Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T05:05:18.544Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Reintegrating Cultural and Natural Landscapes

Indigenous Homelands of the Alsek-Dry Bay Region, Alaska

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2024

Edward A. Johnson
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Susan M. Arlidge
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Get access

Summary

Landscapes are important frames for understanding and bridging environmental perspectives, including between Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems. Landscapes are both “natural” and “cultural,” for, as Indigenous societies attest, all landscapes manifest the coevolutionary interplay of human and nonhuman forces.  We apply three integrated ecological lenses to analyze this interplay: historical ecology, ethno-ecology, and political ecology. Our case study is the Alsek-Dry Bay region of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada, at the intersection of the northern Tlingit and Athabaskan worlds. Historically an epicenter of astonishing geological dynamism and disruption, biological productivity and diversity, this landscape was also a mecca of cultural exchange, contestation, and appropriation. Ironically, the Alsek-Dry Bay landscape is now “preserved” as the center of a celebrated World Heritage Site based solely on its “natural” landscapes and “wilderness” character, and not for its Indigenous identity as a place of outstanding cultural significance – where the trickster-worldmaker Raven literally transformed the cosmos and topography – and the product of deep cultural-environmental histories. Bringing these ecological perspectives together enables a broader appreciation of the natural and cultural dynamism that has shaped such sites and of the enduring value and lessons of Indigenous knowledge systems that have coevolved with rapidly changing landscapes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Natural Science and Indigenous Knowledge
The Americas Experience
, pp. 7 - 31
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, B. (1998). Interview and Stories of Dry Bay, Alaska, Project Jukebox. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska. https://jukebox.uaf.edu/p/3510 (accessed October 23, 2023).Google Scholar
Baleé, W. (2013). Cultural Forests of the Amazon: An Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cronon, W. (1978). Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Cruikshank, J. (2005). Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press and Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Dauenhauer, N. M. and Dauenhauer, R. (1987). Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors, Tlingit Oral Narratives. Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Dauenhauer, N. M. and Dauenhauer, R. (1994). Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories. Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
De Laguna, F. (1972). Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 7. 3 vols. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Denevan, W. (1992). The pristine myth: the landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3), 369–85.Google Scholar
Deur, D., Thornton, T., Lahoff, R. and Hebert, J. (2015). Yakutat Tlingit and Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve: An Ethnographic Overview and Assessment. Anchorage, AK: USDI National Park Service, Alaska Region.Google Scholar
Deur, D. and Turner, N. J. (2005). Keeping it Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Fairhead, J. and Leach, M. (1996). Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Garibaldi, A. and Turner, N. J. (2004). Cultural keystone species: implications for ecological conservation and restoration. Ecology and Society, 9(3), 1.Google Scholar
Gmelch, G. and Gmelch, S. B. (2018). In the Field: Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Dwelling, Livelihood, and Skill. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Langdon, S. J. (2006). Traditional Knowledge and Harvesting of Salmon by Huna and Hinyaa Tlingit. Study Number: FIS 02–104. Juneau, AK: US Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Subsistence Management and Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes.Google Scholar
Langdon, S. J. (2020). Tlingit engagement with salmon: the philosophy and practice of relational stability. In Thornton, T. and Bagwhat, S., eds., The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 169–85.Google Scholar
Lepofsky, D. (2009). Traditional resource management: past, present and future. Journal of Ethnobiology (Special issue: Indigenous Resource Management: Past, Present and Future, Lepofsky, D., ed.), 29(2), 184212.Google Scholar
Lepofsky, D. and Lertzman, K. P. (2008). Documenting ancient plant management in the northwest of North America. Botany, 86, 129–45.Google Scholar
Lepofsky, D., Smith, N. F., Cardinal, N., et al. (2015). Ancient shellfish mariculture on the northwest coast of North America. American Antiquity, 80(2), 236–59.Google Scholar
Loso, M. G., Larsen, C. F., Tober, B. S., et al. (2021). Quo vadis, Alsek? Climate-driven glacier retreat may change the course of a major river outlet in southern Alaska. Geomorphology, 384, 107701.Google Scholar
Neumann, R. P. (2011). Political ecology III: theorizing landscape. Progress in Human Geography, 35(6), 843–50.Google Scholar
Pauley, D. (1995). Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 10, 430.Google Scholar
Ramos, J. and Mason, R. (2004). Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Tlingit People Concerning the Sockeye Salmon Fishery of the Dry Bay Area. Anchorage and Yakutat, AK: USDI National Park Service Alaska Region and the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe.Google Scholar
Sauer, C. O. (1963). Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) (2006). Transcript of discussion of Ish conducted by the Council of Traditional Scholars, November 2005. Copy in William Paul Archives. Juneau, AK: Sealaska Heritage Institute.Google Scholar
Swanton, J. R. (1909). Tlingit myths and texts. Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 39, 1451.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F. (2008). Being and Place among the Tlingit. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F., ed. (2012). Haa Léelk’w Has Aaní Saax’ú: Our Grandparents’ Names on the Land. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press and Juneau, AK: Sealaska Heritage Institute.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F. (2014). A tale of three parks: Tlingit conservation, representation, and repatriation in southeastern Alaska’s National Parks. In Stevens, S., ed., Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas: A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, pp. 108–29.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F. and Deur, D. (2015). Introduction to the special section on marine cultivation among Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast. Human Ecology, 43(2), 187.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F., Deur, D., and Adams, B. (2019). Raven’s work in Tlingit ethno-geography. In Holton, G. and Thornton, T. F., eds., Language and Toponymy in Alaska and Beyond: Papers in Honor of James Kari, Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 17. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 3955.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F., Deur, D., and Kitka, H. Sr. (2015). Cultivation of salmon and other marine resources on the northwest coast of North America. Human Ecology, 43(2), 189–99.Google Scholar
Thornton, T. F. and Moss, M. (2021). Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Turner, N. J., Armstrong, C. G., and Lepofsky, D. (2021). Adopting a root: documenting ecological and cultural signatures of plant translocations in northwestern North America. American Anthropologist, 123(4), 879–97.Google Scholar
Turner, N. J., Deur, D., and Lepofsky, D. (2013). Plant management systems of British Columbia’s First Peoples. BC Studies (Special issue: Ethnobotany in British Columbia: Plants and People in a Changing World, Turner, N. J. and Lepofsky, D., eds.), 179, 107–33.Google Scholar
UNESCO (2022a). Kluane / Wrangell–St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/72/ (last accessed April 2022).Google Scholar
UNESCO (2022b). The criteria for selection. https://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/ (last accessed April 2022).Google Scholar
Wallace, A. F. C. (2005). The consciousness of time. Anthropology of Consciousness, 16(2), 115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, F. (2001). Interview on Dry Bay, Alaska, Project Jukebox. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska. https://jukebox.uaf.edu/interviews/3520 (accessed October 23, 2023).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×