Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability

✍ Scribed by Melissa K. Nelson (editor), Daniel Shilling (editor)

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 291
• Series: New Directions in Sustainability and Society
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land. Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Editors and Contributors
Preface
Part I Introduction to Key Concepts and Questions
1 Introduction: The Soul of Sustainability
2 Native Science and Sustaining Indigenous Communities
3 Mishkos Kenomagwen, the Lessons of Grass: Restoring Reciprocity with the Good Green Earth
4 What Do Indigenous Knowledges Do for Indigenous Peoples?
Part II Bedrock: Toward a Kincentric Ethic
5 Indigenous Sustainability: Language, Community Wholeness, and Solidarity
6 A Single Strand: The Nsyilxcin Speaking People’s Tmixw Knowledge as a Model for Sustaining a Life- Force Place
7 Toward a Philosophical Understanding of TEK and Ecofeminism
8 Wolves and Ravens, Science and Ethics: Traditional Ecological Knowledge Meets Long-Term Ecological Research
Part III Extended Web: Land-Care Practices and Plant and Animal Relationships
9 Redefining Sustainability through Kincentric Ecology: Reclaiming Indigenous Lands, Knowledge, and Ethics
10 Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Canada
11 The Radiant Life with Animals
Part IV Global and Legal Implications of Indigenous Sustainability
12 Home: Resistance, Resilience, and Innovation in Māori Economies of Well-Being
13 Indigenous Peoples and “Cultural Sustainability”: The Role of Law and Traditional Knowledge
14 Conclusion: Back in Our Tracks – Embodying Kinship as If the Future Mattered
Index