etc.) with ii) long-existing indigenous knowledge (which settlers have compartmentalized outside “science�) --I was of course reminded of Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. There remains a vast chasm between the best of recent science vs. modern socio-ecological relationships/culture (trapped by capitalism/colonization). Kimmerer considers the disconnect between knowing and caring; how do indigenous socio-ecological relationships connect knowledge with cultural value systems? …This book features “Manomin� (colonially called “wild rice�) as a case study.
1) “Natureâ€�: Separation or Connection?: --I was recently discussing different perspectives for restoring ecological biodiversity: a) “Natureâ€� as separate: --One approach is to “set asideâ€� land for “natureâ€�; the framing here is that “natureâ€� is separate from “humansâ€�, so it’s popular amongst modernist/Western technocrats, and tied to conservationist groups (with a huge range, including elitist Malthusian groups who preserve environmental access for the privileged, displacing the marginalized: Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis). …E.O. Wilson popularized this with the label “h²¹±ô´Ú-·¡²¹°ù³Ù³óâ€� (Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life), i.e. setting aside half the Earth for “natureâ€�; a Leftist version is Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. b) Indigenous stewardship: --Another approach recognizes that humans co-create ecologies with the rest the environment, leading to a wide range of outcomes in history/anthropology (from respectful stewardship to the capitalist monocrop forests Simard details). The â€�Anthropoceneâ€� is not the result of some reductionist â€�human natureâ€�.
2) Colonization/Capitalism: Disconnection: --The “Anthropocene� can instead be traced specifically to the processes of colonization/capitalism, which devalues the environment (and many humans) into inanimate objects, as inputs in a linear assembly line (and �waste� disposal) resulting in short-term private profits/endless accumulation/consumerist addiction/disconnection: -Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World -Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails -The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis -Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions --Here, we can bring in the book, which weaves together the experiences of indigenous and settler, academics and creatives. --Indigenous treaties were intended to establish nation-to-nation sharing relationships, but colonization betrayed this as “proof-of-purchase�. Key to colonization/capitalism is severing the socioecological relationships with land and community, to destroy resiliency and build dependency/addiction. We are stripped down into individual workers/consumers surrounded by strangers in an environment managed by others. --Colonization’s changing material conditions include habitat disruptions, where dams (hydroelectricity is often considered clean, but dams have a range of ecological impacts) disturb water levels/flow patterns. Upstream urban/factory wastewater leads to contamination. --The book mentions the indigenous framing of gentle rather than drastic interventions to limit the disruptions and rely on socioecological healing (we can contrast this with, say, technocratic geoengineering schemes to “fix� the climate crisis).
…see comments below for rest of the review (�3. Decolonization: Reconnection�)�...more
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