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How birds shaped the world view of the southern Indians? Before the
massive environmental change wrought by the European colonization
of the South, hundreds of species of birds filled the region's
flyways in immeasurable numbers. Before disease, war, and
displacement altered the South's earliest human landscape, Native
Americans hunted and ate birds and made tools and weapons from
their beaks, bones, and talons. More significant to Shepard Krech
III, Indians adorned themselves with feathers, invoked avian powers
in ceremonies and dances, and incorporated bird imagery on pottery,
carvings, and jewelry. Krech, a renowned authority on Native
American interactions with nature, reveals as never before the
omnipresence of birds in Native American life. From the time of the
earliest known renderings of winged creatures in stone and
earthworks through the nineteenth century, when Native southerners
took part in decimating bird species with highly valued,
fashionable plumage, ""Spirits of the Air"" examines the complex
and changeable influences of birds on the Native American world
view. We learn of birds for which places and people were named;
birds common in iconography and oral traditions; birds important in
ritual and healing; and birds feared for their links to witches and
other malevolent forces. Still other birds had no meaning for
Native Americans. Krech shows us these invisible animals too,
enriching our understanding of both the Indian-bird dynamic and the
incredible diversity of winged life once found in the South. A
crowning work drawing on Krech's distinguished career in
anthropology and natural history, ""Spirits of the Air"" recovers
vanished worlds and shows us our own anew.
Exploring the motivations of Indians involved in the fur trade, the
contributors to this volume challenge the spiritualist
interpretation set forth by Calvin Martin in "Keepers of the Game,"
which dismisses the lure of European goods--the power and leisure
that firearms and other tools afforded the Indians--and instead
attributes the Indians' willingness to overkill wildlife to the
epidemics that decimated their ranks, that not only shattered their
religious bonds with game but also unleashed a furious revenge
against the animals.
Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles
for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often
viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts.
This collection draws from African and North American cases to
argue that the forms of knowledge identified as
\u201cindigenous\u201d resulted from strategies to control
environmental resources during and after colonial encounters. At
times indigenous knowledges represented a \u201cmiddle ground\u201d
of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized;
elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and
struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their
hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and
traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific,
which they associated with European colonialism. Indigenous
Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational
insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous
knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book
that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and
should relate to environmental policy-making. Contributors: David
Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M.
Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker
Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr.,
Marsha Weisiger
Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles
for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often
viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts.
This collection draws from African and North American cases to
argue that the forms of knowledge identified as "indigenous"
resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during
and after colonial encounters.
At times indigenous knowledges represented a "middle ground" of
intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere,
indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle.
The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms
of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed
to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated
with European colonialism.
"Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment" offers comparative and
transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging
indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result
is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges
can and should relate to environmental policy-making.
Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen
Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua
Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A.
Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger
"Native Americans and the Environment" brings together an
interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars whose works continue
and complicate the conversations that Shepard Krech started in "The
Ecological Indian," Hailed as a masterful synthesis and yet
assailed as a problematic political tract, Shepard Krech's work
prompted significant discussions in scholarly communities and among
Native Americans. Rather than provide an explicit assessment of
Krech's thesis, the contributors to this volume explore related
historical and contemporary themes and subjects involving Native
Americans and the environment, reflecting their own research and
experience. At the same time, they also assess the larger issue of
representation. The essays examine topics as divergent as
Pleistocene extinctions and the problem of storing nuclear waste on
modern reservations. They also address the image of the "ecological
Indian" and its use in natural history displays alongside a
consideration of the utility and consequences of employing such a
powerful stereotype for political purposes. The nature and
evolution of traditional ecological knowledge is examined, as is
the divergence between belief and practice in Native resource
management. Geographically, the focus extends from the eastern
Subarctic to the Northwest Coast, from the Great Lakes to the Great
Plains to the Great Basin.
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