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Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as "indigenous" resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a "middle ground" of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

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Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as "indigenous" resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a "middle ground" of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

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Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Overview

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as "indigenous" resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a "middle ground" of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780821420799
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Publication date: 11/15/2013
Series: Ecology & History
Edition description: 1
Pages: 344
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David M. Gordon is an associate professor of history at Bowdoin College. He is author of Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa and numerous articles on African social, cultural, and environmental history.

Shepard Krech III is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Brown University and a research associate in the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. A trustee of the National Humanities Center, he is the author or editor of many essays and books, including The Ecological Indian and The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, edited with John McNeill and Carolyn Merchant.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment David M. Gordon Shepard Krech III 1

Part 1 Middle Ground

Chapter 1 Looking Like a White Man: Geopolitical Strategies of the Iowa Indians during American Incorporation David Bernstein 27

Chapter 2 On Biomedicine, Transfers of Knowledge, and Malaria Treatments in Eastern North America and Tropical Africa James L. A. Webb 53

Chapter 3 Indigenous Ethnoornithology in the American South Shepard Krech III 69

Chapter 4 Nation-Building Knowledge: Dutch Indigenous Knowledge and the Invention of White South Africanism, 1890-1909 Lance Van Sittert 94

Part 2 Conflict

Chapter 5 Locust Invasions and Tensions over Environmental and Bodily Health in the Colonial Transkei Jacob Tropp 113

Chapter 6 Navajos, New Dealers, and the Metaphysics of Nature Marsha Weisiger 129

Chapter 7 Cherokee Medicine and the 1824 Smallpox Epidemic Paul Kelton 151

Part 3 Environmental Religion

Chapter 8 Spirit of the Salmon: Native Religion, Rights, and Resource Use in the Columbia River Basin Andrew H. Fisher 173

Chapter 9 Indigenous Spirits: Ancestral Power in a South-Central African Kingdom David M. Gordon 196

Chapter 10 Recruiting Nature: Snakes, Serpents, and Social Movements in East Africa and North America Parker Shipton 216

Part 4 Resource Rights

Chapter 11 Marine Tenure of the Makahs Joshua Reid 243

Chapter 12 Reinventing "Traditional" Medicine in Postapartheid South Africa Karen Flint 259

Chapter 13 Dilemmas of "Indigenous Tenure" in South Africa: Traditional Authorities and the Constitutional Challenge to the 2004 Communal Land Rights Act Derick Fay 287

Selected Bibliography 307

Contributors 317

Index 319

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