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This book examines ways of conserving, managing, and interacting with plant and animal resources by Native American cultural groups of the Pacific Coast of North America, from Alaska to California. These practices helped them maintain and restore ecological balance for thousands of years. Building upon the authors' and others' previous works, the book brings in perspectives from ethnography and marine evolutionary ecology. The core of the book consists of Native American testimony: myths, tales, speeches, and other texts, which are treated from an ecological viewpoint. The focus on animals and in-depth research on stories, especially early recordings of texts, set this book apart. The book is divided into two parts, covering the Northwest Coast, and California. It then follows the division in lifestyle between groups dependent largely on fish and largely on seed crops. It discusses how the survival of these cultures functions in the contemporary world, as First Nations demand recognition and restoration of their ancestral rights and resource management practices.
List of contents
- 1. Commons and Management. - 2. Looking to the Sea: Economics and Ecology in the Pacific Northwest. - 3. Looking to the Land: Terrestrial Ecology. - 4. Traditional Cultural Areas. - 5. Social and Cultural-Ecological Dynamics. - 6. Traditional Resource Management. - 7. White Settler Contact and Its Consequences. - 8. The Ideology Behind It All. - 9. Animism and Rationality: North vs "West". - 10. Respect and Its Corollaries. - 11. Teachings and Stories. - 12. The Visual Art. - 13. Conclusions. - 14. Appendix 1: Indigenous California. - 15. Appendix 2: Wider Connections. - 16. Appendix 3: The "Wasteful" Native Debunked.
About the author
E. N. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside. He received a B.A. in anthropology from Harvard College in 1962 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. He taught at Riverside from 1966-2006, when he became emeritus. He has worked on cultural anthropology, cultural ecology, ethnobiology, and food and nutrition in China, Pacific Northwest, and the Yucatan (Yucatec Maya). He was President of the Society of Ethnobiology from 2007-2009 and received the Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award from it in 2013 for his outstanding contributions to the field. He has been a member of the Editorial Board of the
Journal of Ethnobiology,
Human Ecology, and the
Journal of Ecological Anthropology. He has done field work in Hong Kong, Malaysia, British Columbia, and Quintana Roo.
Raymond Pierotti is Associate Professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Indigenous Nations Studies), University of Kansas. Dr. Ray Pierotti's research investigates the evolutionary biology of vertebrates with male parental care and socially monogamous breeding systems. He collects data on individual variation in behavioral and ecological aspects of parental care. His primary research question is how an individual organism becomes successful at reproduction and contributes to future generations.
