Keeping It Living
by Edited by Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner

#11063

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The European explorers who first visited the Northwest Coast of North America assumed that the entire region was virtually untouched wilderness whose occupants used the land only minimally, hunting and gathering shoots, roots, and berries that were peripheral to a diet and culture focused on salmon. Colonizers who followed the explorers used these claims to justify the displacement of Native groups from their land. Scholars now understand, however, that Northwest Coast peoples were actively cultivating plants well before they experienced contact with Europeans. Keeping It Living tells the story of traditional Northwest Coast cultivation practices, and of how they came to be overlooked by Europeans.

Bringing together some of the world's most prominent specialists on Northwest Coast cultures, this book discusses plant management methods found from the Oregon Coast to Southeast Alaska. It looks at tobacco gardens among the Haida and Tlingit, managed camas plots among the Coast Salish of Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia, estaurine root gardens along the central coast of British Columbia, wapato plot maintenance on the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, and tended berry plots up and down the entire coast.

With contributions from ethnobotanists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and Native American scholars and elders, Keeping It Living documents practices, many quite different from those characteristic of European agriculture, that involve manipulating plants as well as their environments in a way that enhanced both the quantity and the quality of plant production.

About the Author(s)

Douglas Deur is assistant professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nancy J. Turner is Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Geography at the University of Victoria. The other contributors include Kenneth M. Ames, E. Richard Atleo (Umeek), Melissa Darby, Douglas Hallett, James T. Jones, Dana Lepofsky, Ken Lertzman, Rolf Mathewes, James McDonald, Sonny McHalsie, Madonna L. Moss, Sandra Peacock, Bruce D. Smith, Robhin Smith, Wayne Suttles, and Kevin Washbrook.

Details

Quantity:	No item(s) available
Weight:	0.76 kg
Price:	CDN$ 44.95 (US$ 43.74)

ISBN-10:	0774812664
ISBN-13/EAN:	9780774812665
Author:	Edited by Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner
Publisher:	UBC Press Vancouver
Publication Date:	10/2005
Pages:	384 pp
Size/Dimensions:	9.5 x 6.25
Binding:	Hardcover