Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Introduction: Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment

Introduction Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment David M. Gordon and Shepard Krech III “Indigenous knowledge” excites and infuriates. One of its leading academic proponents and critics, Michael Dove, argues that its conceptual space has evolved from “innovative tool to hackneyed dichotomy.”1 Historians and anthropologists are uncomfortable at its mention—increasingly so, we sense, at the very moment that others press its birth as a discipline. After all, is not the notion of an impenetrable body of knowledge that belongs to an unchanging group of indigenes a romantic projection of our modern imaginations into the past? As newcomers—transients and immigrants—arrive in any particular place, some conquering, some settling , some exchanging genes and culture, and so on, with people already present, might not the notion of “indigenous” lack historical nuance? At the same time, however, indigenous knowledge holds political appeal and moral valence. It offers an alternative to a Western teleology of civilization (or development), even if the notion is a creation of the encounter between the West and the rest. It offers an alternative to the power-knowledge nexus of Western thought, and yet it introduces its own modalities of power. It 2 | David M. Gordon and Shepard Krech III unsettles stable categories of knowledge and fields of human agency, such as science and religion, and then tends to confirm the very same epistemological oppositions. This conceptual and political slipperiness is what makes “indigenous knowledge” such an academic apostasy, so essential and so interesting to study. This book investigates the historical constructions, the political uses, and the epistemological nuances of indigenous knowledges. Rather than claiming that indigenous knowledge stands in some kind of exterior relationship to Western conquest, colonialism, and science, we argue that the emergence of modern indigenous knowledges was intimately related to conquest and colonial rule. This is not to claim that people who are now termed indigenous—or who term themselves indigenous—did not have knowledge prior to contact with Europeans. Quite the opposite: the chapters in this volume detail such precolonial forms of knowledge. But they also show that during times of conquest and colonization, by Europeans and by others, attaching “indigenous” to “knowledge” often was, and often continues to be, a strategy entwined with acts of domination and resistance . Rather than an established body of knowledge that can be owned, written, and transmitted unchanged over time, we regard indigenous knowledges as claims, as strategic maneuvers that challenge the imposition of power and make claims to power. Most of all, we reveal modern indigenous knowledges as palimpsests upon which, if we look carefully and ask the right questions, we can detect the signs of past conflicts that scraped out notions of indigeneity. We are not the first to notice the conceptual and political inconsistencies of indigenous knowledge. In a seminal article that appeared just as indigenous knowledge became the catchphrase of environmental and developmental policy-makers and activists, Arun Agrawal pointed to the fallacious oppositions that scholars and activists invoke between “Western science” and indigenous knowledge. Agrawal argued that the tendencies to try to “preserve” indigenous knowledges ex situ have not confronted the political and economic processes that marginalize people termed “indigenous .”2 Others, including Dove, Roy Ellen, and Paul Sillitoe, have followed Agrawal with significant contributions to the debate that we join in this collection.3 This book emerged from the conference “Indigenous Environments: African and North American Environmental Knowledge and Practices Compared,” held at Bowdoin College on April 3–5, 2008, and supported by the Mellon Foundation. Both the conference and this volume were premised on the belief that in juxtaposing scholarship on two continents, Introduction | 3 a vision clarifying still-pressing predicaments of the concept of indigenous knowledge would emerge.4 In its expansive and comparative scope, this work is related to several recent conferences and volumes focused on traditional environmental knowledge, indigenous knowledge, or natural knowledges.5 To this literature, this volume adds a sustained historical focus that supports its contention and contribution: the notion and character of modern indigenous knowledges emerged from the contested terrains of conquest and colonialism. Since then, those on the periphery of postcolonial and neocolonial centers of power have resurrected and sustained indigenous knowledges in an effort to exert greater control over their lives and reverse ongoing processes of marginalization. The cases in this volume make possible comparison of separate historical and colonial experiences on two continents; separate encounters and outcomes in meetings...