Tending the Wild


Book Description

A complex look at California Native ecological practices as a model for environmental sustainability and conservation. John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Marvelously detailed and beautifully written, Tending the Wild is an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California's natural resources that reshapes our understanding of native cultures and shows how we might begin to use their knowledge in our own conservation efforts. M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California's indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.







Language, Politics, and Social Interaction in an Inuit Community


Book Description

Since the early 1970s, the Inuit of Arctic Quebec have struggled to survive economically and culturally in a rapidly changing northern environment. The promotion and maintenance of Inuktitut, their native language, through language policy and Inuit control over institutions, have played a major role in this struggle. Language, Politics, and Social Interaction in an Inuit Community is a study of indigenous language maintenance in an Arctic Quebec community where four languages - Inuktitut, Cree, French, and English - are spoken. It examines the role that dominant and minority languages play in the social life of this community, linking historical analysis with an ethnographic study of face-to-face interaction and attitudes towards learning and speaking second and third languages in everyday life.




Federal Planning and Historic Places


Book Description

Section 106. A critical section of an obscure law, the National Preservation Act. It has saved thousands of historic sites, archeological sites, buildings, and neighborhoods across the country from destruction by Federal projects. And it has let even more be destroyed, or damaged, or somehow changed. It is the major legal basis for a multi-million dollar 'cultural resource management' industry that provides employment to thousands of archeologists, historians, and architectural historians. It is interpreted in a wide variety of ways by judges, lawyers, Federal agency officials, State and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, contractors, and academics. But what does it say, and how does the regulatory process it created actually work? In this book, Tom King de-mythologizes Section 106, explaining its origins, its rationale, and the procedures that must be followed in carrying out its terms. Available just months after the latest revision of section 106, this book builds on King's best-selling work, Cultural Resource Laws and Practice: an Introductory Guide (AltaMira Press 1998). It is indispensable for federal, state, tribal, legal, academic, and citizen practitioners in the United States. King's engaging and witty prose turns a tangle of complicated regulation into a readable and engaging guide. ** CLICK 'Sample Readings' below to view the most current addendum to this book. Sponsored by the Heritage Resources Management Program, University of Nevada, Reno




American Medicine As Culture


Book Description

This book situates biomedicine within American culture and argues that the very organization and practice of medicine are themselves cultural. It demonstrates the symbolic construction of clinical reality within American biomedicine and shows how biomedicine never leaves the realm of the personal.




Victims of Progress


Book Description




Running Out


Book Description

Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.




The Modern Maya


Book Description

One hundred and ninety-five fascinating bandw photographs by Everton, and an equally interesting text, present a richly preserved and colorfully varied culture. Includes essays by Ulrich Keller and Dorie Reents-Budet. The volume accompanies a traveling exhibit of the same name (at Lehigh U. Art Galleries through 1 January 1992, then at the Art Galleries of California State U., Northridge, 24 February-28 March 1992). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR







The Contested Plains


Book Description

Deftly retracing a pivotal chapter in one of America's most dramatic stories, Elliott West chronicles the struggles, triumphs and defeats of both Indians and whites as they pursued their clashing dreams of greatness in the heart of the continent.