Northwestern North America is a region of high biocultural diversity. Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples here have relied on numerous species of plants, animals, fungi, and algae as sources of food, materials, and medicines. They have developed many strategies for survival and for reducing risks associated with unpredictable, changing environments. This chapter draws from diverse sources to present an overview of Indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge systems, specifically on practices and strategies relating to the management and enhancement of plant, algal, and fungal resources. These include, at a broad scale, plant community ownership, monitoring, conservation, ceremonial oversight, distributed access, knowledge exchange, and numerous technological innovations relating to particular plant resource populations. Practices to maintain the productivity and quality of these resources include the use of fire and other methods to clear areas for berry and geophyte production; soil enhancement through tilling and the use of fertilizers; partial and selective harvesting; thinning, pruning, and coppicing shrubs and trees; and transplanting, scattering, and replanting propagules. We conclude that Indigenous resource management has significantly shaped the abundance and distribution of certain plant species and enhanced the region’s overall plant biodiversity.

This chapter presents a panoramic view of elements in the Linguistic Landscape (LL), using photographs from Ireland, North America, England, and continental Europe. The discussion focuses on the operation of language policies and language choices, the regulation of space in the landscape, discourse elements in graffiti and social protest, and the position of the LL in reflecting and commemorating history. The chapter argues that while language display is crucial to the LL, any written display of language also includes visual and spatial elements which are part of the LL. Some elements such as orthography, letter shape, and text colour, are close to the language system. Others include visual images, the physical medium and ground used for the message, and the size and placement of the message. The chapter takes an inclusive view of language, referring to a wide range of displays that involve lexical elements and copresent modes of expressing meaning. A focus on the LL as discourse shows that restricting the LL to written language is overly limited, and that oral tradition and discourse must also be taken into account.

I have two points to make about the chapter title, and these points will help situate my overall argumentation here.

Delphi did not play a crucial part in the creation and circulation of the predictive oracles. After recalling the importance that the modern narrative of ancient Greek history accords to the idea of Delphi, the relationship between oracular texts, events and historical narrative tradition is discussed, focusing on the question of whether the oracles are pertinent to the event or to the narration of the event. There are reasons to assume that the Delphic predictive responses were integral constituents of oracle stories embedded in narratives usually shaped by popular local knowledge. It can be argued that the origin of those oracle stories coincided with the development of the relevant ‘local’ traditions. What is more, oracular narratives contributed not only to reconfigure the past but also to construct an image of an event, or even the alleged event itself. The conclusion is that the oracle stories that hinge on predictive oracles are intrinsic elements of the cultural identity and image of the past belonging to specific political communities. They cannot have originated in Delphi, and they must be placed within the context of the Hellenic social memory; they are, indeed, an aspect of the pre-Herodotean oral tradition which has not yet been adequately recognised.

The Irish vernacular tradition is among the oldest in Europe, but the role of women in this tradition has long been obscured. The public role of the poet in medieval Ireland was considerable, but the poet was invariably male. For evidence of women poets, we must turn to the oral tradition, the ranks of the baird rather than the more elevated filid, and women connected with religious communities, such as St Samthann, abbess of Clonbroney (fl. 730s). Questions of attribution are often tangled, with words attributed to eminent historical personalities, such as Derbforgaill queen of Bréifne (†1193), regardless of the authorship of the text. Further celebrated instances of this include the poems of Liadan and Cuirithir, Queen Gormlaith, and the ‘Hag of Beare’ (an Caillech Béirre). This last work, most likely the work of a ninth-century nun named Digde, is a meditation on age and mortality in the light of the Christian promise of eternity. Despite the penumbra in which they wrote, Irish women of the medieval period left a powerful and enduring poetic legacy.

Across its many forms, from lullabies to laments and songs, the oral tradition in Irish women’s poetry is rich and various. The oral tradition constitutes a body of subjugated knowledge, in the Foucauldian sense, having been subjected to cultural relegation and erasure in the modern period. Addressing the gaps in the tradition has been a significant challenge, then, as witnessed in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘What Foremothers?’, or attempts to unearth the work of Máire Ní Chrualaoich, ‘the Sappho of Munster’. The celebrated case of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill occurs at the intersection of the tradition and the individual talent, as a unique personal occasion collides with long-established traditions of communal mourning (the caoineadh). Subsequent oral performers too have been no less outspoken on questions of marriage, women’s rights, the Famine, and other defining issues of their times, and no history of Irish women’s poetry is complete without an assessment of their contribution.

This essay surveys the small but compelling body of poetry written by women in Ireland, in English and Irish, in the seventeenth century. The Irish bardic tradition generally excluded women, but exceptions do occur, as when a bardic poem addressed to the teenaged Brighid Nic Gearailt elicits a response from its subject. The bardic poems of Caitlín Dubh are another exception again, memorialising an Irish-speaking Protestant loyalist, the Earl of Thomond. Women did, however, occupy a central role in the caoine/caoineadh traditions (the rituals of verse and oral lament). In the Anglophone tradition, poets such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Southwell, and Katherine Philips explore their marginality from their positions as colonial Protestant writers, while still engaging sympathetically with Ireland as setting and subject matter. The network of connections between writers and readers is often complex, but the picture that emerges comprehensively deepens our understanding of Irish poetry from this period.

Native American oral traditions unsettle any notion of linear temporality, colonial and otherwise. This chapter therefore does not observe the requirements of “history” in the usual sense. Instead, it recommends appraising the evidence of orally transmitted Indigenous texts, collected and edited under conditions of colonial reeducation and cultural trauma, to force us to think critically about the implicit assumptions inherent in our use of the term “history.” The chapter shows that oral narratives have the capacity to condense various temporal events into complex, symbolically overdetermined stories that are both literary and historical; it discusses the performative aspects of oral traditions, without which written texts are only partially intelligible; it argues that oral texts are crucially observant of place and land; and it proposes to give more weight to oral traditions in studies of Native American literature, as well as in educational settings today.

This chapter focuses on a particular aspect of South African history in which European men were incorporated into Bomvana and Mpondo societies living along the southeast coast of the former Transkei, where they subsequently founded new clans. With reference to the collection of oral traditions from contemporary members of these clans by various scholars including the author, the role of oral traditions as accurate repositories of historical information and as the products of dynamic social and historical processes is discussed and evaluated. Oral traditions are not only bodies of knowledge but also multidimensional in that they frequently include song, dance, gesture, intonation and other audiovisual elements. As such, they are particularly suited for digitisation and dissemination on the Internet. Oral traditions that have already been documented, and others yet to be accumulated, provide essential educational and scholarly resources in the development of decolonised curricula, and potentially serve as tools for the promotion of multilingualism and multiculturalism in the classroom and beyond.