Body:

Laura Donohue

Healing Gardens

Eloheimo

17.Jan.2007

 

Reflection on Readings: Week 2

 

 

Natural systems and Cultural Systems of the Pacific Northwest

 

 “We often talked about our rights as strangers to take possession of the district…The American woodmen…considered that any right in the soil which these datives had as occupiers was partial and imperfect as, with the exception of hunting animals in the forest, plucking wild fruits, and cutting a few trees…the natives did not in any civilized sense, occupy the land.  [Sproat 1868 (1987): 8].” [Deur & Turner 5:3]

 

“Their civilization was built upon an ample supply of goods, inexhaustible, and obtained without excessive expenditure of labour.  (Benedict 1934: 174).  Boundless fish resources insured that they simply “did not rely heavily on plant foods” (Huelsbeck 1988:166).” [Deur & Turner 5:3]

 

A great tragedy has been wrought upon the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and a good deal of its philosophical origins lie in the fact that the cultural modification of the environment of the Pacific Northwest was invisible to colonial and settling eyes.  Deur & Turner is very important in the dispelling of these assumptions that we have based our right to settle this area on.  “Each [explorer, surveyor, etc…] presumed that the entire region was composed of untouched wilderness, on the basis of Cook’s accounts as well as their own ethnocentric presuppositions.  Thus, some of the earliest explorers, when encountering evidence of indigenous plant management on the Northwest Coast, ascribed the practices to the antecedent diffusion of European influences, despite the rarity of prior cross-cultural interaction.”  [Deur & Turner 4:1]

 

Let us analyze some relatively recent quotes by Arthur Kruckeberg to contrast with those of Sproat. 

 

“The forest reinvaded barren land in early postglacial times, beginning less than 13,000 years ago, and it is now already diminishing in quantity and virgin quality since our brief 150-year tenancy of the land.”  [Kruckeberg 117:3] 

 

 “Alas!  hardly anywhere along the shores of Puget Sound can we expect to find samples of old-growth forest not modified by humans.”  [Kruckeberg 118:5] (Even old growth forests were modified by humans, and the marks of their use are visible to this day in “culturally modified trees”.)

 

 

 “Only the beach or the deck of a ship was sanctuary of open space in those early times.”  [Kruckeberg 117:2]  (He does not mention the prairie ecosystems, estuaries, or open meadows that were gravitated to.)

 

“The native cedar was so plentiful in the wetter sites of lowland Puget Sound that it could be harvested at will, a seemingly unending gift of Nature.”  [Kruckeberg 141:2] (He does not mention the care that was taken to select the right tree, or the relative difficulty of finding the right tree.  Nor does he mention the ceremony or songs sung before the gathering of bark, planks, or trees.) 

 

Sound familiar?  As mentioned in Deur & Turner, the misconceptions that lead to such statements continue to be fed by textbooks that deal with Agriculture, Native Studies, and Ecology.   “Yet, this orthodoxy runs deep, and was taken form well before the arrival of anthropologists on the Northwest coast in the late nineteenth century, shaped by a sense of this region and its inhabitants that was often superficial, based on brief encounters and biased expectations.” [Deur & Turner 3:2]

 

“In turn, past scholars tended to dismiss many of the unfamiliar and seemingly chaotic anthropogenic plant communities encountered in Africa Asia, and the Americas as “nonagricultural.”  (Deur & Turner 14:3)  European cultivation was the measure by which all other practices were judged, and scholars commonly presumed that cultivation had emanated from within a small number of “civilized” societies.”  Even in the recent text that I read for a class studying domestication of species during the Holocene age, they did not describe non-domesticating cultivation methods and their place within indigenous societies all over the world. “Plant tending, most scholars now agree, involves the minor modification of environments to encourage the growth of naturally occurring plants in situ, while plant cultivation involves a more intensive and extensive pattern of environmental modification… Domestication, by contrast, involves the genetic modification of crops as a result of selective cultivation and propagation of plants with anomalous and desirable traits (Ford 1985; Harlan 1995, 1975).”  I would add to that, that Domestication results in the dependency of the domesticated species, upon those that domesticate them, so that they cannot reproduce in the wild unaided.  An example of this type of species would be corn or bananas.  Also, that the cultivation and tending of the Pacific Northwest was so invisible speaks to the highly sophisticated nature of the techniques and attitudes of the peoples of this area.  Modification needed to be obvious to the Europeans, a side effect of the ecological damage wrought. 

 

 

Ecosystem Comparisons

 

“Saying that structure begets function and function begets structure is intentional and profoundly meaningful in the search for an understanding of life.” (Kruckeberg 118:2)  So too is the interwoven relationship between the structure and yield of and ecosystem, and its inhabitants and visitors, and their interactions toward their surroundings.  Species can be lost or diminish in abundance if they are not used in ancient ways that helped develop their current structure.  What does the current status of our ecosystem speak of our interactions?  What can we learn about traditional methods used to cultivate this landscape?  Can we find applicable ways to incorporate them in our modern life?  

 

 “Is all the life on land within the Puget Sound basin a single ecosystem?  Or is it a web of interconnected, yet separable ecosystems?... the landscape is a continuum, separable into subordinate and partially distance groupings more for ease of comprehension than from natural causes.”  (Kruckeberg 118:3)  So the author states, forward thinking for this type of text, however he goes on to generalize the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest by the dominant trees of the area, and does not go into non-treed areas that were very important anthropogenically.  Examples of these types of ecosystems would be near the ocean, in estuaries, in Prairies, or alpine meadows.  It is interesting that Turner/Deur also uses tree-based categories for describing the vegetative qualities of the Pacific Northwest. It is precisely the irregularities and mosaic of differences that has drastically shaped the cultural and environmental interactions and survival techniques adopted by the First Peoples of this area:  “The region’s organisms, including the diverse plants, fish, shellfish, mammals, and birds that provided the Northwest Coast peoples’ staple foods and materials, will be abundant in one location but entirely absent in many others.  Thus, culturally important plants and animals were distributed unevenly, both spatially and temporally….   To be sure, while the peoples of the Northwest Coast were in some manner living in an “abundant” natural environment, they were not living in a place where natural resources were ubiquitous.  Their valuation of particular landscapes varied accordingly, and there were often incentives to minimize output and tribal control of particularly convenient or resource-rich sites (Deur 1999).”  [Deur & Turner 9:1, 11:2]. 

 

To be sure, these variations influenced a seasonal nomadic/sedentary harvesting cycle: different groups migrated from harvesting site to harvesting site, collecting and processing animals and plants, to return to the home base to drop off supplies, and returning for the rainy and dark winters.  Here, in the “big houses” cultural knowledge was passed on through ceremony, song, dance, and potlatch. 

“While linguistically and culturally diverse, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast shared a distinctive, highly developed wood-working technology especially focusing on the use of western red-cedar.  They also shared a marine-oriented economic live, based on fishing, particularly for salmon, hunting of marine and land mammals, shellfish harvesting, and the use of a wide spectrum of plant foods and other plant resources.  Most Northwest Coast peoples lived in large villages of multifamily houses during the winter months while, at other times of the year, they traveled in smaller groups to various permanent resource outposts.”   [Deur & Turner 10:2]

 

Implications for my Garden Site: 

 

            I think it would be a wonderful idea to incorporate a nomadic model for each of the sites, having each site highlight the different plants that would be harvested in a similar ecosystem, and talk about the season and use of these plants, like a mini tour of the nomadic/sedentary cycle.  I would also like to utilize patchy or uneven patterns in my plan for my site, to make them resemble more closely their parent ecosystem.  I also wonder if it is possible to inoculate related fungi structures to gain some of the macrobiotic characteristics of the prairies.