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Chapter 1 Introduction Reconstructing Indigenous Resource Management, Reconstructing the History of an Idea douglas deur and nancy j. turner From the earliest anthropological research on the Northwest Coast of North America to the present day, there has been little debate as to whether the peoples of this region cultivated plants. Most scholars have accepted that they did not. In fact, Northwest Coast peoples’ apparent lack of cultivation and their large, permanent villages of socially stratified foragers provided the anthropological literature with one of its most prominent anomalies. As Alfred Kroeber (1962: 61) and his contemporaries asserted, Northwest Coast societies were exceptional, “a wholly non-planting and non-breeding culture—perhaps the most elaborate such culture in the world.” Prevailing wisdom suggested that, as beneficiaries of vast salmon runs, Northwest Coast peoples fed themselves with minimal eªort. Plant cultivation, in this view, was unnecessary; the potential for plant cultivation was not apparent to the region’s indigenous peoples, and the absence of scarcity extinguished any motive to enhance the natural availability of plants. This anomalous aspect of Northwest Coast subsistence was enthusiastically popularized by Franz Boas and his students, as they sought to rebut evolutionary and environmentalist models of cultural development. In turn, the apparent lack of cultivation on the Northwest Coast became a part of most North American anthropologists’ undergraduate training , a prominent observation within many introductory textbooks, and a cornerstone of later theoretical developments within the fields of anthropology, archaeology, geography, and ethnobotany.1 Yet, this orthodoxy runs deep, and was taking form well before the arrival of anthropologists on the Northwest Coast in the late nineteenth century, shaped by a sense of this region and its inhabitants that was often superficial, based on brief encounters and biased expectations. Moreover, exploration was inextricably tied to the act of territorial appropriation and, all other cultural 3 biases notwithstanding, its written record shall always be somewhat suspect. Captain James Cook visited the rocky west coast of Vancouver Island in 1778 during the spring season, a time of marine resource harvesting on the outer coast(and,significantly,aseasonwhenrelativelylittleintensiveplantharvesting occurs) among the resident Nuu-chah-nulth. On the basis of casual observations during this visit, Cook’s journals described an indigenous population that was “indolent,” “wild & uncouth,” and incapable of the most basic civilized pursuits (including agriculture), but blessed by tremendous natural wealth in the form of fish and other marine animals (Cook and King 1784). In turn, inspired by Cook’s tales of fur trade wealth, European explorers and fur traders flooded into the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each presumed that the entire region was composed of untouched wilderness, on the basis of Cook’s accounts as well as their own ethnocentric presuppositions. Thus, some of the earliest explorers, when encountering evidence of indigenous plant management on the Northwest Coast, ascribed the practices to the antecedent diªusion of European influences, despite the rarity of prior cross-cultural interaction. In 1789, during one of the first Euro-American fur-trading expeditions on the northern Northwest Coast, members of John Meares’s crew saw evidence of cultivated plots—probably of tobacco—within Haida villages. In his o‹cial log, Meares’s assistant, William Douglas (1790: 369), would assert that “In all probability Captain Gray, in the Sloop Washington, had fallen in with this tribe,andemployedhisconsiderablefriendshipinformingthisgarden,”though he noted that there was no evidence to support this interpretation. Indeed, Gray does not appear to have visited the village in question, and Meares was probably the first European to pull ashore there. Today, few would ascribe Haida tobacco cultivation to the “considerable friendship” of early fur traders and explorers: the precontact antiquity of Haida tobacco cultivation is widely accepted (Turner and Taylor 1972). Other plant management practices encountered by early explorers were likewise attributed to European influences, if they were documented at all. However, unlike tobacco cultivation, these practices remain largely misunderstood today and are still attributed to European influence, we contend, due in significant part to a priori assumptions about Northwest Coast peoples’ lack of plant cultivation among the region’s earliest explorers and settlers. Even during the nineteenth century, as European recolonization of the Northwest Coast proceeded apace, accounts of indigenous plant use remained superficial and tied to the biases and agendas of the colonial project. In the colonizers’ view, the people who originally occupied the land used it only minimally , as hunters and random pluckers of shoots...

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