This edited volume is a compilation of papers presented at a 2008 conference on ‘Indigenous Environments: African and North American Environmental Knowledge and Practices Compared’. The editors are both leaders in the field of environmental history, specializing in analyses of the role that autochthonous peoples and notions of ‘indigeneity’ have played in Central African and North American history (respectively). They have done a masterful job of editing and commenting on this series of strong, yet rather disparate, case studies. Acknowledging from the start that there is no scholarly consensus as to what constitutes ‘indigenous knowledge’ or an ‘indigenous’ people, the editors wisely refrain from engaging this debate and let the articles speak for themselves. What results is a fascinating glimpse into the myriad ways certain North American and African societies – all considered (or considering themselves) ‘indigenous’ as compared to later-arrived populations – have ‘resurrected and sustained indigenous knowledges in order to exert greater control over their lives and reverse ongoing processes of marginalization’ (p. 3).
A key goal of the conference was to elicit papers with a strong historical focus in order to counter the widespread notion, often prevalent in policy and development circles, that indigenous knowledge is a ‘traditional body of knowledge that can be owned, written and transmitted unchanged over time’ (p. 2). The introductory essay lays out key debates concerning indigenous knowledge and the environment, as well as the editors' argument that ‘the emergence of modern indigenous knowledge was intimately related to conquest and colonial rule’ (p. 2). The essays that follow are organized into four thematically organized sections.
Due to space limitations, a brief explanation of the papers presented in Part One will be used to illustrate how fruitful this line of historical inquiry can be. Because the notion of indigeneity forces scholars to assume a comparative stance (analyzing aspects of the ‘indigenous’ vs the ‘non-indigenous’), new types of data, analysis, and knowledge often emerge. In the first section, entitled ‘Middle Ground’ (based on Richard White's model of colonial exchange), David Bernstein provides a fascinating study of the ways in which 1820s Iowa Indians, in an attempt to thwart the encroachment of more powerful Indian neighbors and whites, consciously appropriated Euro-American forms of cartography to create a map that would convince the US government that they were the rightful owners of their ancestral lands. Because the Iowas were not successful, the incident is generally portrayed as another ‘clash of cultures’ that resulted in Indian displacement and dispossession. Bernstein argues, however, that a closer analysis of the map, especially in terms of the way it merges Native American and Euro-American conceptions of territoriality, provides new insights into the innovative social and political tactics the Iowas utilized to assert their indigenous rights.
A second essay by James Webb compares the ways that indigenous forms of biomedical knowledge regarding the causes and treatments for malaria were shared, or not shared, among the populations of eastern North America (Native American, Euro-American, and African), and of tropical Africa (African and European). The material is culled from his seminal work on the global history of malaria and illustrates the powerful insights that can be derived by juxtaposing data from multiple continents. Although a bicontinental approach is also used to great effect in Parker Shipton's chapter on ‘Recruiting Nature: Snakes, Serpents, and Social Movements in East Africa and North America’, the volume would have benefited from additional studies that so boldly crossed continental boundaries. A third essay by Shepard Krech III provides an innovative methodological model, illustrating how taxonomic analyses (in this case using bird names) can be used to identify a history of interactions between Indians, Euro-Americans, and Africans in the American south. Finally, Luc Van Sittern's article focuses on how Dutch South Africans, themselves originally a settler community, developed their own form of ‘indigenous knowledge’ through the practice of water divining and used it to counter the hegemony of the later-arrived, more scientifically-oriented, British occupiers.
Parts Two through Four present studies of equal complexity and insight. Part Two on ‘Conflict’ includes chapters by Jacob Tropp on ‘Locust Invasions and Tensions over Environmental and Bodily Health in the Colonial Transkei’; Marsha Weisiger on ‘Navajos, New Dealers, and the Metaphysics of Nature’; and Paul Kelton on ‘Cherokee Medicine and the 1924 Smallpox Epidemic’. Part Three on ‘Environmental Religion’ includes chapters by Andrew Fisher on ‘Spirit of the Salmon: Native Religion, Rights, and Resource Use in the Columbia River Basin’; David Gordon on ‘Indigenous Spirits: Ancestral Power in a South-Central African Kingdom’; and, the aforementioned study by Parker Shipton. Part Four on ‘Resource Rights' includes chapters by Joshua Reid on ‘The Marine Tenure of the Makahs’; Karen Flint on ‘Reinventing “Traditional” Medicine in Post-Apartheid South Africa’; and Derick Fay on ‘Dilemmas of ‘Indigenous Tenure’ in South Africa: Traditional Authorities and the Constitutional Challenge to the 2004 Communal Rights Act’.
While is not quite fair to critique a work for what it ‘should have done’, this reviewer felt a sense of unease with the way discussion or analysis of the ‘precolonial’ was glossed over by many authors, eliminating the possibility for understanding transformations in indigenous knowledge over a longer period. This is a much broader epistemological problem of course (especially for the field of African history), deriving from discomfort with the lack of written sources for precolonial eras. Nonetheless, an attempt to broach this temporal divide, especially in terms of comparative environmental practices, might have provided major new contributions to the field.
That said, the volume constitutes an important contribution to the fields of African and Native American history, environmental studies, and comparative religions. Individual chapters will also be of great use for undergraduate classes on the same topics.
