In the last ten years internationally, traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous management systems have caught the attention of many scientists globally. This is a good trend. We don’t know how long this post-deconstructionist window of cultural relativity is going to be open. We’re damn glad it’s open. We hope it stays open long enough to sneak through and get some of our ideas across about a fundamental difference between the Western scientific-oriented environmental movement, which has many good aspects, but which doesn’t fit exactly with indigenous cosmologies and world views. We need then to find out where we can work together.
In wilderness preservation, in land management, forestry, resource management of all kinds, native peoples offer a certain kind of model. But it’s not the biocentric model that you’re familiar with from deep ecology or Aldo Leopold’s land ethics. It’s fundamentally different, and the difference, primarily, is that it’s kin-centric, which is a word that I’ve coined. It’s not in the dictionary. I had to think of something that would explain that relationship in the universe is about equality.
Traditionally, we work with animals and plants, as co-managers with them. We don’t have the moral authority to extend ethics to the land community. What we have the right to do is to make our case as human beings to the natural world. And that compact, that kind of contract between the animals and human beings is what has guided Indians’ subsistent livelihoods, hunting and gathering, Indian agroecology and agriculture in the old world sense for a very, very long time.
There was a time during the fur trading years, when indigenous people in one part of this continent, because of European diseases, and because of the Jesuit attempt to convert mainly the Algonquin peoples of Eastern Canada and Northeastern US to Christianity, that they lost faith in that compact, lost faith in that treaty between the animals and people. There was a time, the elders in the oral tradition say, when animals and human beings could talk to one another; that’s when these compacts were made. This is metaphorical, this is symbolic, but it guides, nonetheless, how traditional indigenous peoples have related to the animal and plant world.
So, I’m talking about a relationship mode, a kin-centric mode, one in which we are all equal, but we have different jobs to do here on earth. If an Indian woman in California was digging corms, or what we call we call Indian potatoes, digging up that soil, aerating it, taking little corms that stick to the mother corm of brodiaea and camas and many other edible corms, they would propagate the little ones and then extend the size of that tract and increase the health and fertility of that tract. Now federal land agencies have come in and fenced off those places to preserve them. Those tracts of Indian potatoes have disappeared. They’ve diminished to the point where they’re nothing like they were formerly.
The valleys around the Bay Area 150 years ago were amazing seas of blue in May and June, as far as the eye could see blooming camas. We can barely find any camas anymore. The elders say if you don’t take care of the plants and animals, they don’t take care of you. That’s reciprocity.
It’s not so much a moral universe, but it’s more reciprocity. It’s more of a compact. We agree to do certain things and the animals and plants agree to do other things, and we honor that commitment; we honor that contract.
In the nineteen twenties in Tomalas Bay, north of San Francisco, there were eleven major clam beds domesticated and harvested, basically semi-domesticated and harvested by Indian people, the Coast Miwok. Fish and Game in California stopped the harvesting in order to protect the resource, and the clam population crashed. Why? Because by moving those clams around, the Coast Miwok spread out the population, and by mitigating against densities, that mitigated against any diseases that would afflict very tightly growing clam populations. So the clams, by being moved, thrived.
At the openings of river mouths on the north coast of California up into Oregon, indigenous people used to clear away the sand spits that closed off the lagoons and closed off the mouth of the rivers in late summer. There was a Chinook run that is now extinct that was totally dependent on that clearing of the sand spits so the Chinook could get up stream before the rains came, so they wouldn’t get eaten by the pelicans and the cormorants and the seals that were hanging out there when they were milling around trying to wait for the rains to come to lift them over that blockage.
Indian people in British Columbia used to take salmon eggs, and transplant them in peat baskets from one stream to another. When the ice ages came, they were there to move those salmon around. When those rivers were blocked, even in recent history with huge logjams due to earth slides, they made a wooden flume and allowed the salmon around, and they would carry the eggs where they couldn’t build a flume to upper regions so those salmon could spawn. They had weirs across the rivers near the mouth of those rivers, and they would let the salmon through once they’d done the harvesting in the morning.
There are many, many stories like this. Native people would clean spawning beds, break up logjams on steep gradient creeks to allow the salmon up, but most importantly, they didn’t fish the open ocean for salmon or anadromous fish. They fished at the mouths of the rivers, and by fishing at the mouths of the rivers and streams, they could control the harvest, they could control how they built their fish traps and selected their fishing hooks for the size and the species of fish they needed, and the others would be let go.
Native people used fire to circle up a herd of elk in the Willamette Valley in Oregon or in the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley. They’d concentrate those deer into a small place, then go in and take the fair to midlands, not the best deer out. They’d let the best go because they had a sense of genetics, of selective breeding and selective harvesting.
Tobacco, which used to be a very important medicine plant that was sowed out in the ashes of slash at midslope in the Klamath Mountains where I live, nicotiana quadrivalvis is virtually extinct because no one is doing that anymore. When they burned in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, they would back-burn around Douglas Fir groves, Western Hemlock groves at the edges of the valley in the foothills, so they would have thermal cover in the summer time. All this was conscious. There’s a lot of academic nonsense in the literature these days asking the question whether Indians were conservationists or not conservationists, or whether they were the first ecologists or not.
The word conservation and the word ecology as we use it in the Western sense, doesn’t exactly fit. For Indian people these methods were their livelihood, and their livelihood depended on reciprocity, and so the forest was seen not just trees as relatives, but trees as relatives and other species as relatives who watched you all the time. It was a forest of eyes that looked at you to see how you were handling the remains of the plants and the animals. The shadow soul was alive for a long time after the animal was killed, and it watched how you treated the remains. Among the native people of in Central Alaska, if they came across a moose that had died, and it was somewhat decomposed, they would still stop and cut it into edible pieces as if it were ready to be eaten to show that shadow soul that they cared and respected that animal. No matter what means it died from, it was still important to show respect. That was the agreement, the compact, between the animals and the people. That’s how it worked.
I could talk a long time about the codependency and the co-evolution through selective harvesting and gathering between indigenous peoples. Ninety-nine point nine percent of our human existence has been non-industrial, non-major agricultural, it has been hunting, gathering and agroecology all mixed up together depending on the season and the resource that needed to be exploited. Some people say that Indians only occupied 0.02 percent of North America land area. That’s just where the villages were, but they forget that they also did seasonal rounds up to the highest elevations they burned, especially in the West at virtually every elevation from sea level and foothill and valley all the way across the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades and traded with their neighbors beyond, burning along the way where and when it was needed.
Because of this intensive and extensive management by indigenous peoples nearly everywhere in North America as forest ecologists, as scientists, as environmental activists, we need to recognize that there is a model here, a baseline that we can derive historically from the oral tradition, the literature, from various scientific techniques such as pyrodendrochronology, reading the history of fire scars. Indian fires set by the women in this area did not show up as fire scars. A moderate severity fire would show up. So we can get a little bit of an idea, but lightening frequency data and even mean return interval, the average times a fire comes through in any given place, even within the scientific community, is not well known.
Eighty-five percent of the plants that were used by Indian people in California were plants that had been burned the year before in order to make them useful in basketry, for ceremonies, for games, for musical instruments, for fishing and hunting gear, for structures, for clothing, medicine and food, and deer and elk habitat and other things. There were three hunts of deer every year where I live. To make that forage right, they had to burn the habitat to make it suitable for the wildlife.
We need to combine indigenous knowledge and land practices with Western ecological science; we need both to work together. We can then work from a reference ecosystem model that guides us to the present time. The landscape has changed. We have fragmentation, exotic plant invasions, toxic pollutants and more. So it’s not that we’re imitating the past; we can’t do that. Once an ecosystem is gone, it’s gone. That’s why conservation is always the first choice. But if we emulate indigenous practices, even though we are restricted at the landscape level by fragmentation, we could to some extent experience a semblance of the basic structure, composition and function of ecosystems during pre-contact times. By working the two systems of knowledge together, even though we can’t translate cosmologies across the board, we will have better ecological science.
