Rethinking Precolonial Plant Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America

The indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America are widely believed to have been true “hunter‐fisher‐gatherers,” lacking plant cultivation of any kind. This depiction of the region's indigenous inhabitants emerged within early colonial accounts and was perpetuated within the literatures of geography, anthropology, and archaeology. Still, there is ample evidence of plant cultivation available from archival, archaeological, and ethnographic sources. In particular, the peoples of coastal British Columbia created large gardens of edible estuarine plants, using sophisticated indigenous technologies. The oversight of these practices in written representations of the region reveals consistent patterns of bias, emanating from the agendas of colonial agents and early academics alike. In turn, this bias has undermined aboriginal traditions of cultivation and indigenous land claims.     

God's healing leaves: The colonial quest for medicinal plants in the Torrid Zone

The colonial era witnessed a fevered quest for exotic medicinal plants by European physicians and scientists. This essay explores the geographical principles that oriented the search towards the lands and peoples of the humid tropics. Believing that God had planted botanical cures for diseases in their places of origin, medicinal plant collectors concentrated their efforts in the pestilential equatorial latitudes. Although many subscribed to the ancient Doctrine of Signatures, colonial bioprospectors discovered early that indigenous and diasporic peoples represented storehouses of plant knowledge. Assuming that native knowhow constituted more instinct than intelligence, Europeans employed coercion, bribes, torture, and promises of freedom to extract their ethnomedical secrets. In the case of especially lucrative healing plants, imperial and colonial entities conspired to pilfer and naturalize endemic species in their distant colonies. In response to this legacy of inappropriate exploitation of native peoples and tropical plants during the colonial era, most present day bioprospectors follow established codes of ethnobotanical ethics.     

"VALUING THE TROPICS": DISCOURSES OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE FARM AND FOREST SECTORS OF FRENCH INDOCHINA, circa 1900–40

The paper examines how land and forest management policies were elaborated in French Indochina circa 1900–40. It places their development in the context of a scientific and economic discourse about the value of land and forest resources, the most appropriate ways in which they might be exploited and the relationship between colonial science and indigenous knowledge. By focusing on debates and laws relating to the development of small‐scale and plantation farming systems (Land Code legislations) and forest management and exploitation (Forest Code legislations) the paper seeks to ground arguments about Western conceptions of the “tropics” within a discussion of national policy development and impacts. Focusing primarily on Cochinchina and Annam (southern and central Vietnam) and drawing on materials from French archives, the paper shows how changes in both attitudes and legislation have had lasting consequences on systems of property rights in forest management and on the place and status of indigenous peoples in Indochina.     

TROPICALITY AND TOPICALITY: PIERRE GOUROU AND THE GENEALOGY OF FRENCH COLONIAL SCHOLARSHIP ON RURAL VIETNAM

This article discusses the relevance of the work of Pierre Gourou for Vietnamese and non‐Vietnamese scholarship on colonial and postcolonial rural society in Vietnam. The term “tropicality” is used to situate Gourou's work within the framework of both French and Vietnamese regimes of truth. It is argued that Gourou was aware of the complex human geographies of the tropics and monsoon Asia and the challenges this posed to both Western and “tropical” peoples. Gourou and the issue of tropicality is used to show that Vietnamese scholars did not completely reject French colonial systems of knowledge, and that decolonisation did not herald a complete shift in knowledge about rural Vietnam. Rather, since the 1940s there has been antagonism and accommodation between colonial and postcolonial, French and Vietnamese modes of knowledge production. While Gourou underscored the otherness of the tropics, and there are colonial overtones in his work, he had an immense influence on indigenous ethnography and geography in Vietnam and elsewhere in the formerly colonised world. The article traces this important influence and how it has been both questioned and affirmed since independence in the Vietnamese context. It is suggested that the humanistic approach that Gourou pioneered in his 1936 study of the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam has outlived and been able to overcome the setbacks and drawbacks of both colonial and revolutionary/Vietnamese politico‐intellectual projects.     

DEVISE AND RULE: COLONIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE BORNEO DAYAK c.1860–1920

This paper considers some of the ways in which travellers, administrators and academics in the colonial period sought to categorise the indigenous groups of Borneo. It focuses on Sarawak and North Borneo between about 1850 and 1920, and examines the use of stereotypical images of exoticism, fear and loathing in constructing different categories of peoples in the region. The paper argues that such categorisations were important in structuring the relationships between ruler and ruled, and in the development of particular regional and local identities.     

Negotiating Technology — (Re)considering the Use of GIS by Indigenous Peoples

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been increasingly touted for their ability to help empower indigenous peoples. The opportunity to discuss the development of an iwi‐based GIS with Te Ruunanga O Raukawa provides a platform for reflecting critically on issues that impact the effective use of GIS by indigenous groups. The dialectical context of GIS is explored by (re)considering the opportunities and challenges of applying GIS as a cross‐cultural communication device. A position is negotiated which interprets GIS as conditionally empowering provided that indigenous peoples consider their symbolic representation in, and physical access to GIS before making an initial investment in the technology.     

The Drivers of Market Integration Among Indigenous Peoples: Evidence From the Ecuadorian Amazon

Knowledge of the driving forces behind indigenous participation in the market is essential for practitioners intending to integrate conservation and development policies in indigenous territories. Nevertheless, empirical research on the determinants of market integration among indigenous peoples is still scarce. This article uses household survey data and multivariate techniques to examine the drivers of market integration among indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We use multiple measures of market integration, including the sale of crops, timber, and wildlife; the use of credit; and participation in wage labor. The results show that the way in which indigenous peoples integrate into the market depends on their endowments of human, financial, and physical capital. More educated households are able to engage in commercial agriculture and nonagricultural wage work, whereas uneducated poor households in communities in conflict with outsiders are pushed to engage in poorly paid agricultural wage work and (often illegal) timber operations.     

Toward an inclusive semantic interoperability: the case of Cree hydrographic features

There has been ample work in GIScience on the formalization of ontologies but a relatively neglected area is the influence of language and culture on ontologies of geography. Although this subject has been investigated for conceptual ontologies using indigenous words denoting geographic features, this article represents the first attempt to develop a logical ontology with an indigenous group. The process of developing logical ontologies is here referred to as formalization. A methodology for formalizing ontologies with indigenous peoples is presented. A conceptual (human readable) ontology and a logical (axioms specified in mathematical logic) ontology were developed using this methodology. Research was conducted with the Cree, the largest indigenous language grouping in Canada. Results show that the geospatial ontology developed from Cree geographic concepts possesses unique design considerations: no superordinate classes were found from archival sources or Cree speakers so ontologies are structurally flat; the ontology contains some unique classes of water bodies; and the ontology challenges our notions of the generalizability of ontologies within indigenous groups. Whereas these difficulties are not insurmountable to the establishment of a cross-cultural Geospatial Semantic Web, the current plans of the World Wide Web Consortium do not adequately address them. We suggest future directions toward an inclusive semantic interoperability.     

Oil Extraction and Benefit Sharing in an Illiberal Context: The Nenets and Komi-Izhemtsi Indigenous Peoples in the Russian Arctic

ABSTRACT

How can indigenous communities in illiberal regimes benefit from oil production? This paper compares the experience of two indigenous peoples in the Russian Arctic, the Nenets and the Komi-Izhemtsi, in their quest for environmental protection and the development of benefit-sharing arrangements with Lukoil, a Russian oil company. The Nenets people, recognized by the Russian state as indigenous, are marginalized political actors who identified a route to receiving compensation for loss of land and damage to the environment as well as economic benefits under the auspices of Russian law and Lukoil’s corporate policies. In contrast, the Komi-Izhemtsi, despite indigenous status in global institutions including the United Nations and the Arctic Council, are unrecognized as indigenous domestically and initially received no compensation. Their path to benefit sharing was more challenging as they partnered with local nongovernmental organizations and global environmentalists to pressure Lukoil to sign a benefit-sharing agreement. Ultimately, the comparison illustrates how transnational partnerships can empower indigenous people to gain benefits from natural resource exploitation even in illiberal political systems.     

African Fire Cultures,Cattle Ranching,and Colonial Landscape Transformations in the Neotropics

Fire regimes emerge partly from human activities that reflect cultural‐ecological knowledge of the relationships among fire, vegetation, grazing, climate, and other variables, as well as social relations. More knowledge of such “fire cultures,” past and present, therefore remains necessary to better understand the causes and persistent consequences of landscape burning. In the neotropics, people have used fire for centuries to manage livestock pastures. Conventional wisdom has long posited that such practices derived solely from antecedent European and indigenous, Native American fire cultures. Analysis of accounts of rangeland burning from throughout the neotropics during colonial times, however, demonstrates that ranchers incorporated African fire cultures and that the timing of burning shifted from early during the dry season in the sixteenth century to late during the dry season by the nineteenth century.     

Some things do change: indigenous rights,geographers and geography in Australia

Using a recent editorial comment in this journal as a focus, this paper reviews the extent to which geography has been implicated in the ‘colonial project’ in Australia. It argues that recent work amongst geographers involved with indigenous Australians reflects a commitment to transcend this colonial past. The paper calls for geographers to work toward a wide‐reaching decolonisation of the discipline, and to develop a better understanding of the contemporary legacies of geography's colonial past.     

Traditional ecologies of the opium poppy and oral history in rural Turkey

Cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean region for millennia, the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) was profoundly significant in the economies, ecologies, cultures, and diets of the peoples of many towns and villages of rural Anatolia. When the United States compelled Turkey to eradicate cultivation of the plant in the early 1970s in order to diminish the flow of heroin into America, farmers were obliged to deal with not only changes in their incomes but also profound changes in their relationships with the land and the state. Although Turkish officials later allowed production to resume in a highly controlled manner for pharmaceutical purposes, significant socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of Turkey's poppy-growing communities were forever changed. Interviewing now-retired poppy farmers, I employ oral history as my primary source of historical evidence to reconstruct these past ecologies and associated social relationships and to give voice to the informants.     

西方人文地理学研究评述与借鉴——面向知行合一的中国人文地理学

中国人文地理学研究需要走出“精致的平庸”,走向“精致的创新”.而要实现这一点,关键是要厘清当前研究中学术与应用间的梗阻,使学术研究回到创新的源点:理论与现实的相互激发,并破除对西方人文地理研究的模仿和迷信.为此,需要借鉴西方人文地理学研究的成果与方法并使之根植于本土的问题和制度;需要完善本土研究机制,包括区分学会和协会、区分学术和应用、区分学术地理和应用地理;要倡导真正的科学精神,对已有研究保持批判性;让知识体系保持高度的开放性,并适应本土知识生产的需求;让研究实事求是、根植于地,在理论与现实之间深度交流.只有这样,中国人文地理学方能实现知行合一,走出殖民地理的陷阱,走上真正自主的知识生产之路.     

Fluid modern ethnic spaces: contesting the spatial ordering of the State in Bolivia

Relationships between the Bolivian State and the emerging indigenous and peasant social movements have become increasingly fluid since the end of the 1970s. Although this process could be traced back to the 1953 Agrarian Reform, it was not until the world crisis of the 1970s and the surge in globalisation that it led to radical changes in the relationship between State and indigenous peoples. Seen from the point of view of the State, our case study of a group of Quechua communities seems to illustrate a process of fragmentation leading to ungovernability and disorder. This understanding has to do with a lack of 'legibility'. However here I replace that 'image' of disorder with another 'feeling' of cultural ordering, one that emerges from indigenous people's livelihoods, strategies and governance from below. I argue for understanding the apparent lack of governance as the expression of an autonomous reorganising process that leads to the regrouping and expansion of indigenous localities linked into new forms of regionalisation.     

Surface water resources for prehistoric peoples in western Papaguer?́a of the North American south-west

Water for personal use was a limiting factor for the prehistoric and historic indigenous peoples who inhabited the extremely arid North American region of south-western Arizona and north-western Sonora, known as Papaguer?́a. This paper lists and quantifies the perennial and intermittent water resources available to them. In the 16,824 km²study area of the Sonoran Desert, there were 128 waterholes, most of them in the mountains and, when full, these offered at least 3,099,141 l of water. At today's precipitation levels, virtually all points of the region were accessible to inhabitants within a 40 km radius of one or more water sources.     

Competing rationalities in water conflict: Mining and the indigenous community in Chiu Chiu,El Loa Province,northern Chile

Conflict over water is a significant phenomenon in many parts of the world where globally linked neoliberal economic activities encroach on the lands of indigenous peoples. This case study from Chile examines how water scarcity affecting indigenous agricultural communities in the Chilean Altiplano has been exacerbated by legally sanctioned mining‐related practices. Notably, the legal framing of the 1981 Water Code promotes private ownership of water rights and enhanced mining activity usually at the expense of the ancestral territorial rights of indigenous communities. In the case of the Atacameño community of Chiu Chiu, a serious decrease in subsistence and agriculture production has been suffered as a consequence of reduced flow in the Loa River, resulting from the water intensive needs and extraction practices of the nearby Chuquicamata mine owned by Codelco, the National Copper Corporation of Chile. Via an analysis of the political ecology of competing rationalities this paper explores how an economic rationality based on utilitarian and reductionist thinking manifested by Codelco has taken precedence locally over a socionatural rationality grounded in holistic thinking and sustainability concerns as articulated by the Chiu Chiu community.     

The water is not empty: cross‐cultural issues in conceptualising sea space

This paper provides an analysis of the neglect and marginalisation of indigenous peoples’ sea rights. It aims to explain how a complex and ecologically appropriate alternative law of the sea has largely escaped research interests and, until recently, has not been recognised by western systems of law and resource and environmental management. It is argued that the dominance of western views and concepts of nature and landscape predicated on western knowledge and values marginalises indigenous concepts of nature and undermines effective indigenous control of social space. Cultural differences between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal ways of constructing meaning in the sea provide the vantage point from which to explore the relations between differences in cultural values, property rights, and political and economic control over marine and coastal environments.     

The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontologies of the peoples and lands from where we write to inform understanding the city as an always already Indigenous place – a sovereign Aboriginal City. In so doing, the paper tries to practice a way of creating more truthful and response-able urban knowledge practices. We analyse three distinct areas of scholarly research that are present in the contemporary literature: urban greening and green infrastructure; urban political ecology; and more-than-human cities. When placed in relationship of learning with the sovereign Aboriginal City, our analysis finds that these scholarly domains of urban greening work to re-organise colonial power relations. The paper considers what work the practice and scholarship of ‘urban greening’ might need to do in order to become response-able and learn to learn with Indigenous sovereignties and ontologies.     

Arctic climate change discourse: the contrasting politics of research agendas in the West and Russia

In this paper we explore how Western scientific concepts and attitudes towards indigenous knowledge, as they pertain to resource management and climate change, differ from the prevailing view in modern Russia. Western indigenous leaders representing the Inuit and Saami peoples are actively engaged in the academic and political discourse surrounding climate change, whereas their Russian colleagues tend to focus more on legislation and self-determination, as a post-Soviet legacy. We contribute to the debate with data from the Nenets tundra, showing how different research has employed the three crucial Western research paradigms of climate change, wildlife management and indigenous knowledge on the ground. We suggest that the daily practice of tundra nomadism involves permanent processes of negotiating one's position in a changing environment, which is why "adaptation" is woven into the society, and cosmology as a whole, rather than being separable into distinct "bodies" of knowledge or Western-designed categories. We argue that research agendas should be placed in their proper local and regional context, and temporal framework: for example, by collaborating with herders on the topics of weather instead of climate change, herding skills instead of wildlife management, and ways of engaging with the tundra instead of traditional ecological knowledge.     

From vulnerability to immunization—A genealogy of early attempts to deal with the climate

In an age of anthropogenic climate change, risk and vulnerability have become common parlance. Yet the histories of both concepts are bound up in the colonial project. This article attempts to give a brief genealogy of these concepts by considering their evolution within early colonial attempts to deal with the dangers and threats posed by a tropical climate. This article argues that British and French colonial writers and administrators began to understand the dangers associated with colonizing distant lands as distinct risks associated with living in a tropical climate. Tropical fevers, ecological devastation, famine and revolt in particular spurred on the development of new knowledge, which advanced understandings of the effects of the tropical climate both on European health and long‐term colonial ambitions. In turn the concept of a pernicious tropical climate that posed a biological threat to the health of Europeans came to play a major role in configuring prevailing notions of race, health and morality. Risk and vulnerability have been key discursive features of new knowledges and governmental technologies crafted in the context of colonialism to secure European rule over distant lands and people.