Traditional ecological knowledge: Learning from Indigenous practices for environmental sustainability

Title: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biocultural Ecotones in wild and cultivated polycultures Background/Question/Methods

Traditional Knowledge Holders and Indigenous food gatherers generally practice both in-situ and ex-situ food cultivation and resource enhancement activities to create diverse polycultures. This is a strong and old tradition in many Native cultures, on one hand, having traditional gatherers, agroecologists and “tenders of the wild,” and on the other hand, having traditional farmers using irrigation systems, ex-situ annual seeds, and some form of tilling the soil. Contemporary Native American farmers are mimicking these activities in urban farms and other tribal land bases, mixing biocultural restoration of native habitats with intensive Indigenous agriculture, often called agroecology. How do locally adapted Indigenous plants, often culturally-significant perennials, interact and overlap with ex-situ plants such as heirloom Native America seeds and annual plants such as Iroquois White Corn or Tepary beans? What are the ecotones or edge effects between these “wild” and cultivated plant communities? Do these anthropogenic polycultures emulate natural patchy mosaics or are do they have distinct qualities? How are these polycultures enhancing biocultural diversity and Indigenous resilience? Methods include oral history interviews, participant observation, and Indigenous research methodologies.

Results/Conclusions

At two sites in Northern California and in New Mexico, Native American farmers experiment with the interweaving and companion planting of native perennials and annual food crops. These anthropogenic polycultures enhance biocultural diversity by increasing both species and habitat richness and improving the diversity of plant materials used for food, medicine, and craft by Native practitioners. These polycultural ecotones also improve food security for local community stewards. The overlap of these species and polycultures create a “mosaic in motion” that is distinct from non-cultivated patchy mosaics by enhancing other ecological and cultural factors such as increased pollination and symbiosis, and incorporating human concepts of beauty and balance with examples from traditional stories, thus increasing cultural richness and Indigenous resilience.