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Book Review
| Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. By M. Kat Anderson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. xxix + 526 pp. Includes illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, and index. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
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| This lavishly detailed and accessible book presents a wealth of information about traditional Native American land management in California. Anderson completed extensive research for this book including interviews and correspondence with Native American descendants who recalled relevant, traditional practices of their grandparents. One important outcome is that well-entrenched myths are dispelled. For instance, this book directly challenges the hunter-gatherer stereotype, which holds that indigenous Californians caused little or no human impacts to the natural environment because of their nomadic subsistence-settlement patterns. Furthermore, the various notions of early colonizers who saw "California as a foreboding wilderness, a place to do God's work, a giant untapped storehouse of wealth, and a place of raw, unspoiled beauty" (p. 62) are challenged as one reads example after example of the central tenet of traditional Native American land-management in California—"[t]here is no compartmentalization of nature from humans" (p. 39, emphasis in original). Elders shed light on this tenet in three important ways: "one gains respect for nature by using it judiciously ... plants do better when they [elders] gather them ... [and] not only do plants benefit from human use, but some may actually depend on humans using them" (p. xvi, emphasis in original). So what impressed early Spanish explorers and American settlers as a land of diverse and abundant wildlife was actually an artifact of millennia of sustainable Native American land management. |
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Much of this book is dedicated to descriptions of the native land-management practices of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Additionally, Anderson provides hundreds of examples of California Native Americans' traditional uses of natural resources, especially plant parts. If there is any flaw in this amazing compendium, it is that the thoroughness with respect to floral resources is not sufficiently balanced with others, such as faunal and geological resources, to warrant such an all-encompassing subtitle. |
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In addition to insights into the stewardship legacy of Native Americans in California, Anderson's book serves as one source of inspiration for collaborative projects, experiments, and cross-disciplinary studies (p. xviii). Collaborative projects envisioned by Anderson would address the forcible break between Native Americans and the land and could help to revitalize Native American communities by "reestablish[ing] access to the land and maintain[ing] culturally significant plant resources for the perpetuation of native traditions" (p. xviii). Anderson also suggests that experiments and cross-disciplinary studies could help "determine the thresholds of harvest for native plant species and to assess the degree to which particular ecosystems and plant species are dependent on indigenous disturbance regimes" (p. xviii). Anderson also hopes this book will encourage the pursuit of studies in natural history and ethnobiology to "emphasize tactile contact with and direct learning from nature and indigenous peoples" (p. xviii) with the hope of affecting a paradigm shift toward a "new vision of human-nature relationships and the place of humans in the natural world" (p. xviii). Useful as an anthropological, historical, agricultural, and ecological resource, Tending the Wild also deserves a place on the bookshelves of land managers and policy makers, especially in California. |
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Amy L. Ollendorf, president of ALO Environmental Associates LLC, has twenty-four years of experience in archaeology, geology, and paleoecology. Her research interests include landscape studies, policy, and management of heritage sites. |
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