Tending The Wild: Native American Knowledge and The Management of California's Natural Resources

Abstract

Among botanists and ecologists, the prevailing view has long been that Native American populations were too small, too dispersed, and too low-tech to have had much impact on California's native landscape.The fact that forests have encroached on Yosemite Valley meadows, and dead brush has built up to fuel catastrophic wildfires in many areas only since depopulation and decline of traditional practices among indigenous peoples has received little serious attention among those seeking to understand the flora and vegetation of our state.More than a decade ago, an edited volume of papers on environmental management by Native Californians (Blackburn and Anderson 1993) quietly entered the scene.Anthropologists and ethnobotanists working independently in different areas had been finding indications that indigenous non-agricultural peoples systematically modified their surroundings.Taken together, the several papers on this theme did attract some notice, and researchers in other fields began to look at Native Americans' relationships with the land in a new light.That was just an initial step.Now comes its apotheosis in an important new book, Tending the Wild.In this truly impressive work, ecologist M. Kat Anderson presents overwhelming evidence that California Indians-though often simplistically classed as "hunter-gatherers'were unquestionably a powerful force in the history of California's flora and plant communities.The stunning wildflower displays and parklike woodlands filled with astonishingly abundant wildlife that dazzled early explorers and settlers were not, as they assumed, a pristine wilderness untouched by human hands.These were, in fact, anthropogenic landscapes.As Anderson shows, some three hundred thousand indigenous people throughout the state could and did have profound effects as they selectively burned, pruned, weeded, tilled, scattered seeds, and harvested the results of their efforts over the course of many centuries.The long duration and broad scale of these practices demonstrably affected the diversity, abundance, distribution, physical structure and health of both plants and the ecosystems of which they are a part.