Claiming Indigenous Plant Knowledge: From Botanical Exchanges to Resource Extraction in the Indian Ocean World examines the collection and documentation of the natural world’s development over the course of the nineteenth century into a vast network of scientists who attempted to categorize and understand nature, particularly in the botanically rich Indian Ocean. But the process of collecting plants and exchanging knowledge about the natural world went far beyond the labor of botanists and naturalists. Naturalists depended on many groups for regional knowledge and local information about the uses, names, and value of plants. Publications and archival materials included local and indigenous knowledge of nature, but as exploration led to colonial expansion and botany became a professional science, local and indigenous knowledge moved to the periphery of botanical writing. Local knowledge never stopped being important, but the act of discovery and the claiming (perhaps even colonization) of botanical knowledge became the limited sphere of professional botanists. Indigenous peoples involved in the early days of collecting never stopped their activities, but professionals failed to acknowledge their labor and expertise. By the end of the century, colonial administrations used botanic information collected by professionals to convert colonies into natural resource extraction zones. This shift disrupted indigenous lifeways in the Indian Ocean World and led to environmental issues facing the region today.

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability—and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.

The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts: just a few examples of white Americans' tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles "A valuable contribution to Native American studies."—Kirkus Reviews This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras—and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.

This book deals with the values of medicinal plants and associated knowledge(s) in the field of bioprospecting in post-apartheid South Africa. Bioprospecting, the use of genetic or biological resources for commercial purposes, is a profit-oriented enterprise facing new challenges with the rise of human rights and biodiversity politics. This new situation has led to claims for political leverage made by indigenous communities, as well as to claims for national and local cultural identity and heritage. The picture presented here contributes to the widely discussed yet so far unresolved question of how to appropriately share benefits, and how to protect indigenous knowledge in this field.

Art and Cultural Heritage is appropriately, but not solely, about national and international law respecting cultural heritage. It is a bubbling cauldron of law mixed with ethics, philosophy, politics and working principles looking at how cultural heritage law, policy and practice should be sculpted from the past as the present becomes the future. Art and cultural heritage are two pillars on which a society builds its identity, its values, its sense of community and the individual. The authors explore these demanding concerns, untangle basic values, and look critically at the conflicts and contradictions in existing art and cultural heritage law and policy in its diverse sectors. The rich and provocative contributions collectively provide a reasoned discussion of the issues from a multiplicity of views to permit the reader to understand the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the cultural heritage debate.

For millennia, plants and their habitats have been fundamental to the lives of Indigenous Peoples - as sources of food and nutrition, medicines, and technological materials - and central to ceremonial traditions, spiritual beliefs, narratives, and language. While the First Peoples of Canada and other parts of the world have developed deep cultural understandings of plants and their environments, this knowledge is often underrecognized in debates about land rights and title, reconciliation, treaty negotiations, and traditional territories. Plants, People, and Places argues that the time is long past due to recognize and accommodate Indigenous Peoples' relationships with plants and their ecosystems. Essays in this volume, by leading voices in philosophy, Indigenous law, and environmental sustainability, consider the critical importance of botanical and ecological knowledge to land rights and related legal and government policy, planning, and decision making in Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. Analyzing specific cases in which Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights to the environment have been denied or restricted, this collection promotes future prosperity through more effective and just recognition of the historical use of and care for plants in Indigenous cultures. A timely book featuring Indigenous perspectives on reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and pathways toward ethnoecological restoration, Plants, People, and Places reveals how much there is to learn from the history of human relationships with nature.