Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 21

threat, so do the stories that people tell about their environments. Local
knowledge does not easily translate into majority languages, and moreover,
as Luisa Maffi states: 'along with the dominant language usually comes a dominant
cultural framework which begins to take over'. 39
Thus, we increasingly lack the capacity to describe changes to the
environment and nature, even if we are able to observe them. Slowly, it
all slips away. Gary Nabhan and colleagues describe how the children of
the Tohono O'odham (formerly known as the Papago) of the Sonoran
Desert in the south-west US are losing both a connection with the desert
and with their language and culture. Even though they hear the language
spoken at home, they are not exposed to traditional story-telling, and are
no longer able to name common plants and animals in O'odham - though
they could easily name large animals of the African savanna seen on tele-
vision. Nabhan called this process of erosion the 'extinction of experience'. 40
These losses, too, are hastened by land degradation or removal for other
purposes. Also in the Sonoran Desert, Felipe Molina found that his own
people, the Yaqui or Yoeme, were unable to perform traditional rituals
because of the disappearance of many local plants. Land is being settled
by non-Yoeme and converted to other uses. 41 Biodiversity slips away, and
only the local indigenous people notice. But they are powerless in the
global scheme of things. Their intimate spiritual and physical connection
with nature is under threat; yet, we on the outside may never notice it
disappear.
Yaquis have always believed that a close communication exists among all the
inhabitants of the Sonoran Desert world in which they live: plants, animals, birds,
fishes, even rocks and springs. All of these come together as part of one living
community which Yaquis call the huya ania, the wilderness world. 42
These problems are all connected. Luisa Maffi adds:
The Yoeme elders' inability to correctly perform rituals due to environmental
degradation thus contributes to precipitating language and knowledge loss and creates
a vicious circle that in turn affects the local ecosystem. 43
The concept of the frontier suggests to me a place where people test out
existing ideas on a new environment. As a result, both change. William
Cronon and fellow historians indicate that self-shaping occurs rapidly on
the frontier. The different identities of groups arriving from distant places,
and those of people already present, clash and blend, merge and stand
apart. Of the American frontier, they say: 'Self-shaping was a part of the very
earliest frontier encounters and continues as a central challenge of regional life right down