Indigenous Knowledge and Environmental History: A Global View

Environmental historians are showing increasing interest in Indigenous knowledge. I learned about much useful work being done on this topic when I wrote a review of Indigenous Knowledge, a volume of articles from a decade of Environment and History (my review appeared recently in the same journal).

Historians are following scholars of other disciplines in this study, especially anthropologists, who have worked with Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems for decades. But even so, they are forming some distinctive approaches to understanding Indigenous knowledge.  Several lessons from this volume are, I think, of particular interest:

�      Indigenous knowledge is central to understanding the relations between people with ties to particular places, and the larger forces of imperialism, globalization, or (more recently) nature conservation.

�      Indigenous knowledge also has tremendous political significance, as a foundation for asserting identities, rights, and interests, in part by asserting that places have long been occupied by a particular community or people.

�      Contrary to some stereotypes, Indigenous knowledge is not a timeless, ahistorical phenomenon, but an evolving body of understanding and ethical values � something better understood as a process than a fixed entity.

�      There is a substantial history of appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, particularly in colonial contexts.  Nevertheless, the relation between western science and Indigenous knowledge is too complicated to be described as one of domination.

�      And finally, the study of Indigenous knowledge requires careful attention to method: flexibility, thoughtfulness, and collaboration are prerequisites.  Real understanding of Indigenous knowledge -- to the extent that this is possible for an outsider -- just about always requires genuine collaboration.

I've looked myselfat the relations between science and Indigenous knowledge, mainly in northern Canada.  But while any nation-focused study can be useful (and some, such as work by Julie Cruikshank, is brilliant), a valuable feature of this book is that it's a global collection, with chapters drawn from more than a dozen countries.  The effect gained when reading them all is a sense of the diversity not only of Indigenous communities, but of the scholarly communities that work with them.