{"id":57607,"date":"2021-04-28T16:28:03","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T21:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57607"},"modified":"2021-04-28T16:28:03","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T21:28:03","slug":"unearthing-the-work-of-indigenous-master-horticulturalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57607","title":{"rendered":"Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists<\/a><\/h3>\n

These forest gardeners got sustainable returns for centuries. Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong is now studying their work.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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The SFU team found ecological diversity was richer on the lands of ancient Indigenous villages than in neighbouring forests.\u00a0Photo submitted.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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Ahistorical ecologist and her team at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial discovery about B.C.\u2019s ancient forest ecosystems \u2014 one that could strengthen the systems of today and tomorrow and equip us to understand our own environment even as it changes with the climate.<\/p>\n

Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an Indigenous Studies assistant professor and the leader of the\u00a0Historical and Ethnoecological Research Lab<\/a>\u00a0recently\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0a study in the journal\u00a0Ecology and Society<\/em>. In it, she documents four sites that are ecologically more diverse than the conifer forests surrounding them. And for good reason: each is on an Indigenous reserve and marks the site of an ancient community of master horticulturalists.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old settler myth that North America was \u201cundeveloped\u201d by Indigenous peoples, who subsisted as hunter-gatherers and therefore didn\u2019t deserve to claim stakes in any particular land. Never mind that agricultural civilizations flourished all the way from Mexico to the Great Lakes, or that white explorers traversed the continent by following long-established Indigenous trade routes.<\/p>\n

Here in B.C., this self-serving cultural ignorance operated even with relatively advanced anthropologists like Franz Boas, who assumed he was studying dying peoples and only wanted to record their folkways before they vanished. In Boas\u2019 case, he additionally focused on Indigenous men and ignored women, so he missed a key element of coastal Indigenous culture \u2014 the\u00a0clam gardens<\/a>\u00a0designed and maintained by women, which could sustain a population well over 100,000 in the centuries before contact.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists These forest gardeners got sustainable returns for centuries. Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong is now studying their work. The SFU team found ecological diversity was richer on the lands of ancient Indigenous villages than in neighbouring forests.\u00a0Photo submitted. Ahistorical ecologist and her team at Simon Fraser University have made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[103,13253,31158,8677,23813,5499],"class_list":["post-57607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-canada","tag-crawford-killian","tag-forest-gardening","tag-horticulture","tag-indigenous-peoples","tag-the-tyee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57608,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57607\/revisions\/57608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}