Reintegrating Cultural and Natural Landscapes: Indigenous Homelands of the Alsek-Dry Bay Region, Alaska

Published In

Natural Science and Indigenous Knowledge: The Americas Experience

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

4-2024

Subjects

Ethnoscience Research, Traditional ecological knowledge, Social justice

Abstract

Landscapes are important frames for understanding and bridging environmental perspectives, including between Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems. Landscapes are both “natural” and “cultural,” for, as Indigenous societies attest, all landscapes manifest the coevolutionary interplay of human and nonhuman forces. We apply three integrated ecological lenses to analyze this interplay: historical ecology, ethno-ecology, and political ecology. Our case study is the Alsek-Dry Bay region of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada, at the intersection of the northern Tlingit and Athabaskan worlds. Historically an epicenter of astonishing geological dynamism and disruption, biological productivity and diversity, this landscape was also a mecca of cultural exchange, contestation, and appropriation. Ironically, the Alsek-Dry Bay landscape is now “preserved” as the center of a celebrated World Heritage Site based solely on its “natural” landscapes and “wilderness” character, and not for its Indigenous identity as a place of outstanding cultural significance – where the trickster-worldmaker Raven literally transformed the cosmos and topography – and the product of deep cultural-environmental histories. Bringing these ecological perspectives together enables a broader appreciation of the natural and cultural dynamism that has shaped such sites and of the enduring value and lessons of Indigenous knowledge systems that have coevolved with rapidly changing landscapes.

Rights

© Cambridge University Press

DOI

10.1017/9781009416665.003

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41718

Link to Book

Share

COinS