Book Details How Native Americans Of Pacific Coast Sustainably Managed Resources

January 11, 2023
By Eurasia Review

For at least 10,000 years before contact with European settlers, Native American societies from Alaska to California conserved and interacted with natural resources using a more sustainable and spiritual approach than anything seen in the modern industrial world.



A new book, “Respect and Responsibility in Pacific Coast Indigenous Nations: The World Raven Makes” (Springer, 2022), co-written by an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Kansas, explores key philosophies and practices that guided how these significant civilizations in the Pacific Northwest related to their environment.

“One of the things that governs their thinking that we think is necessary for the contemporary world is that people have to show respect and responsibility towards one another and the natural world as a way of trying to guarantee our survival to the future,” said Raymond Pierotti, associate professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at KU. The book was co-written with Eugene Anderson, professor emeritus of anthropology and a prominent ethnobiologist at the University of California, Riverside.

“The audience we wrote it for is the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest,” Pierotti said. “Gene Anderson, my co-author, has worked with them for years on their societies, cultures and knowledge systems. He’s an anthropologist by training, but he’s also very understanding of ecology and the way that it functions. Gene brought me in because he thought my experience working on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and relationships with nature would enhance the overall power and impact of the book.”

Examining how Native American cultural groups found balance with nature, the authors in part curated a collection of Native American testimony — including myths, stories and speeches that signify an ecological viewpoint. This is important, Pierotti noted, because the government of Canada now recognizes Indigenous accounts as equivalent to Western traditions of evidence in court cases concerning land claims and decisions about land management.

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https://www.eurasiareview.com/11012023-book-details-how-native-americans-of-pacific-coast-sustainably-managed-resources/