Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Restoration of Subsistence-Use Activities
For many indigenous groups, restoration goals may include regenerating the capacity
of the landscape to support traditional subsistence activities—hunting, fishing, gath-
ering. The ethic of reciprocity embodies the idea that the land provides for the people
and the people, in turn, must care for the land. A landscape is seen as whole and
healthy when it can provide enough to share with the people. The goal of restoring
subsistence raises the standards for ecological integrity. It is not sufficient to restore a
fish population and then issue an advisory against eating those fish due to contamina-
tion. In the restoration of Onondaga Lake, one of the most chemically polluted lakes
in the country, the Onondaga Nation's vision statement states that restoration is not
complete until people can once again eat the fish (Onondaga Nation 2010). This goal
actively resists the slide of baseline expectations for ecosystem integrity and places ad-
ditional, higher expectations on a restored landscape.
Indigenous-led restoration projects all over the world call for a return to
subsistence-capable landscapes with viable populations of plants and animals. Such
projects include salmon restoration in the Pacific Northwest, restoration and protec-
tion of walleye fisheries by the Red Lake Ojibwe (Dokken 2010), the return of tradi-
tional berrying grounds, and the restoration of basket-making resources and hunting
grounds, as well as places for gathering nontimber forest products (see chap. 19, this
volume, for a discussion of cultural severance).
Restoration of subsistence is tied to restoration of indigenous cultural identity, lan-
guage, health, and also to the vitality of the restored “resource” itself. Appropriate har-
vest is understood as a benefit to the land. There is considerable evidence for human
subsistence activity providing the disturbance regime and stimulus for regenerating
many culturally significant plants. For example, ethnobotanist Kat Anderson has doc-
umented that the indigenous harvesting of root food plants in California grasslands
maintains the vigor of the population through a suite of practices she calls “tending”
(Anderson 1996; Anderson and Rowney 1999). Traditional harvest and tending prac-
tices have been shown to maintain the productivity and diversity of subsistence plant
communities, including camas meadows, basketry plants, acorns, and others (Turner
2005). In experimental restorations of the culturally significant sweetgrass (
Win-
gaashk
,
Hierochloe odorata
), we observed that plots harvested according to traditional
practices exhibited a significantly higher rate of recruitment and lowered mortality
than the unharvested controls, which actually declined in vigor (Reid 2005; Shebitz
and Kimmerer 2005). In this case and others, subsistence practices actually stimu-
lated the success of the plant species. These experiments uphold the indigenous prin-
ciple that, “If we use a plant respectfully, it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore
it, it will go away.” These findings suggest that in order to successfully restore some
keystone species, one must also restore the mutually beneficial subsistence relation-
ship with them.
In the indigenous view, an authentic landscape incorporates human participation
in ecological flourishing. A beautiful meadow of blue camas (
Qém'es
,
Pa-siko
,
Ca-
massia quamash
) is not an authentic landscape until people engage in reciprocity
