Beyond the “Ecological Indian”: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America

Smithers, Gregory D.

doi:10.1093/envhis/emu125

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…2011; Uprety et al. 2012), and public health research (Simonds and Christopher 2013), as well as environmental history and law (Cruikshank 2005; Smithers 2015; Williams and Hardison 2013). TK and IK have also played an increasingly significant role in either collaborative or NA-directed research (Milburn 2004; Bassett et al.…”

Section: Background: Cultural Plurality and Environmental Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native American Perspectives on Health and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Isaac

Finn

Joe

et al. 2018

Environ Health Perspect

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Background: Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a conceptual framework that highlights Indigenous knowledge (IK) systems. Although scientific literature has noted the relevance of TEK for environmental research since the 1980s, little attention has been given to how Native American (NA) scholars engage with it to shape tribal-based research on health, nor how non-Native scholars can coordinate their approaches with TEK. This coordination is of particular importance for environmental health sciences (EHS) research exploring interdisciplinary approaches and the integration of environmental and human health. Objective: Our perspective on TEK arose from a series of Health and Culture Research Group (HCRG) workshops that identified gaps in existing EHS methodologies that are based on a reliance on Euro-American concepts for assessing environmental exposures in tribal communities. These prior methods neither take into account cultural behavior nor community responses to these. Our objective is to consider NA perspectives on TEK when analyzing relationships between health and the environment and to look at how these may be applied to address this gap. Discussion: The authors—the majority of whom are NA scholars—highlight two research areas that consider health from a TEK perspective: food systems and knowledge of medicinal plants. This research has yielded data, methods, and knowledge that have helped Indigenous communities better define and reduce health risks and protect local natural food resources, and this TEK approach may prove of value to EHS research. Conclusion: NA perspectives on TEK resulting from the HCRG workshops provide an opportunity for developing more accurate Indigenous health indicators (IHI) reflecting the conceptualizations of health maintained in these communities. This approach has the potential to bridge the scientific study of exposure with methods addressing a tribal perspective on the sociocultural determinants of health, identifying potential new areas of inquiry in EHS that afford nuanced evaluations of exposures and outcomes in tribal communities. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP1944

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Section: Background: Cultural Plurality and Environmental Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native American Perspectives on Health and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Isaac

Finn

Joe

et al. 2018

Environ Health Perspect

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“…These communities must often, on the one hand, develop and use limited natural resources on their own lands to generate the adequate revenues or otherwise provide basic goods and services to community members. At the same time, these communities need to continue practicing and observing their distinct “traditional” relationships with those lands as a means of both socio-spiritual renewal and ecological care (e.g., Curley 2019; Smithers 2015). It is imperative to hear and take seriously the existential threat the planet’s collapsing climate poses to these communities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nature and the native

Vasko

2022

Critical Research on Religion

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Critics of climate collapse and colonization in the Americas rightly identify the origin of these twin crises in early modern political theologies. They seek to combat these crises with new political theologies of nature that pay greater reverence to “native” peoples’ ecological knowledge. But in doing so, these critics subtly, perhaps unwittingly, recall elements of the colonial power they criticize. I explain why this is the case, examining Bartolomé de Las Casas’s use of naturales in his critiques of Spanish Conquest, and Thomas Harriot’s use of naturall inhabitants in his writing on English colonization to describe “native” Americans. Both authors aimed to promote politico-theological reverence for “native” peoples and their relationships with “nature.” This set into motion a productive form of power operating in modern political theologies. This power works by legitimizing the European-Christian presence in the Americas through their ability to recognize, respect, and protect “native” relationships with “nature.”

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“…In defense of the forests and rights of Indigenous peoples such as the Penan, environmentalists reframed their knowledge in terms compatible with a Western romantic tradition (Brosius 1997). Critiques of science (including the notion of the history of science as a story of progress) and modern society became projected onto Indigenous knowledge, now designated as a source of new environmental attitudes (Krech 1999;Smithers 2015). Viewed as timeless and outside modernity, Indigenous knowledge became defined in oppositional terms that eschewed any attempt to engage with Indigenous people and their histories on their own terms (Nadasdy 2005).…”

Section: Reconsidering Contemporary Indigenous Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Indigenous Knowledge and Perspectives

Bocking

2023

Historiographies of Science

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Indigenous knowledge, once dismissed as mere folklore, is now widely recognized as an essential dimension of global environmental knowledge. Indigenous people, once excluded, now participate across a range of environmental affairs. Understanding how and why this has occurred requires attention to a complex history of scientists and others constructing ideas about Indigenous knowledge. A variety of scholars, including historians of science, environmental historians, and political ecologists have examined this history, identifying the factors that have influenced expert, public, and institutional perceptions of Indigenous knowledge. These include various colonial and postcolonial contexts, ideas about development, changes in the natural environment, disciplinary perspectives (such as those of anthropology), and shifting views of human-environment relations. Indigenous peoples – as knowledge producers, brokers, and intermediaries – have been crucial to these evolving perceptions, by asserting that their knowledge can be a means of achieving change in both knowledge and politics. The Arctic provides a distinctive setting in which the historical construction of Indigenous knowledge can be examined in more detail.

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Beyond the “Ecological Indian”: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America

Cited by 12 publications

References 6 publications

Native American Perspectives on Health and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Native American Perspectives on Health and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Nature and the native

Indigenous Knowledge and Perspectives

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