This is the kind of language and languaging that we need in our school curricula that can become a common vocabulary behind what I truly hope will be a Green New Deal with the next administration.
This shift also needs to inform our thinking towards Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing, or epistemologies, themselves. Not as something backward or that can be "usefully" appropriated (stolen) but rather approached in a respectul, humble way. For example, as mentioned in this piece, the indigenous uses of fire provide a complex view that is entirely new to Western thinking. To this end, land managers need to partner, on an equal basis, with native communities everywhere.
Finally, although not mentioned but abundantly related is that we also have to preserve all indigenous languages, as well, as it is this very life- and planet-saving knowledge that is contained within.
Enjoy!
-Angela Valenzuela
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| ILLUSTRATION BY LUISA RIVERA/YALE E360 |
From
Alaska to Australia, scientists are turning to the knowledge of traditional
people for a deeper understanding of the natural world. What they are learning
is helping them discover more about everything from melting Arctic ice, to
protecting fish stocks, to controlling wildfires.
BY JIM ROBBINS • APRIL 26, 2018
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While he
was interviewing Inuit elders in Alaska to find out more about their knowledge
of beluga whales and how the mammals might respond to the changing Arctic,
researcher Henry Huntington lost track of the conversation as the hunters
suddenly switched from the subject of belugas to beavers.
It turned
out though, that the hunters were still really talking about whales. There had
been an increase in beaver populations, they explained, which had reduced
spawning habitat for salmon and other fish, which meant less prey for the
belugas and so fewer whales.
“It was a
more holistic view of the ecosystem,” said Huntington. And an important tip for
whale researchers. “It would be pretty rare for someone studying belugas to be
thinking about freshwater ecology.”
Around the globe,
researchers are turning to what is known as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
to fill out an understanding of the natural world. TEK is deep knowledge of a
place that has been painstakingly discovered by those who have adapted to it
over thousands of years. “People have relied on this detailed knowledge for
their survival,” Huntington and a colleague wrote in an article on
the subject. “They have literally staked their lives on its accuracy
and repeatability.”
Tapping
into this traditional wisdom is playing an outsized role in the Arctic, where
change is happening rapidly.
This
realm has long been studied by disciplines under headings such as
ethno-biology, ethno-ornithology, and biocultural diversity. But it has gotten
more attention from mainstream scientists lately because of efforts to better
understand the world in the face of climate change and the accelerating loss of
biodiversity.
Anthropologist Wade Davis,
now at the University of British Columbia, refers to the constellation of the
world’s cultures as the “ethnosphere,”
or “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations,
intuitions, brought into being by human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.
It’s a symbol of all that we are, and all that we can be, as an astonishingly
inquisitive species.”
One estimate says that
while native peoples only comprise some 4 or 5 percent of the world’s
population, they use almost a quarter of the world’s land surface and
manage 11 percent of
its forests. “In doing so, they maintain 80 percent of the planet’s
biodiversity in, or adjacent to, 85 percent of the world’s protected areas,”
writes Gleb Raygorodetsky, a researcher with the POLIS Project on Ecological
Governance at the University of Victoria and the author of The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from
the Edge of Climate Change.
Tapping into this wisdom is
playing an outsized role in sparsely settled places such as the Arctic, where
change is happening rapidly – warming is occurring twice as fast as other parts
of the world. Tero Mustonen, a Finnish researcher and chief of his village of
Selkie, is pioneering the blending of TEK and mainstream science as the
director of a project called the Snowchange
Cooperative. “Remote sensing can detect changes,” he says. “But what
happens as a result, what does it mean?” That’s where traditional knowledge can
come into play as native people who make a living on the landscape as hunters
and fishers note the dramatic changes taking place in remote locales –
everything from thawing permafrost to change in reindeer migration and other
types of biodiversity redistribution.
The Skolt Sami people of
Finland have documented a local decline in Atlantic salmon and are
collaborating with scientists on a project to restore them. GLEB RAYGORODETSKY
The Skolt Sami people of
Finland, for example, participated in
a study that was published in the journal Science last
year, which adopted indicators of environmental changes based on TEK. The Sami
have seen and documented a decline in salmon in the Näätämö River, for
instance. Now, based on their knowledge, they are adapting – reducing the
number of seine nets they use to catch fish, restoring spawning sites, and also
taking more pike, which prey on young salmon, as part of their catch. The
project is part of a co-management process between the Sami and the government
of Finland.
ALSO
ON YALE E360
Food Insecurity: Arctic
heat is threatening indigenous life. Read more.
The
project has also gathered information from the Sami about insects, which are
temperature dependent and provide an important indicator of a changing Arctic.
The Sami have witnessed dramatic changes in the range of insects that are
making their way north. The scarbaeid beetle, for example, was documented by
Sami people as the invader arrived in the forests of Finland and Norway, far
north of its customary range. It has also become part of the Sami oral history.
It’s not
only in the Arctic. Around the world there are efforts to make use of
traditional wisdom to gain a better and deeper understanding of the planet –
and there is sometimes a lot at stake.
Record brush fires burned
across Australia in 2009, killing 173 people and injuring more than 400. The day
the number of fires peaked – February 7 – is known as Black Saturday. It led to
a great deal of soul searching in Australia, especially as climate warming has
exacerbated fire seasons there.
Land
managers in Australia have adopted many of the fire-control practices of the
aborigines and have partnered with native people.
Bill Gammage is an academic
historian and fellow at the Humanities Research Center of the Australian
National University, and his book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How the
Aborigines Made Australia, looks at the complex and adept way that
aborigines, prior to colonization in 1789, managed the landscape with “fire and
no fire” – something called “fire stick farming.”
They used
“cool” fires to control everything from biodiversity to water supply to the
abundance of wildlife and edible plants. Gammage noted five stages of the
indigenous use of fire – first was to control wildfire fuel; second, to
maintain diversity; third, to balance species; fourth, to ensure abundance; and
five, to locate resources conveniently and predictably. The current regime, he
says, is still struggling with number one.
“Controlled
fire averted uncontrolled fire,” Gammage says, “and fire or no-fire distributed
plants with the precision of a flame edge. In turn, this attracted or deterred
grazing animals and located them in habitats each preferred, making them
abundant, convenient, and predictable. All was where fire or no-fire put it.
Australia was not natural in 1788, but made.”
While the
skill of aborigines with fire had been noted before the giant brushfires –
early settlers remarked on the “park-like” nature of the landscape – and
studied before, it’s taken on new urgency. That’s why Australian land managers
have adopted many of the ideas and partnered with native people as co-managers.
The fire practices of the aborigines are also being taught and used in other
countries.
Scientists have looked to
Australian natives for other insights into the natural world. A team of
researchers collaborated with natives based on their observations of kites and
falcons that fly with flaming branches from a forest fire to start other fires.
It’s well known that birds will hunt mice and lizards as they flee the flames
of a wildfire. But stories among indigenous people in northern Australia held
that some birds actually started fires by dropping a burning branch in unburned
places. Based on this TEK, researchers watched and documented this behavior.
Aboriginal Australians
were the first to observe that kites hunt their prey by dropping burning
branches to start new brush fires. BOB GOSFORD
“It’s a feeding frenzy,
because out of these grasslands comes small birds, lizards, insects, everything
fleeing in front of the fire,” said Bob Gosford, an indigenous rights lawyer
and ornithologist, who worked on the research,
in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2016.
Another recent study down
under found that an ancient practice of using fire to clear land to improve
hunting also creates a more diverse mosaic of re-growth that increases the
number of the primate prey species: monitor lizards and kangaroos.
“Westerners
have done little but isolate ourselves from nature,” said Mark Bonta, an
assistant professor at Penn State Altoona who was on a co-author on the paper
on fire and raptors. “Yet those who make a point of connecting with our earth
in some form have enormous knowledge because they interact with a species. When
you get into conservation, [that knowledge] is even more important.” Aboriginal
people “don’t see themselves as superior to or separated from animals. They are
walking storehouses of knowledge,” he said.
The Maya people of
Mesoamerica have much to teach us about farming, experts say. Researchers have
found that they preserve an astonishing amount of biodiversity in their forest
gardens, in harmony with the surrounding forest. “The active gardens found
around Maya forest villagers’ houses shows that it’s the most diverse domestic
system in the world,” integrated into the forest ecosystem, writes Anabel Ford,
who is head of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California
at Santa Barbara. “These forest gardeners are heroes, yet their skill and sophistication
have too long been set aside and devalued.”
Some
native people have the ability to adopt the “perspective of many creatures and
objects – rocks, water, clouds,” a researcher says.
Valuing these life ways is
an important part of the process. For the Skolt Sami, writes Mustonen,
“seeing their language and culture valued led to an increase in self-esteem and
power over their resources.”
It may
not just be facts about the natural world that are important in these
exchanges, but different ways of being and perceiving. In fact, there are
researchers looking into the relationship between some indigenous people and
the very different ways they see the world.
Felice Wyndham is an
ecological anthropologist and ethnobiologist who has noted that people she has
worked with can intimately sense the world beyond their body. “It’s a form of
enhanced mindfulness,” she says. “It’s quite common, you see it in most
hunter-gatherer groups. It’s an extremely developed skill base of cognitive
agility, of being able to put yourself into a viewpoint and perspective of many
creatures or objects – rocks, water, clouds.
“We, as
humans, have a remarkable sensitivity, imagination, and ability to be
cognitively agile,” Wyndham says. “If we are open to it and train ourselves to
learn how to drop all of the distractions to our sensory capacity, we’re able
to do so much more biologically than we use in contemporary industrial
society.”
Among the most important
messages from traditional people is their equanimity and optimism. There “is no
sense of doom and gloom,” says Raygorodetsky. “Despite dire circumstances, they
maintain hope for the future.”
· Email
Jim Robbins is
a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New
York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His
latest book, The Wonder of Birds: What they Tell Us about the World,
Ourselves and a Better Future, is due out in May. MOREABOUT JIM ROBBINS →
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