Anderson, Tending the Wild Presentation (Avatar Day) PDF

Anderson, Tending the Wild, Chapter 4, “Methods of Caring for the Land” “Indigenous peoples have been pingeonholed by social scientists into one of two categories, ‘hunter-gatherer’ or ‘agriculturalist,’ obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as wildland managers … The image of the h...

Anderson, Tending the Wild, Chapter 4, “Methods of Caring for the Land” “Indigenous peoples have been pingeonholed by social scientists into one of two categories, ‘hunter-gatherer’ or ‘agriculturalist,’ obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as wildland managers … The image of the hunter-gatherer is of a wanderer or nomad, plucking berries or pinching greens and living a hand to mouth existence; agriculturalist, at the other extreme, refers to one who completely transforms wildland environments, saves and sows seeds, and clears engulfing vegetation by means of fire and hand weeding. … But a reassessment of the record in California reveals that land management systems have influenced the size, extent, pattern, structure, and composition of the flora and fauna within a multitude of vegetation types throughout the state. When the first Europeans visited California, therefore, they did not find in many places a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended ‘garden’ that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding and transplanting.” (125-6) Anderson, Chapter 8: California’s Cornucopia: A calculated abundance “Early European and American explorers and settlers saw in the productive landscape an ever-full horne of plenty that gave the native people no need to be industrious. In their eyes, native people were merely the reapers of this abundance, not the sowers … years later, anthropologists would make the same mistake, arguing that the rich suite of plant and animal species and their high densities and numbers squelched nay motivation to cultivate food plants and thus develop agriculture.” (241) MIND-BLOWING HISTORICAL/IDEOLOGICAL IRONY:  the effect of native land management – ABUNDANCE on a scale UNIMAGINABLE TO (and unachievable by) EUROPEAN AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES– “ is mistaken for the cause of supposed lack of native land management/agriculture.  Native people are stereotyped as “indolent” / lazy, living off what is merely “given” rather than driven to “improve” the land. But “indigenous people burned areas to stimulate food-producing pants and discourage their competitors, carefully tended and pruned seed- bearing shrubs and trees to increase their productivity, and dug fleshy tubers, bulbs and corms in ways that ensured their existence and vitality over time. To a considerable extent, therefore, the abundance of the California landscape was an anthropogenic phenomenon, based on human labor and knowledge. Many ‘wild’ edible plants bore more profusely when they were helped along in some way.” (241) “When societies adopted agriculture, it triggered a trend toward the simplification of human relationships with nature. Today’s industrial agriculture relies on fewer and fewer crops, monoculture, chemical fertilizer, and pesticides, creating homogenized landscapes in which everything is dead but the crop.” (253) “Much of the rich material disclosing the ancient management of wilderness lies in the dusty diaries and handwritten notes of anthropologists and the eyewitness accounts of early European settlers. For example, Kroeber’s 1939 field notes, housed at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, record that the Yurok of northwestern California practiced burning at a frequency that was appropriate for each cultural purpose: burning of hazelnut for basketry occurred every two years, burning under tan oaks to keep the brush down took place every three years, burning for elk feed occurred every fourth or fifth year; burning in the redwoods for brush and downed fuel control occurred every three to five years. These observations did not chang his thinking about ‘hunter gatherers,’ nor did he publish them.” (126)  Where does a new paradigm about indigenous ecologies come from? Reading the same archive differently.  And: Consulting real life indigenous people as authorities on the subject. Duh. (p. 126)