Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

This book debunks the notion that indigenous knowledge of the environment among Africans or Native North Americans is intrinsically primitive, pure, unchanging, holy, or communal. The editors are David M. Gordon (History, Bowdoin College, US) and Shepard Krech III (emeritus professor of Anthropology, Brown University, US, also a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History). They point out that whether this vision of culture is mocked or revered, it is a European-created myth, opposing a myth of Europeans as advanced, impure, swiftly changing, secular, and individualistic. The editors accept that concepts of indigenous peoples and knowledges can be entrenched and important, and that for all the colonial history of scientific forms of understanding, these also exist as ways to knowledge and are not about to disappear. As a result, the book is more than a debunking. Its essays look at specific historical examples of knowledge of the environment in a world Africans, Euro/Americans, and Native Americans share as diverse individuals and groups. The book works within a traditional framework of Euro/American intellectual culture to more accurately reimagine its own visions of who indigenous African and North American peoples are and what their knowledge of the environment is like. Part one looks at middle grounds, co-inventions, and cultural transfers of knowledge. Part two looks at conflicts. Part three looks at environmental religion, and part four looks at resource rights. The authors are academics, and contact information for each is included at the end of the book. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)